I am actually very surprised they are pulling a profit. I had thought with all the r&d spending that SpaceX would be in a loss for some time. Good on them.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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They were also selling Starlink terminals at a big loss early on, so either that has turned around with the new production lines or they make enough money to offset the loss. They're moving some serious quantities of those things.
They are banking on winning their appeal for almost a billion dollars in subsidies for Starlink from the government for "Rural community service" that the FCC denied.
So much of Musks companies have benefitted from government funds in one way or another that it makes you wonder how successful they would be without them. Just to list a few others: Over 15B in Lucratice SpaceX contracts, a half a Billion in preferential loan rates for "expanding electric manufacturing capacity", COVID aid funding, SpaceX took in $3M in state and local subsidies and grants and over "$100M in Federal loan guarantees and bailouts", Tesla received $2.5B in state and local subsidies (tax credits, grants, etc.)
Also, let's not forget the Federal electric vehicle tax credit that was started when Tesla had almost no competitors and then ended before competition really started.
All of this while Musk complains about them expanding the electric tax credits now that Ford and other companies would be eligible vehicles. Oh and let's not forget him railing against NPR as "Government Funded Media" when NPRS government funding is like 0.03% of what he is appealing for his rural Starlink grant.
I get your point, but can you honestly go through the SpaceX contracts and tell me which ones should have gone to someone else, especially on the launch side? The only thing I can really think of is the initial Artemis HLS, but NASA was so budget constrained that they were between a rock and a hard place on that one. SpaceX has the most launch availability and best prices right now, so it would be irresponsible, if not literally impossible, to launch most payloads with anyone else.
Plus having the government as a customer is very different from receiving subsidies from the government. SpaceX certainly has got some r&d funds from nasa, but on the whole most of their "government funding" comes in the form of contracts that they won on merit.
Tesla's a bit different, but consider that the government intended to spend a bunch of subsidize the rollout of electric cars and I'd argue that they got what they paid for. Had it not been for Tesla moving aggressively into that space I don't think we've have nearly as many viable electric cars at this point. Certainly it's more of a subsidy to it was to achieve a specific policy goal and that's really not quite the same as (for example) when we specifically bail out a company with taxpayer funds because they are at risk of failure.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| FCC | Federal Communications Commission |
| ~ | (Iron/steel) Face-Centered Cubic crystalline structure |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
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