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SpaceX (barely) turning a profit in 2023 Q1 (self.spacex)

submitted 1 year ago by pigeonberry to c/[email protected]

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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

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/15u0cua/wsj_news_exclusive_a_rare_look_into_the_finances/jwnae4j/

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.