from the everybody-pre-book-your-flight-to-Mars-NOW! dept.
Elon Musk confirms he's worried SpaceX could go bankrupt:
Elon Musk said Tuesday via Twitter that his spacecraft company, SpaceX, needs to produce a lot more of its next-generation Starship engines, and soon, to keep growing its Starlink broadband constellation and stay in business.
"If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink (and) Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible," he tweeted.
The statement came in response to a leaked email that Musk reportedly sent to employees over the long Thanksgiving holiday in the US asking for "all hands on deck."
[...] "The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can't fly Starship, which means we then can't fly Starlink Satellite V2. Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong," reads the email, which was first obtained by SpaceExplored.
SpaceX and Musk didn't directly confirm the veracity of the leaked email to CNET, but when asked by a Twitter user on Tuesday morning "(how is) the Raptor thing going?" Musk responded briefly "It's getting fixed."
In the email, Musk concludes by warning that SpaceX could face "genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."
[...] Raptor production isn't even Starship's most immediate hurdle. The vehicle's first orbital test flight is still awaiting the conclusion of an environmental review and the official green light from the FAA, which isn't expected before the end of the year.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @09:23AM (5 children)
What I see here, is a sideways pep talk. "You've got to do better, boys and girls, the company is depending on you!" "If you fail, we all fail!" "Loose lips suck . . . " Oh, we don't need to go there, do we?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @12:06PM
"You don't want to take any of that holiday leave you've been saving up, do you?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:56PM (1 child)
Oh, boo fucking hoo. [theonion.com] Someone born into wealth is sad because he might lose his toy. I'm supposed to be sympathetic?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:39PM
No, they just want your money. And one way or another they are going to get it.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:59PM (1 child)
Don't tight lips suck more efficiently without air leakage?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:06AM
Loose lips suck at sucking. News at 11.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 01 2021, @09:47AM (9 children)
If true, I can't see how this can be anything other than a shocking failure of management. They have a product that is orders of magnitude cheaper than their competitors and yet they are at risk of bankruptcy? Insane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @10:01AM
The story looks like clickbait though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:25PM (1 child)
This is probably from a financial statement to investors, which are required to list every known risk, no matter how slight. "We could go out of business if there is a global recession and all of our customers stop buying launches" (say, due to an ongoing pandemic) is a pretty standard item on those lists if you don't have a huge war-chest. Musk may be the second richest man in the world but it is already invested in his companies. He doesn't have enough cash on hand to bail himself out. His only option is to get ahead of the possibly up-and-coming down-curve and get Starlink profitable.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 01 2021, @04:33PM
Starlink seems to be as on track as possible. Considering the supply chain issue with chips, etc.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by richtopia on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:35PM (2 children)
Since half the planet has a boner for Elon, you could solve SpaceX's financial problem by going public. That IPO would have brokers tripping over themselves to buy shares.
Or, if Elon wants to continue with the private model, he can dig into his own pockets. Rockets are expensive, but the richest person in the world probably can keep the company aloft for a few months.
OR: they could pause Starship development for a few months. I don't know what their burn rate is, but I suspect they could pause expensive testing operations and stay liquid and bank some dollars from the existing, profitable launch platform.
Your welcome Elon, this random chucklehead on the internet has given you three options for financing.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:04PM
You forgot that winning a large lottery is a valid strategy too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday December 01 2021, @07:02PM
Would an IPO and going public be a bad idea for SpaceX?
Investors are fickle. They want quick ROI. SpaceX is in a business that needs investors that want ROI over a longer period. Much longer.
Investors don't care about the company. Or its people. Or its mission. They just want to squeeze out any money they can by inflating the stock price. Pure and simple.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:11PM
A few years ago, SpaceX found themselves in a curious position: They had the cheapest launch capability, but the launch market was just not growing that fast. If they wanted to continue funding R&D, they needed a way to grow their market.
So, they came up with starlink. They would start a business that would be their own best customer.
At the beginning of this year, there were a total of 3400 active satellites in orbit from anybody, anywhere. https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/how-many-satellites-are-orbiting-the-earth-in-2021/ [geospatialworld.net]
There are now over 1600 starlink satellites in orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink [wikipedia.org]
So, SpaceX's launch business is doing great. They are launching a lot of satellites. But they are launching all those satellites for their own starlink business. And it needs to start making money.
SpaceX could have approached this differently. They could have passed on starlink altogether, laid off their R&D team, and monetized their advantages in the launch market. If they had done that, all those rocket scientists would have gone to their competitors, and pretty soon those advantages wouldn't exist anymore.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday December 01 2021, @07:12PM (1 child)
Orders of magnitude? BS. Anyway, perhaps being sold too cheap is the problem. Perhaps Musk is selling at a loss just to try to prove that his company is more efficient than the others, when it isn't.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Guppy on Wednesday December 01 2021, @09:58PM
Falcon Heavy launch cost is than 1/10th of the SLS launch cost. So maybe one order of magnitude?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday December 01 2021, @10:54AM (5 children)
When I hear about Musk Tweets (thank you SN, you are my source), by now I have a certain feeling that he wants to do some nudging. Either manipulate stock/currency prices or something else. Runaway hypothesizes that he wants to nudge SpaceX employees, that's a possibility. My idea is that he wants to be seen more favorably by public funders (ie NASA). If he really needs money, he should make an IPO and he could raise as much as he would like.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday December 01 2021, @12:47PM (4 children)
To be fair, the Musk quote does caveat it with "If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity ..."
It's also clear that this is about starship / starlink losing money - the falcon part of the business is fine, but that doesn't get to mars which is Musk's end game.
There is also as clear nudge on the FAA over the environmental review - I can kinda understand that, the site is clearly already there and operating and was always intended for starship / superheavy operations, so if it is the wrong place to do that environmentally surely that should have been made clear from the start before it was allowed to get to this stage.
I note Musk also has problems with environmental approvals in Germany - for a tesla battery factory, yup enviro activists object to making electric cars, just can't please some folk.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @01:16PM (2 children)
Big issue in Germany... Cutting down trees, not battery making. Musk bough land in a forest. He could of bough lland from coal strip mining operation, that already cleared the land.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @01:50PM
The location of that factory is in the former East Germany. Virtually anything you did with any land there would be an environmental improvement after what the communist regime did.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @04:29PM
*could have
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @01:55PM
Some of that resistance is likely the German automakers throwing stumbling blocks in Tesla's way while they race to get their own EVs to market. Foreigners like to think of Germany as being more environmentally conscious than others, and in some ways they are. But make no mistake, the large manufacturers in the Rhine-Ruhr valleys still rule that country.
The manufacturers themselves aren't the only institutional resistance, either. The big automaker unions feel very threatened by Tesla, which has no unions.
On the plus side for Germany, Tesla's factory is located in the former East Germany, where they desperately need jobs and development. Without more economic parity with the former West Germany, the country will not be very united.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Opportunist on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:09PM (2 children)
C'mon, guys, let's start a GoFundMe for him. Dig deep.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:19PM (1 child)
Digging Deep is not what you want with rockets. Maybe Reaching Out ?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday December 02 2021, @05:12AM
Doesn't he also have a boring company? Or was that the other rich guy?
Hey, they look all the same to me, really.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @02:56PM
"genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."
I thought the FAA approval was for 12 launches max for the year?
That seemed a fair number to support development of Starship assuming another site for eventual production launches.
(Kind of the intent of the deal to get the Texas site in the first place?)
Do the launches for the V2 block of sats depend on being able to launch from Texas, or maybe an offshore platforms will come online?
Side question: Once apon a tine, I toured a fireworks lab. They had all sorts of strange chemicals stores on shelves above a lab bench. There were two shelves, with a strict rule that oxidizers went on one and fuels on the other. The thought was that if some stuff fell off a shelf, it would not be a good idea if this made something energetic on the bench top. Seems the who idea of a rocket is to make something interesting by bringing LOX and Methane together at the right time in impressive quantities. Is it wise to have the cryo farm supporting this together, or should it be separated like the old chemist's storage shelves?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:03PM (1 child)
Because when I think of places where I would want to rush production and possibly cut corners, the engines that power the rockets are the first thing that comes to mind.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday December 02 2021, @12:08AM
Don't forget we are talking private sector here. Costs and profits are what matters, not results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @03:50PM (1 child)
here's ten beelllleon for 15% of all future mars mining extracted with machines (and parts) that got there on raptors ... for say the next 100 years?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:39PM
here's 10 beelleeons for 10% but with veto rights on declaring war if "naviis" should be encountered >: D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @05:56PM (1 child)
The Raptor engine sounds like a "death march" project. Even if the engineers get fantastic bonuses (they probably won't), it seems reasonable to expect that SpaceX rocket engineer will be in the *past* on some highly qualified resumes. Even when the rewards are high, project like that take a toll on your life and people start to do the reasoning about all the money in the world being worthless if you can't see your family enough, or die young of a stress related illness. Elon should know this, as he's displayed some classic signs of over-work in the past.
Where the company goes from there is another matter. Plenty of firms do OK after having such projects, and Elon's companies have proven themselves to weather storms in the past. Young, talented engineers exist and will leap at the chance to put SpaceX on their resumes. Even if you burn out, people will see that and be happy to land you on some other drone ship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:37PM
i don't believe in the phrase "burn out". it's old. it's up there with memes and since its inception in the 80s (?) nobody has challenged it.
it's a "cool word" for a "bad thing".
also it doesn't give a hint on a solution.
rather it's "accumulation of compromises". sounds shitty for management/slave drivers and gives a hint on a solution (again, management don't want).
"the spice has to flow".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @06:34PM (5 children)
What, the fed's Wall Street bailouts and all those other subsidies aren't enough?
How long are we going to keep letting these people fleece us?
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedGreen on Wednesday December 01 2021, @08:10PM (3 children)
"How long are we going to keep letting these people fleece us?"
A long as they keep paying the bribe money, oops forgot they like to call them "campaign contributions".
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @09:35PM (2 children)
Well, then why do we keep reelecting politicians that take bribes? Seems to me like we have to take our own initiative and vote out the incumbents if we want anything to change.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedGreen on Wednesday December 01 2021, @10:11PM (1 child)
"Well, then why do we keep reelecting politicians that take bribes? Seems to me like we have to take our own initiative and vote out the incumbents if we want anything to change."
Good luck with that people are morons who will vote against their best interests all the time. Even the others who are not in office are beholding to the same parasite corporations that play all sides of the coin. You got five parties they pay the bribe money five times. Going with the one they think will win with the most cash, down to the least likely with a little, then ram it up once they are in office to complete the subjugation of democracy. Add in they control almost all of the Media so they get to set the agenda of public discussion. The ruling class with all the money have done this for hundreds of years and are not interested if giving up the power. They allow the illusion of democracy to keep the sheeple in check, even when they get tired of it and rise up and chop the heads off, once in power they do exactly the same are theirs predecessors do. It is human nature people are scummy sacks of shit.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @09:13PM
Yes, that's all well and good, but when will people quit blaming the politicians and accept that they are just a reflection of the voters looking for a piece of the action for themselves? Gotta bring home that bacon, you know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @12:50AM
Hasn't he made enough new billions just during the pandemic?
Truly it says "the leech has two daughters: give, give" [Prov 30:15] (unbridled greed)
If Tesla | SpaceX | MuskEmpire turns to mush, I will cry^h^h^h laugh myself to sleep for a solid month.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday December 01 2021, @07:02PM (3 children)
This is Musk, right?
Say it's tanking.
Wait for share price to drop.
Snap up shares.
Announce that it's a load of nonsense and the company is doing fine.
Wait for the share price to rise.
Use your profits to pay off the SEC.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @09:14PM (2 children)
SpaceX and Starlink are not publicly traded companies.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2021, @10:44PM (1 child)
That's why he is heavy into cryptocurrencies, because that's exactly what he does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:18AM
How about we let the ledow guy move those goalposts.