The SpaceX IPO Is A Giant Unworkable Con Orchestrated By An Overt White Supremacist Huckster

Sign in<br>Subscribe

Elon Musk is a hateful white supremacist cosplaying as a supergenius engineer. There's little indication he actually understands how anything works, yet he's endlessly mythologized by a shitty corporate press, eager to ignore his virulent racism and financial fraud because he's accumulated obscene amounts of money.

Just last week he enabled violent race riots in Ireland. His clumsy Trump administration tourism resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He owns a far right wing propaganda website where he openly calls for violence against minority populations while enabling child sex abuse material.

Last week's SpaceX IPO is a stunning act of financial fraud that wouldn't be allowed in a country with functional regulators. It cobbles together a bunch of money-losing ventures into a giant pump-and-dump scheme untethered to objective reality, all controlled by a proven bullshitter.

But because the U.S. government is too corrupt to function in the public interest, and the U.S. corporate press lacks the integrity to tell the truth, this shake and bake scam is now tightly woven into Americans' retirement savings.

There's simply no shortage of red flags that this all ends very, very badly. Yet you'd glean absolutely none of this from reading this Reuters breakdown of the IPO, where this paragraph of fluff is as close to honesty Reuters gets:<br>While admirers view Musk's no-filter style as part of his appeal, critics have accused him of wielding oligarch-like power, raised concerns about governance at his companies and objected to his increasingly partisan political interventions.<br>"Oligarch-like" power. Ambiguous "partisan political interventions." A "no filter style." Unnamed critics with unspecified "concerns." Hard hitting stuff!<br>The IPO made Musk the world's first trillionaire (on paper), generated an immediate $75 billion in cash for Musk, and undeservingly made SpaceX the sixth-largest company in America worth nearly two-trillion dollars (on paper).

It also cemented the increasingly-unhinged Musk with an unimpeachable 80+ percent ownership control, ensuring that as Musk is steadily-devoured by his own madness and bad habits, the entire operation – and the broader economy – will remain tethered to his inevitable, albeit comfortably well funded, downward spiral.

The SpaceX prospectus filed with the government is a colossal work of fiction, promising a utopian future that will never arrive and technology that will never exist, delivered by a man incapable of delivering it. The proposal utterly fabricates paths to profitability, and lies endlessly about foundational reality.

SpaceX itself, it should be clear, lost $5 billion last year. And while Musk's actual engineers may have done some useful things for space innovation, the entire project is a financial dog; it's a heavily-subsidized money pit propped up by utterly unworkable plans for Mars colonization and a cumbersome Starship rocket that routinely explodes, often due to Musk's failure to understand engineering basics.

A big chunk of the prospectus promises that before SpaceX doesn't take us to Mars, it will get into the space data center business. That's also not going to be happening for a long list of reasons including radiation and maintenance and resupply costs.

But again, you wouldn't know that reading outlets like Semafor. They penned a sloppy piece of boosterism concluding that skepticism wasn't warranted because the CEO of a robot startup – unironically named Icarus (which hasn't deployed a single actual space robot yet) said so:<br>Another common argument is that it’s hard to switch chips and fix broken hardware up in space, but there’s a path to addressing that as well. New York startup Icarus Robotics is developing robots that can be controlled remotely to assist in space missions, and the bots are already slated to begin testing in the International Space Station next year. For that mission, they will unload bags with supplies like food and lab equipment, but the team can develop workflows for data center maintenance if the market demands it, CEO Ethan Barajas told Semafor last month.<br>CEO said a thing!<br>I've always been fascinated by the way corporate business journalism isn't really journalism in any coherent sense of the word. As a telecom beat reporter I spent years watching major outlets write stories about U.S. internet access (or the lack thereof) where they couldn't admit the whole industry was dominated by corruption-coddled monopolies devoted to destroying all competition.

They weren't allowed to. Despite being factual, it was deemed editorially impolite.

This sort of journalism doesn't really care about real consumers, labor, technology, or even whether the technology even works. Its focus is propping up extraction class narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation. It's lazy fanfiction for...