>2. A medium sized launch vehicle (Falcon 9) which is not profitable, unless you factor in Elon Musk cross-financing launches with the starlink project.
stalink is a complete scam, and I'm not just talking about it not making it's money back, that's not even somethign I would consider to be that important, sometimes infrastructure is good to be paid for fi it's useful
no, I mean that the project is near completely useless, the issue is the bandwidth, it's ridiculously small, the entire network of 12 thousand satelites (which would completely destroy earth based astronomy and create ton of kesler syndrom problems if it was ever completed) wouldn't even provide 1 million internet connections, that's not even taking into account satelite trajectories and how it creates massive blind zones
And coming back to the other part, financial viability, spaceX is literally selling the ANTENAS at a loss
not the rockets, the fucking antennas, the numbers were leaked, and it costs them 3500 dollars to make each one, and they sell them for 1000 each
Everything is like that with elon musk, he sells products at a loss, so he can lie about doing everything super efficiently, so that he can generate hype and be given investement money, which he then uses to finance selling more shit at a loss, in a massive ponzi scheme
same with his rockets, it costs more to refurbish a falcon 9 than to build a new one, yet he lies about the numbers, because it makes redditors suck his dick and pushes the idea that his company has achieved cheap space flight, implying they have a global monopoly on that ability, and therefore getting a bunch of undeserved investement money, that they, you guessed it, use to sell rocket flight tickets at a massive discount, all to continue the illusion of efficiency
it's a character you would expect exists in idiocracy not the real world, literally "if you give me extra money I will sell you the same thing for cheaper"