<story><title>SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think Musk has shown something a little higher than eccentricity for as long as he&amp;#x27;s been in the public eye. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately[0], SpaceX as a company seems to be in good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. They&amp;#x27;re launching very regularly[1], haven&amp;#x27;t had a customer-impacting failure in years[2] and they&amp;#x27;ve got the market cornered. They have customers lined up for years, and continually make huge gains by reducing costs. They&amp;#x27;ve got a head start by at least 5-10 years over all new entrants (Blue Origin, Electron, etc) and are massively undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA).&lt;p&gt;If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.&lt;p&gt;[0] I think he&amp;#x27;s overworked and burned-out himself out but can&amp;#x27;t recognize it. Who am I to judge- I&amp;#x27;ve been there.&lt;p&gt;[1] They were going to launch about 20 minutes ago actually, but scrubbed at the last minute. They&amp;#x27;ll probably launch it tomorrow.&lt;p&gt;[2] Two failures recently were Falcon Heavy middle core doing a dive instead of a landing due to running out of igniter fluid, and the much-watched booster &amp;#x27;water landing&amp;#x27; recently, where they fully recovered the booster afterwards. Both were successful launches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TrainedMonkey</author><text>If we take a step back to look at what Musk has done at scale:&lt;p&gt;* Tesla has tremendously accelerated electric car deployments. I am going to count Solar City in this bucket as well. It was not a smashing success as Tesla or SpaceX are, but it helped to accelerate solar deployments.&lt;p&gt;* SpaceX proven out booster re-usability and lowered launch prices.&lt;p&gt;* Helped start open AI which is pushing limits of building machine intelligence by tackling progressively harder problems.&lt;p&gt;Whatever you think about the man, you can&amp;#x27;t ever take away those accomplishments. All of the current controversy looks so small and insignificant compared to them.</text></comment>
<story><title>SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think Musk has shown something a little higher than eccentricity for as long as he&amp;#x27;s been in the public eye. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately[0], SpaceX as a company seems to be in good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. They&amp;#x27;re launching very regularly[1], haven&amp;#x27;t had a customer-impacting failure in years[2] and they&amp;#x27;ve got the market cornered. They have customers lined up for years, and continually make huge gains by reducing costs. They&amp;#x27;ve got a head start by at least 5-10 years over all new entrants (Blue Origin, Electron, etc) and are massively undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA).&lt;p&gt;If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.&lt;p&gt;[0] I think he&amp;#x27;s overworked and burned-out himself out but can&amp;#x27;t recognize it. Who am I to judge- I&amp;#x27;ve been there.&lt;p&gt;[1] They were going to launch about 20 minutes ago actually, but scrubbed at the last minute. They&amp;#x27;ll probably launch it tomorrow.&lt;p&gt;[2] Two failures recently were Falcon Heavy middle core doing a dive instead of a landing due to running out of igniter fluid, and the much-watched booster &amp;#x27;water landing&amp;#x27; recently, where they fully recovered the booster afterwards. Both were successful launches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krn</author><text>&amp;gt; I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.&lt;p&gt;There are people great for depending on, and there are people great for following. Even if from far away. They are still great. Just in a different way.</text></comment>