A couple of articles.
“WSJ News Exclusive | A Rare Look Into the Finances of Elon Musk’s Secretive SpaceX” is paywalled.
“CNBC: SpaceX reportedly turned a profit in the first quarter” quoting from the Wall Street Journal, supra.
The Journal reports that SpaceX posted a first-quarter profit of $55 million on revenue of $1.5 billion. For the full year 2022, Elon Musk’s rocket company posted a loss of $559 million on revenue of $4.6 billion, the report says. It roughly halved losses while doubling what it brought in during 2021.
SpaceX tallied $5.2 billion in total expenses last year, up from $3.3 billion the year earlier, according to the Journal.
u/tendie_time provided what seems to be a vertaim quotation of the entire article at
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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.
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.