I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
But more likely that merger would consist of SpaceX acquiring Tesla and taking it private
Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
Plenty of defense contractors with classified projects are already publicly listed, so this is not uncharted territory.
Lockhead Martin for example: https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...
Gives this level of detail:
> Aeronautics classified program losses $(950)
> MFC classified program losses -
It seems very safe from a national security perspective.
The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company.
BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war chest" in his battles.
There is also a danger that investors will see xAI as politically dangerous, which will really hurt SpaceX IPO
Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.
With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
I'll bet SpaceX financials aren't as great as some people think. Remember, Elon was the guy who tried to take Tesla private, and talked a lot of smack about how silly it is to be a public company. All of a sudden he wants SpaceX to go public?
Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder
Starship is not all of SpaceX. Saying, maybe because one hates Musk, that SpaceX is going to become irrelevant is wishful thinking.
In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.
Then out of, what, 14 000 active satellites in space more than half have been launched by SpaceX.
SpaceX is, so far, the biggest space success story of the history of the human race (and GP is right in saying that SpaceX is now a national security matter for the US).
Everything has to go right with that, or cybercab will be irrelevant before it works. Same deal. Same bullshitter.
NASA is still here. Unfortunately, NATA fell victim to enshitification by government contracting. NASA even if it wants to simply cannot today design and launch a rocket. :(
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti...
The biggest selling point to who? Definitely not wall street
Your opinion on Boeing being terrible as a shareholder vis-a-vis Tesla would be completely reversed if dividends and capital gains of the 2 companies were to be offered in the form of miles to be flown on Boeing planes and miles on Teslas Uber/Taxi/Autonomous taxis instead of dollars
The absolute overperformance on the stock market that Tesla has enjoyed vis-a-vis Boeing is not rooted in a concrete and tangible quality of life improvement for citizens. Not American citizens, nor global citizens for that matter.
It is my opinion that for all public companies in which it is possible to do so government should mandate payment in kind to all shareholders and board members to prevent the excessive promotional , cult and all around BS aspect of marketing to take over and allow people to profit just by riding off those, and Musk is the GOAT at that.
As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats.
AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.
Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.
Weirdest freaking timeline.
He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
As for FSD, nope. Unless you redefine the word reliable.
Edit: I owned a 2018 Model S as well. Literally the worst fucking car I have ever owned or driven.
> cybercab will net them $50k per car per year.
Assuming no mass boycotts, nor targeted vandalism. We've already seen both in the last 12 months.
I root for a competitive rocket market, but SpaceX is at the moment critical.
Their revenue from Starlink is slated to be bigger than the entire NASA budget this year.
How much does it cost to develop and maintain the reusability? Is it worth the trade-offs in lower tons to orbit due to more weight? Is it worth it adjusting the payload into smaller units, including developing things like refueling in LEO?
Idk, I'm not on the inside doing those calculations...
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
Since you are in europe you have no idea how good fsd is.
As I'm in Europe I just get trains.
And everything in the BMW you should be dealing with when driving is on or around the steering wheel.
The article you linked agrees with me. Greatest resolution in the macula which is a span of approximately 6 degrees from the centre.
Sigh...
Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.
What's keeping Chinese brands out of the USA, isn't keeping them out of Europe or much of anywhere else.
Not just that, the cost of each rocket launch is drastically cheaper than all of its competitors costs.
However, the current US administration appears to be actively violating the 1st and 5th in a bunch of ways, the 14th that one time, and making threats to wilfully violate the 2nd for people they don't like and the 22nd to get a third term. It is reasonable, not hyperbolic, to be concerned about Musk's support of this.
Really? It's one thing to hate Elon Musk, but you're talking about a lot of brilliant engineers who worked on these cars, everything from the components to the software. It's uneeded low blow just because you don't like Elon Musk.
That story makes no technical sense. There's no benefit to doing this. Nobody should believe it any more than boots on Mars by 2030.
So was GM. Didn’t stop it from going bankrupt.
Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked
So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ...
To bring the discussion back on topic: $50k/year or ~$250k over the course of the vehicle's lifetime, instead of $5k for a singular sale event, is why the path for the company is crystal clear. Cybercab is the same kind of step for Tesla as the Model 3 was back in 2017.
I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.
I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.
If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
Because the amount of energy radiated varies with the temperature to the fourth power (P=εσT^4).
Assuming very good emissivity (ε=0.95) and ~75C (~350K) operating temperature I get 808 W/m2.
Why does cruise control sometimes change to the speed limit and sometimes not?
Why does auto lane change sometimes need me to start the manoeuvre and sometimes not? If I guess wrong and start the lane change myself, all autopilot just disengages suddenly.
I have to proove that I'm holding the wheel by wiggling it from time to time, but if I accidentally wiggle too hard it disengages. Why not have a sensor or use the cameras to detect if I'm holding the wheel?
My son didn't shut the back door properly. I started driving and the car started binging. It didn't tell me why it was binging until I put it in park and looked at the pretty 3d representation of the car, then noticed that the door was open.
Maybe if I drove more regularly I would get used to all this stuff. The car was borrowed and I gave it back.
Too big to fail is a very recent modern myth. Go back 100+ years and lots of banks failed leading into the Great Depression.
Every system has a break point.
Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate and it should have been allowed to bankrupt and break off into businesses that worked and actually competed for customers.
For the rest of your complaints you can mostly thank the overzealous EU/unece regulation which limits steering torque and requires intervention. FSD has none of those concerns, it just drives and does not require torque on the wheel.
Where is the benefit? These awesome tech demos? It just screams charlatan to me on an epic scale. I see no reason a government shouldn't step in to assume control if its "too big to fail".
Second, history will look back and realize that without taking into account the volume of your voice, you don't really have free speech in a way that matters. If you the person next to you can use a megaphone that is so loud that no one hears you, you effectively have no speech. A great many democracies implicitly realize this and thus have election spending limits tied to the number of supporters. The US, through it's lobby system, and through party affiliated control of third party networks, does not.
This is not good for SpaceX. It's a less valuable company with X and xAI. But it helps Elon make it look like he runs two successful businesses.
This is completely false. Audi and Chevrolet both have self driving as good as Tesla.
Personally I have a hard time believing this. But even if you had similarly priced Chinese options, I would guess the main reason for buying a Tesla is not just because you want an EV. While a Tesla will be a reliable baseline EV, surely the reason you (or at least I) would buy one is for the supervised self-driving feature.
Amazon Leo will have 14k satellites in space in a few months? Wow! Amazing!
FSD works EVERYWHERE, almost any time.
Tesla theoretically now owns a chunk of xAI... whose valuation will no doubt increase due to the internalized SpaceX acquisition. Append to this a future IPO, as discussed in the artice, presumably an eventual premium of 20-50% (reasonable, 14% purely for the ibankers when this will happen)... yields to an interesting bailout situation.
To me, the real question is why. The $2B from Tesla can't possibly move the needle for any party involved in this transaction. If this were to be work 50x as opposed to a potential 50% upside (hell, make it 2x for argument's sake) it still doesn't compute. So what's the actual reason.
It's too big to fail for Musk, because it is one source of his money, in large paid by the US tax payer.
So would most of EU car makers in Europe. China is not playing by the same rules and everyone with car manufacturing domestically is slamming them with tariffs.
Quite ingenious, you have to give Musk that. This is why he is making so much money.
SpaceX buying xAi means that xAI shareholders are cashing in on its current high valuation. It makes it look like Musk is not very confident that xAI can navigate through the AI cycle, so he might as well sell it to rake in the profits.
But he still needs control over it because of the Tesla plan and in case something else happens in the AI field that he doesn't want to miss. So he's buying it with SpaceX, because he can, freeing some of SpaceX cash to pay himself and his xAI investors.
That he managed to bullshit SpaceX investors into buying xAI is pretty crazy. But I guess that's his main talent.
You can play around with words as much as you can, but Musk even with a very high rate of failure seems to be making a lot of things work.
You are correct about the issues of navigating the DoD but that isn't a reason to accept these assholes the process needs to be open to normal companies and promote standards without any grifter connections.
Many companies could simply cease to exist tomorrow, including Spacex and Starlink, and the world would go on. Frankly for the better in a lot of cases.
Or the current R admin, next time Musk has a spat with Trump.
Would definitely be a popcorn moment; doubly so if Canada has changed its rules on citizenship by then and has also stripped Musk of that, leaving him only with South African.
This dichotomy has always been in place for a huge range of specifics, both for imports and technology that makes workers less relevant. The "we want cheap stuff" argument is the one that has done best historically, though the track record of handling this badly also led to the invention of actual literal communism.
One matching what you say; the other saying they're up significantly, e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/byd-overtakes-tesla-world-lar...
I do not know what to make of this.
However, it is unimportant, as the main concern for your argument should be all Chinese brands combined rather than any specific brand. Unfortunately, given I'm seeing two narratives that seem to be mutually exclusive for BYD, I don't think I can trust web searches to tell me about all brands combined either.
However, even that is unimportant, as my point was more focused on the price and value for money, how Chinese models compete on AI for less cost; even to do badly in this regard (which they might or might not be given the mutually incompatible news stories I've seen) is less a narrative about Chinese market failure and more of a demonstration that hardly anyone really cares about the AI in the first place.
Who will be paying Tesla $50k/year, and why?
Considering what Uber drivers take home after costs, I think this is unrealistic.
> Chinese ADAS are much better than European ones but still far behind FSD.
Not so, on both "much" and "far". Some tests put FSD ahead of various Chinese options, other tests put them behind. Tesla's FSD is still considered a level-2 system due to the failure modes it has, whereas (Europe's) Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot and (Japan's) Honda Sensing Elite are level 3. Allegedly others exist, but I'm mentally categorising those as vapourware until they ship, this is demonstrably a domain in which it's easy to fool oneself into thinking the destination is closer than it is.
And what does that have to do with China playing by different rules than the west?
The public is very afraid of innovation in anything aviation related, same goes for nuclear reactors.
If you are in those businesses you have your hands tied behind your back.
Still you'd buy the stock if the only way to get miles aboard Boeing planes were to own the stock and get paid dividends and capital gains in the form of miles.
This underscore how essential and vital Boeing is to the world whereas if you disappeared Tesla nothing would really happen
Here's Sundar talking about doing it by 2027: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-project-suncatcher-su...
one opinion is that tariffs on China was response of breaking rules by China (heavy subsidies on domestic EV and similar).
And besides...how does Airbus innovate?
They're also probably rushing out the IPO to beat the bubble pop. I think everyone earlier expected to keep the bubble going a few more years, that's why they made all those circular deals. But then Trump spooked Europe into possibly scaling back US investments and decoupling from US tech. So now you have an unsure Nvidia walking back their OpenAI deal, etc.
Then of course there is cost of living and salary; both of which are lower in China compared to where most legacy auto manufacturers are.
So China can pay their employees less and pollute the environment more in order to create an affordable, very high quality vehicle.
I can understand a small amount of tariffs to help "even the playing field" but not the 100% tariff or whatever was proposed against BYD
Ask your local llm for the earnings of a $.20/.30 per mile autonomous vehicle
The "dark" side of the JWST has temperature of about 40 K (-233 C)
How widespread the manufacturer allows their software's use, is not the same thing as how good it is.
Sure, FSD works everywhere. But SuperCruise has zero crashes caused with 700 million miles driven. There are youtube channels dedicated to all the Tesla FSD crashes.
The private sector has different interests
*googles* Mid Jan this year? Yes, I was focusing on my German language course for the entire month. Only online here to relax.
> It wasnt close to fsd.
Except it was. Failure modes make Tesla's FSD a level-2 system, not even level 3: https://abc7news.com/post/mercedes-beat-tesla-become-1st-off...
Almost all businesses are more cautious than Musk, that doesn't tell you the systems are actually lower performance. The certification shows where they're at after all the smoke and mirrors, and where Tesla's at just isn't very impressive these days.
This difference isn't just a Euro/US split, most US companies are also more cautious, so same goes for Waymo who have been maintaining their slow-and-cautious approach despite what Musk keeps promising with Tesla, and operate actual robo-taxies in more cities than Tesla does.
> Ask your local llm for the earnings of a $.20/.30 per mile autonomous vehicle
I mean, I can do that in my head because 100,000 miles/year is a lot of driving even at motorway speed, and 1e5 times any cost per mile is trivial mental arithmetic, and even at 30¢/mile it still doesn't get you $50k/year/car.
30,000 miles/year is more likely, given constraints about when people most need vehicles and the relative fraction of time spent on motorways vs. urban areas, at which point 30¢/mile gets you more like $9k/year.
Also, crucially, 30¢/mile is what Waymo are already claiming as its operating cost. The reason this matters is that the moment anyone has competition on this (e.g. should Tesla actually do what they've been promising is 6-18 months away for the last decade), they don't corner the market and don't get to charge that much just because it's cheaper than a human Uber driver, they're facing off against other robo-taxi people with the same advantages who are, today, already operating in more places than Tesla are and without as much political stigma. Basically, when you get two competitors like this, it looks like the market for software and prices tend to costs; everyone in transport then only makes a profit when the demand exceeds supply, like this Monday in Berlin when my partner had to spend half as much on one single taxi ride as a monthly Deutschlandticket because of a strike action, but this kind of thing does not a business plan make.
While in US, potus can impose tariffs at whim, until scotus decides otherwise, my understanding is that EU tariffs are results of such rulings.