So, we’ve talked before about problems with Tesla. His competitors are, to put it simply, producing better cars which cost less, especially but not only the Chinese like BYD. Meanwhile Musk’s politics, like denying climate change and throwing a Nazi salute, while tying himself to Trump just as Trump is pissing off almost every country whose consumers buy Tesla vehicles has made customers a lot less interested in buying Tesla. He’s trashing his own brand with the people who supported it most.
Musk’s riches are based primarily on Tesla, but he also has SpaceX, which currently has the lowest cost space lift and pretty much guaranteed business from the US government. But a large part of Musk’s SpaceX income comes from Starlink. It looks like SpaceX made about 13 billion in 2024, and of that Starlink provided 8.2 billion. However in terms of profit, Starlink seems to have provided only about a third of SpaceX’s three billion profits.
That said, Starlink is still in the fairly early stages, with high capital costs, and the revenue numbers indicate it’s a big deal for SpaceX and Musk.
Then we see this:
But here’s the thing, there is an onrushing competitor to Starlink. A Chinese one. Qianfan. They’re far behind Starlink right now, but as they scale, they seem likely to wind up larger than Starlink, and the price for access may be $50 versus $120 for Starlink, though it’s unclear what the terminals themselves will cost.
Musk seems determined to lose Starlink customers, too. He accused oligarch and billionaire Carlos Slim of being tied to Mexican cartels, for example, and Slim immediately cancelled his deal with Starlink and indicated he’d be pursuing the Chinese alternative.
So, in two to three years it seems likely that Starlink will not be the only game in town and the other game will be cheaper. At which point all Elon Musk has is his political moat: some countries may make it illegal to choose Qianfan.
But… that political moat is looking very leaky outside of the United States since Musk has tied himself to Trump, and Trump has pissed off almost all of Europe, including serious American allies like Poland (see above), Canada, Mexico and even Japan. China may look like the lesser evil, after all they rarely tariff anyone unless the tariffs are retaliatory and they aren’t threatening to annex any countries.
That means the only remaining moat Musk has is his space launch, which is genuinely cheaper. But a cursory search showed me eight Chinese private space-lift companies. They’re all behind SpaceX right now, but then, a few years ago, so were China’s EV manufacturers and Chinese smarphone producers were behind Apple and Samsung.
And, anyway, a company with 13 billion annual revenue isn’t why Musk is so rich. It’s mostly Tesla. Canada, for example, put a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. China has now counter-tariffed, hitting Canadian agriculture hard. Might not seem worth keeping those tariffs on. Europe is similar. No one likes Musk right now other than MAGA, and they prefer gas-guzzlers.
I can’t remember ever seeing someone as rich self-destruct the way Musk is. He’s mishandled Tesla for years, and lost his first mover advantage, he’s destroying his brand value and pissing off both consumers and governments in almost every country he sells cars or internet in.
So if you don’t like Musk, well, get ready to enjoy a rich harvest of schadenfreude.
Larry
Musk does seem to be doing a great job in giving a leg up to his competitors.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/why-european-starlink-rival-eutelsat-shares-are-rocketing.html
Jefferson Hamilton
It would be a lot easier to enjoy Musk’s self-destruction if he wasn’t eviscerating the country with his thrashing. I sincerely hope his limelight grabbing bruises Trump’s ego enough for him to get ejected from power.
someofparts
So people in the anglosphere will get to watch everybody else overseas have cars, phones, AI, satellite access and who-knows-what-else that are better and cheaper than ours, while our rulers deny us access to those things with punitive tariffs. I don’t think my clueless boomer cohort will wake up enough to object, but I suspect succeeding generations will reject that nonsense pretty quickly.
Breaking Points had an interesting segment showcasing Tim Walz. Turns out dim bulb Kamala kept him out of the limelight because he outshines her so much. When it is time to dig ourselves out from under whatever rubble Trump leaves in his wake, Walz looks really good. Not only are his policies excellent, but he is terrific at political rhetoric and knows how to talk about goons like Trump/Musk in ways that connect with regular folk. As effectively as his knack for spin hits now, I’m guessing that after a few years of misrule on steroids, plain civilized talk like his will have an even bigger impact. All we have to do is figure out how to keep the current incarnation of the Democrats from running him out of politics because he is clear headed and effective.
bruce wilder
Trump’s chaotic thrashing about may be what is necessary in a wider sense to bring about the end of neoliberal globalization and American Empire without igniting WWIII. The power of the incumbents and their cocoon of rationalizations is too resistant to reason, so . . . maybe Trump and his nonsense is a better approach to the work of demolition. As dumb as Trump appears to be, it is worth remembering just what vicious liars he’s up against and how many “smart” people simply do not yet understand just how supremely dangerous and destructive are the political forces behind the conventional norms of the neoliberal era. Maybe they never will understand or admit they were wrong about anything.
And, no I do not think Trump is secretly wise and smart in some bizarro world version of a West Wing fantasy. I am deeply uncomfortable to find myself politically aligned with authoritarian leaders-for-life like Putin or Xi. Just as I look on in amazement when, say, Jimmy Dore aligns with the Right on skepticism about “the climate change conspiracy”. But here we are.
Every time I hear some moron cheer on Ukraine in its war with Russia and condemn Russia as “the aggressor” (“case closed” moralism at its finest, not) and see Elon make sense in some tweet about Ukraine and the senseless war, I am reminded we are no longer in neoliberal Oz.
Yes, Elon Musk, “richest man in the world” on the basis of wild speculation and vast overvaluation may go down as the world he is naively helping to demolish, collapses in the process of demolition.
I probably won’t mourn Starlink. Whether it is displaced by a Chinese competitor chasing taillights or simply falls out the sky as humanity discovers the consequences of its vast overreach is something to be realized after my time.
Eric Anderson
Who is this odorific fellow of which you speak?
Are you referring to this Dr. Evil guy?
https://www.tiktok.com/@consequence/video/7479669609654750510
Mark Level
So, Character is destiny, as the old saying goes. Why did Elon Musk shit the bed? Because it is in the psychological makeup of Elon that he will shit the bed, due to a warped sense of his own, power, importance, etc. Trump provides the template for him by threatening multiple other nations, many “allies” (toadies, Quislings, Vichy Republics) . . . uniting much of the RoW (rest of world) in hatred for the US, for good reasons mostly, as well as bad (Trump might admit the Ukraine Proxy war has lost!! How dare he!?)
The Billionaire & Vampire Squid Rentier Capitalist class are parasites, through and through. Some have pointed out that Jeff Bezos created his “look” specifically based on Lex Luthor. They do not in any way need to hide their propensity for looting and evil, so why would they? Remember an Elon Golden Oldie when some Thai children were trapped in a soaked underground cave, he pretended his incredible Tech Superpowers would enable sending a small Submarine to rescue them, to the plaudits of the billions worldwide. Someone on site at the disaster pointed out why that idea was completely unworkable, and E’s response was to call the critic a “Pedo.” The victim tried to sue him as the claim had no basis, but there is no justice against people like Elon in a totally monetarized country like the US.
Now I have no problem with E crapping on the deranged & sub-moronic clown, R. Sikorski. For those who don’t recall, Sikorski was the one who Tweeted when Biden had the Navy bomb our ally, Germany’s Nordstream pipeline, (an act of war, btw) “Thank you, USA!” with an image of the methane release into the Baltic Sea that was the largest and most damaging known in the entirety of human history. https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/09/27/why-did-polish-mep-post-thank-you-usa-along-with-image-of-damaged-nord-stream-pipeline/
The “little man” stuff is pure projection, of course, this is what we expect from right wing wannabe bully boys. Much like Trump’s braggadocio, “I was almost recruited to play pro baseball in college! I had the most successful business deals ever! I am the greatest Negotiator in human history!”, ad nauseum.
More regarding Elon’s personal life: the 12 or 13 babies he paid various women to have, ONLY male (why doesn’t he just clone himself? I assume he could afford it), he didn’t have sex with a single one of them, he mailed his sperm in every case. The scuttlebutt is, per Chapo Trap house, that he has a non-functioning 11th digit, because he paid for some kind of implant that was botched (either to enlarge or to permanently stiffen his unit), thus masturbation is his sole sexual ability. As DJT would opine, “Sad!!” Another interesting brag E made (he has this in common with Zuckerberg), is that he paid a professional to instruct him in “cage-fighting”/ MMA (mixed martial arts). He has challenged multiple international figures, including the 72 year-old Vladimir Putin, to publicly fight him. Lotsa insecurities, brandished openly, not hidden.
Now, as highly as I do respect some of parts’ many contributions on this site, I am going to agree 100% on the first paragraph of his post, & as a Minnesota resident (since 2021) let another local person rebut his 2nd paragraph entirely. See the first letter here, “Trump’s Worst Legacy,” from last month, in the free local weekly:
https://duluthreader.com/articles/2025/02/20/130675-letters-feb-20-2025
(This paper specializes in Trump Derangement Syndrome, apart from one anti-Zionist political cartoonist. There is one columnist, Phil Anderson, who at one time I respected. C. 2022 he noted that the Ukraine War with Russia was provoked by US & Ukraine, and would not end well, which I was shocked to see in any Dem-dominated house organ. But in the run-up to the Nov. ’24 election, every week he rewrote the same columns about the moral “decency” of Genocide Joe (first), then Kamala’s awesome record of “service” to the poor, needy, LGBTQ+, People of Color, etc., no evidence of any of the preceding given. This was simply comparing them to Trump. Would you prefer to eat the pile of shit, or the wino vomit? It’s a legitimate “choice”!! He completely refused to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Gaza, though I commented on this several times on the website. Finally, after Trump whomped Kop Kamala, he wrote a Cover Story/ column called “We Are All Screwed!” about the impending 2nd Trump term, quickly acknowledging that the Biden-Harris “genocide” in Gaza may have damaged KH’s chance at victory. I guess that those of us who shamed his Holocaust Denialism finally got to him.)
Now let’s talk about s.o.p’s encomium of Walz. The dude looks like the old “B” Horror-movie actor Tor Johnson. He is an ardent Zionist, pic of him with his “friend” Bibi Netanyahu at some AIPAC event in 2009 proudly shared. He doesn’t speak well (but I will agree, is far better than Cackling Kamala), has nearly zero charisma. His policies are very preferable to the R’s in the state, the belated institution of Free School Lunches for children 2.5 years ago was long overdue (but was by no means his doing alone). He, along with the state A.G. and (faux) “Muslim” Keith Ellison, and Amy Klobuchar, forces the public employee pension system to invest in Israeli “field-tested” (killing Palestinian civilians, mostly children) weaponry for the Retirement fund. He lied about his “service” abroad for the Empire as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, falsely claiming to have drawn his weapon against the Brown People, he subsequently had to apologize for that Stolen Valor claim. Harris would’ve won Minnesota without nominating him (it is a mostly Blue State), Obama wanted the bald astronaut Mark Kelly for the Pres spot when Drooling Joe was forced out. . . I was gladdened when the Dems finally legalized Cannabis about a year and a half after I moved here, but . . . oops, I was duped by a Dem again!! They set up a “racial and poor reparations” lottery (fair enough idea if it had been properly designed) for early weed brokers, which got sued in court. Two and a half years later, there is no legal marijuana in Minnesota (although people with property can grow it), and this summer when I leave here, I will have never been able to purchase pot legally in a 4 year residence here. Florida is more “progressive” on cannabis than Minnesota, as is friggin’ Oklahoma!!
Mr. Kosuth called it: “There are still almost 4 years left to build a real alternative. There is no time to lose.” The Washington Generals lose every game to the Harlem Globetrotters. This is by design, not by chance. A center-right (on culture issues only, not economic, not even mostly on environment) party is not going to liberate anyone from the impending collapse of the US Empire.
Don’t believe in “Great White Hopes”– Walz is very white, and his girth makes him great. Dressing up in Camo and pretending to hunt ducks might have gained him a few votes of the targeted “rural” demographic, but he is as phony and soulless as the rest of them.
As another famous Minnesotan observed, “Don’t follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters!!”
Clonal Antibody
Both Musk and Trump show clear signs of being sociopaths
https://bsky.app/profile/notabot1.bsky.social/post/3lk26qmqclk2u
Purple Library Guy
Even in the US . . . most of the people who buy electric cars are either Democrats or further left than Democrats. Given any choice at all, they’re not going to be buying Teslas. I’ve been saying ever since he started visibly going MAGA that it was, from a commercial perspective, a boneheaded move.
Feral Finster
For an alternative view:
https://booty.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-helping-us-intelligence
Mary Bennet
Bruce Wilder, Jimmy Dore is bought and paid for. His rants might be a reliable indicator of what the Democratic donors are fixating on this week, but please don’t imagine that you can derive what us non-Trumpists are thinking from listening to Dore. No question, Dore and his backers and the rest of the Dumbs brought this on themselves. They never should have stolen the nomination(s) from Bernie.
Most of us are now focusing on survival. I will say one thing; the days when personal competence had to be hidden, because the boys and babes might get their feelingses hurt, poor dears, are over with.
Soredemos
Musk is a moron, and always had been. And I don’t mean that in some ‘I don’t like him so I’ll call him dumb’ insult way. I think he’s genuinely stupid. He was just a rich kid who started ahead and got further ahead by going around buying up others people’s nascent creations. He has literally not created a single thing from scratch.
For years, a decade or more, he was viewed as this Howard Hughes style eccentric. Because everyone viewed the weird shit he said and did as at least partially part of a persona, a fake affectation. His childish obsession with the letter X, his incredibly weird name for his kid, his tweeting out dumb stuff including photoshops of himself as Iron Man, it’s all one giant ironic joke, surely. Now I think people are coming to the sudden realization that it’s not an act. He actually is just a dumb, annoying weirdo. Now just heightened because it’s clearly fueled by drug abuse.
Or he is actually still being partially ironic, and a lot of what he does is just trolling (which, yes , clearly. ‘DOGE’). Only now he’s trolling with people’s livelihoods and crucial government infrastructure, and there’s nothing to laugh about anymore. He’s genuinely loathsome. This isn’t the most awful episode in America history, not the most damaging, but it’s surely the dumbest. This whole period will be remember ad a mark of national shame. DOGE? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s actually shameful.
NR
Purple Library Guy:
Don’t forget that the reason Musk went to the right in the first place is because sexual harassment allegations were coming out about him, and he knew that right-wingers wouldn’t care (or would even like him more because of them) while the left would.
someofparts
ML – Well, thanks for the correction on Wolz. If I were willing to subscribe to Breaking Points I would send Krystal a message to let her know she needs to check him out more closely before she sings his praises.
This will sound weird, but I’m glad no woman had to be intimate with Musk to produce those children. I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that on them. That said, just in case anyone doubts that Musk is coo coo bananas, who but an incorrigible doofus would want to invite the full glare of publicity when their sex life is that embarrassing.
mago
I know a 28 year old tech bro who is a nice guy actually and a spiritual practitioner.
He did some work in Silicon Valley and told me that many people there have shrines to Elon at their work stations, to which I could only reply, that’s sick, while thinking once again, we are so screwed.
Oakchair
Trump will save the human race and make America great. Because really the world can only be saved by the destruction of America and America sacrificing itself for the betterment of all mankind would make it the greatest of the great. Jesus’s second coming in fact.
bruce wilder
that catching a descending rocket with chopsticks on a tower trick earned Elon a lot of cred with young, aspiring tech bros
crypto is another bizarre object of tech bro faith that we may all soon enough regret became a thing
Samuel Insull died on the stairs of the Paris Metro, unable to afford cab fare and William Durant ended up managing a bowling alley
miss jennings
From Feral Finster’s link to the article entitled:
Elon Musk Is Helping U.S. Intelligence Turn Thousands of Satellites into a Planet-Wide Brain to Spy on Everything All the Time
The National Reconnaissance Office, USA’s most secretive spy agency, contracts with SpaceX to build & launch a “proliferated architecture” of AI-controlled spy satellites interfacing with Starlink
‘The NRO ‘Launch 49’ team that used a Delta IV Heavy in January, 2011 to launch a KH-11 mission composed this patch highlighting that the spacecraft was assembled with spare parts, then rose like a Phoenix from the flames and ashes of the $10 billion Boeing failure to deliver on its contract for a new optical spacecraft line, forcing NRO to take emergency measures to restart the Lockheed Martin KH-11 production line.
At the top the Latin phrase “melior diabolus quem scies” translates to ‘The devil you know…’, meaning that going back to Lockheed was better than continuing with Boeing to retool the program.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket ship corporation, is a natural candidate for NRO workhorse given the singular scale of the firm’s launch capabilities.
The company utterly eclipses all competition and dominates the industry, launching four times more mass into space than the sum total launched by everyone else, government or private, on the planet in 2023.21 The rapid growth in SpaceX operations can be seen in this plot from Wikipedia showing the number of launches and distribution of rocket configurations they have used each year since 2010:
https://tinyurl.com/4ructxk9
SpaceX’s first launch for the NRO22 seems to have taken place in 2018, when they carried the classified23 “Zuma” Northrop Grumman satellite,24 but, unfortunately for our surveillers, Zuma failed due to improper calibration by Northrop.25
That’s the official story, at least.
The US government has hoaxed satellite failures to obscure classified missions in the past, going so far as to launch fake space debris to fool observers, so there has been reasonable speculation that something similar may have gone on with the $3 billion Zuma satellite.
It’s hard to say what really happened, but discussion of Zuma is a great excuse to display this image captured by a Dutch pilot as the upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket returned to Earth after the launch…’
https://booty.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-helping-us-intelligence
Top Secret KH-11 Spysat Design Revealed By NRO’s Twin Telescope Gift to NASA
Let’s get right to the meaty stuff:
‘Instead of meeting with the Chairman again, this time I was summoned to the White House and a meeting with Navy Adm. Dan Murphy, director of intelligence for the National Security Council and the late Les Dirks deputy director of science and technology at the NRO. There was also a third person present who did not want to be identified. I surmised that he was either intelligence community undercover, or Justice Dept.
The KH-11 was still a top secret program and the fact its manual had been sold to the Soviets did not affect the government’s opinion that we should still keep it secret, even though other media had begun to mention it. Their position was that it “may not have” been made widely available in Soviet military and intelligence circles. But their arguments were going total political.
Finally I told them that in my opinion their arguments were not strong enough to justify a national security hold on our part. I pulled out a pocket calculator and said that if I could determine what a KH-11 was doing with this, then the Soviets could certainly do it especially since they were in possession of the operations manual.’
DeepSeek before DeepSeek.
https://archive.ph/CKIa0
——-
Pair with Slaughterbots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
——-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56hqrlQxMMI
The ‘Eye in the Sky’ that inspired Eric Woolfson’s lyrics were the cameras in the casinos in Vegas in the early 80’s.
https://www.tampabay.com/whats-the-story-behind–alan-parsons-eye-in-the-sky/2290427/
Of course, you could always simply step outside the casino back then. Out into the largely unmonitored public spaces. Even the most ‘important’ buildings had very little security just a few decades ago.
There was a lot more freedom. And a lot less fear.
I remember when a house or two or three in the town I grew up in back in the 1980’s installed a camera or two in the their yards. It was ususally accompanied with a sign saying ‘Smile, you’re on camera.’ The overwhelming majority of people had no cameras and thought the people who had cameras were weird. This was back when most left our doors unlocked. Not that long ago.
How many people have Amazon doorbell cameras now?
If you step outside the casino today you are still monitored by all their outside security cameras which are tied into their huge central security complex which itself may be tied into the local police department.
The plan – well underway – is to have all the now private cameras in cities directly linked to the police. The public cameras obviously already are and are actively monitored depending upon the given department’s budget.
This will all be done by AI eventually, or that’s the plan.
This is all a massive, massive, extraordinary regression in humanity. I know that that is a poorly-worded sentence but I don’t know how else to say it.
bruce wilder
Bruce Wilder, Jimmy Dore is bought and paid for.
maybe. I don’t know the twists and turns of his journey. I saw a tweet (they are still “tweets”, right? not “X’s”? talk about dumb) where Dore was ranting that he was beginning to suspect climate change really was a hoax because of Russiagate, assurances about “sharp-as-a-tack”, etc. Ian commented on it.
I do not know Dore well enough to appreciate his full position, if he has thought one out or simply sold one on e-bay, but I understand the feeling of political whiplash every time I find myself nodding in agreement with or cheering on Tucker Carlson!! I remember laughing at the titles of books like, “Liberal Fascism” and “Dow 40,000”. Jokes on me.
An electric car is not going to save the planet from global warming or contribute in any significant way as far as I can see to mitigating the effects of adding carbon to the carbon cycle or otherwise prevent the enormous damage to life from human overpopulation and overconsumption. That Elon profited from selling delusions about that and the “promise” of self-driving cars tells us more about the gullibility and hypocrisy of the general public than the character of a huckster.
different clue
I think I remember a little while ago Tony Wikrent offering an article about 3 main groups of power-operators separately backing Trump in order to pursue their own 3 semi separate agendas.
The traditional Republican rich people want to restore the kind of governance and society America had before President Teddy Roosevelt. The Gilead Christians want a Divine Christian Dictatorship which they imagine to be a pure form of what existed in the Eleven Hundreds. The silicon tech bros want to turn America into a set of digital plantations owned and operated by silicon tech bros.
Here is an article about the silicon tech bros advancing that agenda. It is titled :
” Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build ‘Freedom Cities’ Run by Corporations ”
Here is the link.
https://gizmodo.com/tech-execs-are-pushing-trump-to-build-freedom-cities-run-by-corporations-2000574510
Musk may be too busy just now to be an active part of the effort. But he would certainly sympathize and support it. It seems to me that the companies headed by these tech bros and tech execs should be boycotted first and longest and hardest to try reducing their power. Since they occupy critical chokepoints, they can’t be extermicotted. But they can perhaps be semicotted enough to weaken them down some.
miss jennings
You penned this too soon, Ian. Musk is back in the game with Teslas going for 35 grand now. Pick up at the White House, South Lawn:
A new role for the South Lawn of Trump’s White House: Tesla car lot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/11/trump-musk-tesla-white-house/
‘Critics said the spectacle stretched the bounds of what is ethical in the White House, with Trump openly seeking to boost the financial fortunes of Elon Musk.’
Not if they include waffles and bottled water. Or maybe a BBQ on the lawn. Just don’t get any rib sauce on Elon’s steering wheels. An AI slaughterbot may respond.
——
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eztgcwvfPjM
https://youtu.be/T5rzOU-4Bkc?t=28
someofparts
The More You Have the Less You Fight
https://substack.com/home/post/p-158710335
The link is to Hamilton Nolan once again cutting through the noise and getting right to the key point.
Oakchair
the reason Musk went to the right in the first place is because sexual harassment allegations
——-
Musk was born an oligarch, and has always aggressively defended the oligarchy. He has always been on the right.
Equality and economic justice has been so removed from political discourse that even on left-wing blogs it is suggested that sexual harassment is what sent Musk to the right, not him being a billionaire oligarch.
Ian Welsh
Miss Jennings,
I tried to email you but it bounced. So: your comment on Ukraine didn’t go thru because it’s long and off topic for this post. I’d be happy to put it thru if it was in the open thread or the roundup.
Cheers,
Ian