this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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After the merger with xAI, that's about 22% of their business. The rest is AI. The brochure will tell you about reaching for the stars and living on Mars, but the main product is actually Grok.
Which just goes to show you how bullshit the profit margins are on space travel when they gotta turn the business into a chat bot to be "profitable"
I disagree. That part is actually a somewhat reasonable business (though partially held up by public funds through contracts). The issue isn't what part is profitable. The issue is what part is getting all the investment and speculation. SpaceX was probably still overvalued for a space company, but they were doing something with measurable tangible value. The AI side is pure promise, and it's only speculation, and the speculation is wild. It's valued higher than something that's actually making profit.
I get what you're getting at, but I'd argue that we should look holistically at spacex. If their business model is launching a bazillion satellites and making a bazillion dollars we have to look at the entire launch complex as operating capital of starlink and spaceai. It all depends on starship launching a bazillion times a day so we should include development costs of starship as costs of starlink. The need for these businesses are necessary because the boom in private bookings of rocket launches that was anticipated with cheap launch services hasn't materialized and so they have an airport and planes without passengers.
I ain't no rocket economist but it seems "all the money" that starlink makes arent enough.