SpaceX, Tesla Stock Down

 

After an IPO last week with SpaceX's market valuation at $2.78 trillion, stock in South African fascist and mass killer Elon "Leon" Musk fell 16%, causing the white supremacist space cadet $240 billion.  His accident-plagued car Tesla is also shedding value.  From Fortune.com:

"Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) is already among the world’s most valuable companies, briefly surpassing Amazon in the days following its market float when it soared to a valuation of $2.78 trillion.

Musk owns approximately 5 billion shares in the company, meaning that a vast portion of his net worth is tied to the exploratory business. Despite SpaceX gaining some 20% in its first day of trading, a reality check soon sent its stock price downwards. The stock lost 16.43% yesterday, a selloff of approximately $400 billion. It’s market cap currently sits at $2.03 trillion.

A further dampener on Musk’s fortune is the value of shares for EV maker Tesla. Over the past month, Tesla shares have been down 6.6%, and by more than 7% for the year to date.

In turn, Musk’s net worth has dropped from a peak of $1.32 trillion to $1.08 trillion at the time of writing, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop—between June 16 and a week later—is some $240 billion." (our emphasis)

From today's opening, it appears that the drop will continue.  The ketamine-fueled megalomaniac has delusions of space travel, as in Star Trek, not grasping that until humanity discovers how to travel at near light speed, deep space voyage is science fiction.  But that won't stop master bullshit artists like Musk (or his nearest competitor and fellow Trump ass-kisser Jeff Bezos) from hyping and fleecing investors despite regular failures of their creations.  May the downturn continue.

(photo: Send this space cadet on a one-way trip to Mars)

 

Musk SpaceX Starship Experiences "Major Anomaly"

 

You may recall South Afrikaner fascist Elon "Leon" Musk providing fireworks for us in the form of exploding SpaceX rockets (here, here, and here, just this year alone).  Last night, there was yet another major anomaly "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of a Musk SpaceX vehicle, perhaps the most dramatic and debilitating one (for SpaceX) yet:

 

From CBS:

A SpaceX Starship upper stage exploded in a spectacular conflagration during ramp-up to an expected engine test firing at the company's Starbase manufacturing facility on the Texas Gulf Coast late Wednesday, destroying the rocket in what appears to be a major setback for the Super Heavy-Starship vehicle Elon Musk says is critical to the company's future.

Video from LabPadre, a company that monitors SpaceX activities at Starbase, showed the Starship suddenly exploding in a huge fireball just after 11 p.m. CDT, 10 to 15 minutes before the anticipated engine test firing, sending flaming debris shooting away into the overnight sky from a churning fireball that engulfed the test stand. [snip]

The explosion's impact on the test site infrastructure was not immediately known. SpaceX has a history of making relatively quick recoveries from failures or setbacks but this mishap, along with destroying a nearly-ready-to-launch Starship, may have caused significant damage to Starbase infrastructure. In any case, the next test flight will be indefinitely delayed.

Known as Ship 36, SpaceX was expected to launch the Starship atop a huge Super Heavy booster around the end of the month on the integrated rocket's tenth unpiloted test fight. Hotfire tests are a normal precursor to actual flights, allowing engineers to verify upgrades and overall performance prior to committing it to launch...

Talk about waste, DOGEbags!  This should give the retribution- minded Malignant Fascist and the legion of Musk- haters in his regime a perfect opportunity to scale back or scrap Musk's expensive, taxpayer- funded fireworks enterprise. 

Another SpaceX "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly"

 

South African fascist and Afrikaner white supremacist Elon "Leon" Musk is having problems not only at his failing Tesla car company, but his SpaceX rockets aren't cooperating with his geeky vision of space flight to Mars.  From Reuters:

"SpaceX's Tuesday night Starship launch went further than previous attempts.

But in the end it lost control and is believed to have disintegrated on reentry, marking another setback for Elon Musk's promise to put humans on Mars.

The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship vessel mounted atop a towering SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off at about 7:36 p.m. EDT (2336 GMT) from the company's Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Brownsville.

SpaceX launched the Starship system with a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time, aiming to achieve a key demonstration of its reusability.

As expected, the 232-foot (71-m) first-stage rocket separated from the upper-stage Starship vehicle several minutes after launch and headed back toward Earth.

But SpaceX controllers lost contact with the booster during its descent before it presumably plunged into the sea instead of making the controlled splashdown the company planned." (our emphasis)

Musk, like his cult leader, can't accept losing, so he portrayed the setback as a "big improvement" over the last couple of launches, which also ended in disaster.  In their announcement, SpaceX called the failure a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," the same silly jargon that was used in the previous failures. 

It's past time for the U.S. to wean itself off of SpaceX's monopoly, which in itself is a national security problem given the dangerously mercurial and radical head of the company.  That won't happen in the Malignant Fascist's regime, since he's a MAGA icon and can hold his political contributions hostage, but it has to be done eventually.

Another "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" For Musk's SpaceX

 

Fresh off of his reckless and lawless destruction of Federal jobs and agencies, illegal South African immigrant and fascist skipping dipshit Elon "Kaboom" Musk can rack up another explosive failure: that of his SpaceX Starship, after yesterday's "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of its Starship over the Caribbean. CNBC has the story:

"SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft tumbled and exploded in space on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.

Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cutoff, a SpaceX live stream of the mission showed.

The failure comes just over a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year." (our emphasis)

Looking at earlier failures with his absurd Cybertruck / WankPanzer, Tesla stock tanking, X / Twitter losing 80% of its value, and now this, it's obvious that Musk's reputation for technical, entrepreneurial genius has been vastly overstated. To make matters worse, the tech schmuck has pocketed some $38 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts, loans, and subsidies since 2003. He's still planning to continue feeding at the Federal trough with new contracts, while his DOGEbag operation kills thousands of Federal jobs and programs that impact veterans, public education, consumer financial protection, and aid to sick and hungry people abroad. You can be assured that few, if any, cuts will be made to the selfish and delusional oligarch's pet projects that benefit from Federal largesse.

(photo: SpaceX Starship disintegrates over Bahamas. @ericloosen_ Via Reuters)

An Unhealthy Addiction

 

Anti-Semite and crashing car and exploding rocket mogul Elon Musk has wormed his way into critical sectors of our national security, from satellites to heavy lift rockets. It's way past time to wean ourselves away from this unstable, narcissistic bigot. A lengthy excerpt from the New York Times:

"The White House denounced Elon Musk on Friday for “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate,” for his endorsement of what an administration spokesman called a “hideous lie” about Jews.

All of which might make one think the Biden administration was going to try to pull back from doing business with the world’s richest person. Except that, in recent weeks, the U.S. government has become more dependent on him than ever, agreeing to as much as $1.2 billion worth of SpaceX launches next year to put crucial Pentagon assets, including spy and command-and-control satellites, into space.

And in September, the Pentagon agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars for “Starshield,” a new, secure communications system his company has set up for the nation’s defense and intelligence systems, relying on the same clusters of Starlink satellites that have proved vital to Ukraine’s military during the war with Russia.

In private, administration officials say the Starlink satellites are critical to deterring China because they are far more resistant to Chinese efforts to disable them than the Pentagon’s own communications satellites.

These are only the latest examples of why the federal government has no viable way to break up with Mr. Musk, at least as long as the United States decides it is going to continue space exploration and deter its biggest superpower rivals. It may denounce him and declare that all Americans should reject his views. But it needs him, or at least his rockets and his satellites, more than ever.

And the White House and Pentagon both know that.

Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single, if petulant, technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant. And yet, by the account of administration officials, they have no choice — and will not for a while. Because there are, right now, few viable alternatives." (our emphasis)

How the Federal Government let itself get into a situation where it's dealing with one single supply source for those technologies and capabilities is shocking and almost malfeasance. The unstable Musk is perfectly capable of sabotaging those efforts whenever he feels aggrieved by the Government. His attempt to curry favor with Russian thug and war criminal Vladimir Putin by temporarily denying Ukraine access to his Starlink system last year is a warning sign. This latter day billionaire Bond villain is a threat to our national security due to his virtual monopoly on satellite communications and space technologies. It's a monopoly that the U.S. can ill afford to allow.