Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

“His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.”

You can tell SpaceX is Elon's most successful project because Lyn has to say the least about it. 😂

SpaceX is selling the US (and many other) governments a much needed service at an unprecedented low price. If course he's getting money from the government. The US and EU need launch services and SpaceX selling them.

BTW here's SpaceX's list of recent launches: https://www.spacex.com/launches/

As you can see it's mainly communication satellites, both government and commercial.

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The practice of throwing away first stage rockets was anachronistic when I first learned about it, and that was before SpaceX. They are providing an innovative service that serves both government and private business.

Elon isn’t everything that everyone says he is. However, he does know how to take on incredible startup risk and see through it.

I’m not a big fan on what’s happening lately at Twitter and the China connection is very strong for Tesla, so it likely has a big influence on him.

She certainly overshot on that one; you can tell that she was in rant mode.

I weakens the post unfortunately and unnecessarily.

They have a market cap well north of $100b based on private investors who think they sound futuristic and innovative by declaring themselves SpaceX investors. They have come nowhere close to meeting their revenue projections over the years. Launch revenues about a billion and maybe another billion for Starlink. Look at Orbital ATK, ULA, Safran, Aerojet Rocketdyne and the telecom companies financials and market cap.

Entirely speculative market cap based on cult of personality, much like Tesla. Stocks are monetized and money needs no intrinsic value. Elon makes a relatively good local Schelling point for store of value to many people.

Their approach of reusable, large rockets is predicated on a surge in demand for launch far greater than anyone is expecting, and the proliferation of smallsats means way less mass/volume per satellite. Starship absurd excess capacity. They wanted to bootstrap with Starlink, but they are finding link budget means they cannot actually deliver great service (costs rising, and congestion reducing speeds).

Meanwhile 5g deployment is growing at such a tremendous pace, there will be wireless broadband in small towns that outperforms Starlink at a fraction of the price. Already the case in most places. I've been in various ~5k population towns where this works great, and the population in sub 1k towns ("true rural") is miniscule.

#[1] said they least about SpaceX because she is not an engineer, yet has enough data to surmise from Elon's character that something is likely awry, and I am happy to back her up.

You remember my ring, Peter? That's the sort of stuff that gets slowed down when people fixate on investing in things that are physically big/shiny, driven largely by reptilian instincts.

“They wanted to bootstrap with Starlink, but they are finding link budget means they cannot actually deliver great service (costs rising, and congestion reducing speeds).”

In other words, Starlink is too successful...

Nothing you've actually said negates my argument. Obviously, SpaceX is a risky venture and could well fail for many reasons. But that doesn't make it a government subsidized grift. It just makes it a high risk venture.

Nothing wrong with a bunch of private investors potentially losing their shirts over that. In the meantime, customers like the US government get cheap launches.

Yes, the statements others have made with regards to the government being their customer being an invalidating thing are rather foolish.

I would have no problem with people making risky investments if it was actually their money and they had skin in the game, but most of the capital comes from money management schemes due to the absences of sound money (pensions, university endowments, etc), combined with people who know they can access the money printer against paper markups, thereby taking no real risk.

The misallocation of capital under faux-capitalism is worse than many realize, or are willing to accept. There is easily an order of magnitude more money in markets vs cash than will be present with Bitcoin, so it is extremely noisy. Real investors outbid >10:1.

Your understanding of economics apparently has room for improvement

I actually would agree that SpaceX is the most successful. I wrote on Twitter before that I like SpaceX.

Still… it doesn’t make Elon a better or less arrogant person. The guy thinks he can do whatever he feel like without any consequence. This has to stop now.

And he legit founded SpaceX and his closet competitors are all substantially worse companies. SpaceX is a clear success & a clear W for Elon.

SpaceX is the most successful project because Mike Griffen and the DoD /CIA conceived it and Shotwell runs it. Elon, having no actual aerospace experience, does what he does best here, marketing Darpa/Spook initiatives to lollibertarians, while the adults run the actual programs

Love Lyn, but this is a status quo opinion in tradfi.