Considering that SpaceX is so far behind on its bills that dozens and dozens of companies in Texas have had to place liens against the company, my guess is that neither the Twitter people, nor the SpaceX people, nor the federal buyout people will ever see a dime.
For some reason, links to stories about the leins and SpaceX becoming notorious for not paying its bills are hard to come by, but it's in the printed newspapers regularly; as recently as yesterday. Here's and older link I could find: https://www.chron.com/culture/article/spacex-overdue-bills-t...
EDIT: Specifically the claim that "SpaceX is so far behind on its bills that dozens and dozens of companies in Texas have had to place liens against the company"
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musk-beats-500-million-se...
I know it's en-vogue to hate on Elon companies, and a lot of people would love to hear that the World's Richest Man is having financial issues, but in reality it's a bunch of starry-eyed newgrads trying to make the world better but taking on more than they can handle.
It would be surprising if spacex wasn't just awful at paying things on time, as there's no reason they should have actual financial difficulties.
To say that China is "very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing" is quite the stretch.
(Counter point is that New Glenn's one orbital launch is more impressive than all of the Starship launches combined, as SpaceX is willing to burn hardware during tests and they have many more Starship tests to go).
In spite of all of this they are still a very distant 2nd place behind SpaceX. If anything ITAR hurts more than helps SpaceX since it means their talent pool is strictly limited to strictly domestic talent. They seriously have something "special" going on.
Artemis definitely isn't going to be putting anybody on the Moon. It again relies on the SLS which is just an endless money pit. But I do think it'll be interesting to see if SpaceX gets there before China. But I think the big picture is on Mars. I expect whoever gets their first will probably foretell who dominates space for the next century. Because once you can put men on Mars, the entire Solar System starts to viably become your playground.
E.g. intern that knows nothing
From the perspective of a crusty old man anyway.
The Manhattan Project was made possible by similarly young grad students.
You can be as crusty as you like, but the reality is that young smart people can be extraordinarily effective under the right conditions.
As a customer of SpaceX, though, I have to say their customer service is barebones. It is almost a relief when I work with another launch provider since they provide a much better service and support. I always compare it to a low cost airline in my head, like flying Spirit instead of Emirates kind of thing.
The propaganda machine must be real good.
Reuters, May 2024: "Quick to Build, Slow to Pay" https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-is-qui...
SAEN, Feb, 2025: "Contractors say they're owed more than $5.5 million" https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/spacex-unpaid-c...
There's also a "somewhat" unique one from MySanAntonio that goes over the general range of lawsuits that are being filed against Musk in Texas over a range of issues. It happens to include the Reuters article lawsuits and liens as one of the many listed.
MySanAntonio, Sept, 2024: "lawsuits in Texas" https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/austin/article/elon-musk-t...
It don't appear to be because SpaceX is having trouble paying.
I would guess SpaceX are delaying payment as much as possible because it is cheap lending and because it's run as an extremely mercenary company.
Their costs of deliquent payment are likely below their lending costs. So optimally don't pay until the cost of deliquency exceeds lending costs (maybe ≈ junk bond rate per year).
Musk doesn't pay "because he can get away with it" isn't better or worse than "because there's a money shortage"; and in any case, the federal government being delinquent is a very different kind of catastrophe, as is it making promises it refuses to keep.
Elmo being a shitty business partner isn’t the same as the US.
There's a possibility of contagion from Musk to the US government, but I very much agree they're different — and it's much worse if that contagion goes from potential to actual.
2.5mm in liens is just how much they have proveably shorted construction workers in Texas. It doesn't count other vendors doing work that isn't elegible for a lien, or how many workers got shorted, but it just wasn't enough to worry about.
If you were one of the 70+ businesses that held a lien against them, you would think differently.
> It don't appear to be because SpaceX is having trouble paying.
Having the cash to be paid out, and having the systems in place to pay your bills are two different things.
> I would guess SpaceX are delaying payment as much as possible because it is cheap lending and because it's run as an extremely mercenary company.
Violating the terms of your contract isn't cheap lending. It is fraud. The fact that they are getting away with it isn't a defense.
> Their costs of deliquent payment are likely below their lending costs. So optimally don't pay until the cost of deliquency exceeds lending costs (maybe ≈ junk bond rate per year).
Consistently and intentionally violating the terms of payment is, as noted above, fraud. They are getting away with, and they might continue to get away with it, but mercenary businesses getting away with crime is a bad thing.
Aside: I think most moral people struggle to even recognise amoral decision making. I also suspect that learning to be more sociopathic can be profitable. I don't much admire most doyens of business. Trying to fight amoral business people seems like a personally losing game because you eventually internalise their tricks.
Everything you said says nothing of how they pay their vendors. $2.5mm is not exactly breaking news for construction projects. Most large projects have some percentage of total project value in liens.
I know we all want to get upset but its too hard to say either way, the dollar amount is far too small, it maybe involve a large portion of contractors and based on the cost of the development does not seem to be a rampant issue.
I hate to be this guy but please provide a source for this. I’ve been involved in the construction industry for quite a while, almost exclusively on large and mega projects, and “most” of my jobs have not had any percentage of their total project value in liens.
One company that refused to pay for work my (then) company performed is SpaceX. Our work did not permit filing a lien.
Now SpaceX could totally be stretching their NWC as far as it goes and always paying late on purpose. Really impossible to tell in this style of shock reporting.
I would be surprised in your experience that you have never had cases of a GC not paying on his end and those folks throwing a <$100k lien on the project. Or a dispute between the GC and payer.
——
SpaceX donated $265M to Trump last year:
https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-tr...
It sounds like that’s comparable to their total profit for the year, and it would cover the liens 100 fold.
I wonder how much of that cash was taxpayer money that got laundered and used for Trump’s personal finances.
The page I linked is confusing. (Why attribute it to SpaceX, but not X or Tesla?)
> mostly on the back of [its] delusional investors creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
continues to hold true.
They should have used that money to buy GOG and go into digital distribution competing with Valve & Epic, or something like that.
But then again, so many stable companies get pushed by their investors to make big ambitious bets, then go belly-up. I kinda got respect for them just focusing on a good brick-and-mortor game buying experience.
JP Morgan’s analyst position on the company really says it all: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jpmorgan-deeply-skeptical-wal...
The scary thing is that the lie is so big, everyone is exposed to it — TSLA is 2% of VTI’s holdings.
Robotaxi is also a pretty interesting bet. I'm skeptical that it'll pan out, or at least that it will ever reach the same level of safety as Waymo without lidar, but on the other hand AI has obviously significantly advanced and been significantly democratized compared to when Tesla first launched Autopilot over a decade ago. More significantly, I see the decentralized rollout strategy as a potentially viable path to beat Waymo to the punch of a full-scale deployment. Waymo might still get there first based on its headstart and massive warchest, but Tesla's strategy is essentially crowdfunding it while using the market to optimize geographic distribution. The downside is that allowing the Robotaxi to be used in arbitrary/novel locations might be significantly less safe and/or more computationally expensive than Waymo's approach, so it's a more uncertain bet than Waymo.
It just seems that self driving is staying a "hard problem" (harder than expected!)
Both would be insanely economically valuable.
I do fear humanoid robots will face intense competition from Chinese mass manufacturing, undercutting them with cost while mostly matching features.
Elon dangles all sorts of bullshit to get you thinking about nerd nonsense. “OMG, a Tesla robot will do my laundry on Mars with my robot rocket ship!”
It’s all bullshit. They’ve been dangling the imminent $25k car for a decade. The Tesla roadster that people put huge deposits on is nowhere to be found.
People are figuring it out. My previous comment would have created a 100+ comment thread in HN 5 years ago.
But it isn't what I'd call insane. Google's gross margin is 58%, profit is $349B.
Because the benchmark set was "insane". I agree no car company gets insane profitability levels. Tesla was never insanely profitable by most metrics.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/elon-musk-does-not-owe-ex-...
Case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68307087/agrawal-v-musk...
The only substantive order in the case to date appears to be one denying Elon Musk et al.'s motion to dismiss one of the claims: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.42...