Does anyone actually think the Tesla robotaxi rollout is going well? I’m not sure even Musk fanatics are all that convinced. The news broke a few days ago that Tesla’s Texas robotaxi fleet is just 42 strong, a far cry from the 1,000-a-month after-launch total Musk promised. I’m used to seeing Tesla fans drink the copium and run to Musk’s defence, but it seems their fight has run out. It’s almost like they have finally realised you can trust a damn thing this compulsive liar says! Well, even Tesla insiders are loudly calling BS on Musk’s self-driving taxi.

You see, Reuters interviewed nine former Tesla data labellers and a former self-driving engineer about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD), the system behind Tesla’s robotaxis and ‘supervised’ self-driving consumer cars. And, let’s just say their reviews weren’t exactly glowing.

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Seven of the data specialists outright said they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla being controlled by FSD. They said they had “all seen it fail,” with one even saying that they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you f**king paid me.” Which isn’t surprising, considering five of them reported constantly seeing the robotaxis exceed speed limits. The self-driving engineer said that Musk’s proclamations that FSD is ready for “safe unsupervised” rides are flat-out lies, saying “Definitely don’t trust Elon on this.”

When the people whose job it is to get these systems working tell you that it is this crap, you run for the hills.

But, quite frankly, we shouldn’t be shocked.

FSD Tracker crowdsources data from customers who bought FSD for their Tesla, and its results are fascinating. As of writing, they have logged more than 344,000 miles with the V14 version of FSD, the same version used in Tesla’s Robotaxis. They found that in the city, you know, where robotaxis operate, FSD V14 has an average distance to disengagement (when the system has to be disengaged to stop a minor incident) of just 36 miles, and an average distance to critical disengagement (when the system has to be disengaged to stop a major incident) of just 869 miles. A typical taxi drives roughly 200 miles a day. So, these numbers suggest that a truly unsupervised Tesla robotaxi would get into five minor scrapes a day, and one proper accident every week.

FSD tracker currently has the overall critical disengagement rate (which includes highway, side roads, and city driving) at an average of once every 1,996 miles. Which sounds a lot better. But, don’t forget, the average American crashes roughly once every 375,000 miles. So as it stands, FSD tracker suggests the same system Musk claims is ready for unsupervised rides, crashes at a rate 187 times more than human drivers.

But are you ready for the icing on this cake?

FSD tracker is inherently biased towards Tesla. These customers have spent a fortune to get the latest Tesla with the latest version of FSD. As such, they are far less likely to self-report when it goes wrong or underreport the severity of the failures. Moreover, they will likely use FSD only when they feel it is safe to do so, which serves as an inbuilt cherry-picking filter.

So, FSD will likely perform substantially worse than this when used to operate a robotaxi with zero human oversight.

So, why is FSD such an awful system? It’s been in development for a decade by this point; you’d think it would be at least passably good.

Well, thanks to Musk’s vicious combination of idiocracy, cavernously crippling ego, and ignorance, he set the entire system up for failure.

Most self-driving cars use a plethora of different sensors, 3D reference maps, and multiple redundant systems. This might make the vehicle more expensive and limit its operating area to places that have been mapped correctly, but it greatly improves performance. The different sensor types and detailed 3D reference maps provide redundancy, meaning that if the AI gets it wrong, as it almost certainly will, there are redundant systems in place which can check and mitigate these errors.

Cars set up like this, such as Waymo’s, don’t require 100% accurate AIs to drive relatively safely. Which is a damn good idea, because no AI can be 100% accurate, as they are statistical, not cognitive machines.

Ever the contrarian, Musk pushed for a far more ‘naked’ approach. Despite his own engineers’ pleas, he forced FSD to use only cameras (read more here). In fact, the only way FSD ‘understands’ the world around it is with its nine low-quality cameras, and a basic GPS reference map similar to Google or Apple Maps, that is it. To drive even remotely safely, the computer vision AI has to interpret the world around it with near-100 % accuracy, as there are no redundant systems to check for errors or anomalies, and even a minor error or anomaly can cause an incident. Likewise, to avoid constantly crashing, the AI driving the car needs to make decisions with near-100 % accuracy using this very sparse data.

This is why FSD has such a bad disengagement rate. The entire system is set up on the premise that the AI will eventually become functionally 100% accurate once enough data and computing power are shoved into it.

Not only is this total lack of redundancy against all good engineering practices, but a 100% accurate AI physically can’t happen, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of how AI works knows that.

For example, there is the Floridi Conjecture, which I have talked about before. Yale Professor Luciano Floridi put this forward in a paper, detailing how an AI system can either have a narrow scope and high certainty (more accuracy) or a wide scope and low certainty (less accuracy). Crucially, Floridi’s Conjecture states that an AI absolutely can’t have both a great scope and great certainty. FSD has an incredibly wide scope, even wider than other self-driving cars, as it has to cope with chaos using less data, so it can never been 100% accurate, meaning it can never be safe enough for unsupervised operations.

But as Waymo recently found out, when they had to pause their operations across much of the US due to their vehicles driving horrifically dangerously, just because you try to narrow down the scope with redundant systems and greater data fidelity doesn’t mean you have solved the problem. People seem to think I prefer Waymo to Tesla. I don’t. Self-driving cars, as a concept, are utterly moronic to the core. AI is not intelligent; it doesn’t actually ‘understand’ what it is doing, it can’t cope with chaos, and it will statistically get it wrong frequently. We shouldn’t use AI in applications like self-driving, which have such high risk, and require accuracy that it simply can’t deliver. Waymo’s solution is just less worse than Tesla’s as it actually reflects some level of engineering sense.

So, I guess the question is, how long before we actually heed the warnings of the people actually making these inherently flawed and utterly moronic contraptions? There is enough data and testimonials out there to prove that these stupid machines should be nowhere near a public road. So, can lawmakers stop pandering to authoritarian oligarchic Big Tech goons and actually serve and protect the very people they are meant to represent? You know how a democracy is supposed to work.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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The SpaceX IPO is looking less and less like a galaxy-brained business decision and more like a carefully engineered way to give the billionaire SpaceX insiders an exit strategy and to make the scorching-hot potato that is SpaceX stock everyone else’s problem. The notion that this looks like a pump-and-dump scheme to scam the world of their retirement funds is now so widely recognised that it has become a meme. But how does this painfully obvious IPO grift actually work? Well, let’s go through it step by step.

I am not the first to talk about this topic. A More Perfect Union and Patrick Boyle have some great videos diving into the SpaceX IPO, and I highly recommend giving both a watch.

The Pump

All pump-and-dump schemes have two phases, hence the name. First, the price is artificially boosted, or pumped, way beyond its actual value. Then the insiders sell, or dump, at the peak, pulling the rug out from under everyone else, who are left holding the bag when the price comes crashing down. Thanks to the torrent of Crypto and NFT grifts over the past few years, most people are now fairly familiar with how this scheme plays out, how wealthy it can make the perpetrators, and how catastrophic the losses can be for the victims.

So, where is the alleged pump in the SpaceX IPO?

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Well, how do you artificially raise the price of anything? Simple. Restrict the supply and coerce demand, and Musk is openly doing both.

Let’s start with supply. Most companies float between 10% and 30% of their shares in an IPO. Larger, more mature companies like SpaceX almost always aim for the higher end of that range. When you consider the colossal amount of capital SpaceX will require in the coming years just to remain functional (with more on that in a minute), it would make sense for SpaceX to offer more than 30%. But no, SpaceX is offering less than 5% of its stock.

This insane construction will create artificial scarcity, particularly when you take into account the company and the IPO’s publicity, and seriously jack up the price. This is the Beanie Baby approach to pricing.

But what about demand? Well, Musk has a way of jacking that up too.

In a normal IPO, 90% of the shares are allocated to institutional investors, such as banks and insurance funds, and 10% are allocated to retail investors, reflecting market demand. SpaceX has instead opted for a 70/30 split, allocating three times the typical amount of shares to retail investors! This strongly suggests that professional investors have seen the artificial scarcity tactics and don’t want to buy at that inflated price. So, despite offering an extremely constrained number of shares, SpaceX has to sell its wares to individual investors who are less likely to spot the ruse.

Musk has been hyping up SpaceX for years to his cult of brain-dead investors. Therefore, this split ratio also suggests they expect demand from those who swallow Musk’s constant lies and manipulations to be substantial

These factors alone are enough to jack the price up to insane levels. SpaceX targeted an IPO price of $1.75 trillion, then raised it to $2 trillion, and later lowered it to $1.8 trillion.

But I don’t think people realise the true extent of that estimate.IPOs are typically valued using a revenue multiple, where the overall value of the business is a multiple of its annual revenue, with the multiple being higher if the business is considered to have more growth potential. Most IPOs have a revenue multiple of around six, and famously, Facebook’s IPO was astonishingly high at around 11. Now, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025(including X and xAI, which recently merged). That means that it is targeting a revenue multiple of 96!

Even if you believe all of SpaceX’s BS (again, with more on that in a second), that is a totally fanciful and unjustifiable valuation.

Fortunately, Musk has found a way to push it even further and pull practically all of us into his grift.

SpaceX will be one of the biggest IPOs in history. As such, Musk could make some quite shocking demands given that exchanges would fight over who gets to list them. Ultimately, the NASDAQ won that fight by changing one of its rules at SpaceX’s behest, calling it the ‘fast entry rule’. Normally, a company has to be traded for a year before index funds, like the S&P 500, are allowed to include it. This is known as ‘seasoning’, and it is supposed to protect index funds from the crippling instability of IPOs and to give the market time to find a true value. This fast entry rule completely scraps that concept and shrinks the seasoning period to just 15 trading days!

The majority of indices, like the S&P 500, track the most valuable companies. Because of the restricted supply artificially boosting value, SpaceX will likely become one of the most valuable companies on the planet following its IPO. That means most of your investment portfolios, retirement funds, and even some savings accounts will be forced to buy a huge portion of SpaceX’s highly restricted stock after little more than a fortnight of public trading.

But here’s the thing: there is more passive money, such as these index funds, in the stock market than active money, such as traders. This means that after 15 days of public trading, a veritable tsunami of demand will strike, jacking the price up even higher!

This demonstrates all the hallmarks of a pump, particularly when it seems to totally deny the reality of SpaceX.

The Reality

SpaceX has some serious problems and baggage that should drastically weigh down its valuation.

SpaceX owns X/Twitter and xAI and after a series of bailouts — I mean, all stock mergers,neither company is doing great. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of X/Twitter’s severe legal troubles after the horrific Grok child and unconsentual sexual abuse image debacle, but on top of that, it makes a fraction of the revenue it once did.

xAI, whose chatbot only produced the heinous material on X/Twitter, is also embroiled in said legal trouble. But it too is deeply unprofitable, losing around a billion dollars a month! Not to mention that this cash burn isn’t actually growing xAI either. Their data centres have such catastrophically low utilisation rates, thanks to no one actually using Grok, that they have rented compute to their competitor Anthropic to help pay the bills (read more here)! Moreover, the main founders have left, and Musk has admitted that xAI needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, causing many to ask what the hell SpaceX actually bought when they merged, other than all of xAI’s gargantuan debt.

Then there is SpaceX, which is complicated. Despite what you might think, SpaceX doesn’t actually make that much money from rockets, because the space launch market hasn’t really grown in decades, as demand outside of Starlink has remained quite stagnant. That is why over 70% of SpaceX’s launches last year were for its Starlink satellites. In fact, thanks to how much Starship is costing them, the launch business is losing money!

As I covered in a previous article, Starlink appears to be profitable, reportedly making just over a billion dollars last quarter. But thanks to the IPO filing, we now know that it isn’t a truly scalable business. Their service is too patchy, and their costs are too high to dominate the market, despite what Musk claims. So yes, well done — Starlink works as a business, but it doesn’t warrant excessive speculative valuation at all.

Then there is Starship, which is heading down a path to nowhere. The IPO filings and recent launch have proven that SpaceX is really struggling to increase its payload capacity to even useful levels, let alone the promised 100 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit, and that it is not getting any closer to full reusability, let alone the rapid zero-maintenance reusability Starship requires to hit its launch price goals. There is also zero evidence that SpaceX can solve the boil-off problem, which is critical for Starship to reach higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars (read more here). Starship should be seen as a project that costs SpaceX billions of dollars a year without delivering any real value. Let’s not forget this rocket has yet to even reach orbit!

Some will say that SpaceX’s plans to deploy a million orbital data centres could justify its price, but that is so far off the mark it’s painful. For one, Starship has to succeed for that to be even close to viable, and it has provided no proof that it can ever work. But as I have covered before, orbital data centres will be too catastrophically expensive, cumbersome, risky and inefficient to ever be viable. This is purely fanciful thinking.

When faced with the hard facts, SpaceX doesn’t look like a growth company. It looks like a company wasting billions of dollars a year to mak itself look like a growth company.

This brings me to the gap problem. As my fellow Substack writer Capefearadvisors points out, SpaceX faces around $235 billion in spending commitments through to 2030. Considering the overall business is losing money, you’d think SpaceX would want to raise this amount of money through the IPO, right? After all, that is the point of an IPO: to raise money to pay for growth. But no, even with its insane valuation, this IPO will ‘only’ raise $50 billion to $75 billion due to the fact that so few shares are being sold. On top of that, $20 billion of it must be used to pay down the $20 billion in debt SpaceX has on its books. As such, SpaceX actually needs roughly five times the amount of capital this IPO will raise.

So why bother going public? It won’t materially help the business. It makes no sense, unless growing the business isn’t the point of this IPO. This context should make investors cautious and seriously depress the valuation.

With all of this being considered, a more realistic yet extremely generous revenue multiplier for SpaceX would be around six. That would put SpaceX’s valuation at just $114 billion, or roughly 94% below its IPO target!

This is what I mean when I say the reality of SpaceX is at total odds with this IPO.

But, somehow, it gets worse.

The Dump

Okay, so that’s the pump; now for the (alleged) dump.

There are standards in place to prevent insiders from using an IPO to dump their stock. Normally, insiders are not allowed to sell their shares for the first 180 days of trading.

But, guess what? That isn’t the case for SpaceX. Insiders are allowed to sell 20% of their shares for just three months. If the shares are selling for 30% above the IPO price at that time, that limit is raised to 30%. After that, there is a rolling schedule where they can sell the rest of their shares in stages up to 135 days post-IPO. Musk is exempt from this policy and can’t sell his shares for a year.

By this three-month mark, the index fund tsunami has a decent chance of pushing the value of SpaceX up 30% from its IPO (up to $2.34 billion). That would mean insiders could offload 30% of their shares in just a few months’ time. These insiders, who include the likes of Google and some of the most deranged and greedy venture capital firms on the planet, own approximately 53% of SpaceX (Musk owns 42%, the public will own 5%). So, they could legally sell roughly $372 billion worth of SpaceX shares just 90 days out from the IPO. To give you an idea of how maniacal that is, SpaceX was valued at just $350 billion in late 2024. This sell-off would repay these insiders many times over the amount they invested into SpaceX (or X or xAI), but it would also utterly tank SpaceX’s valuation, destroying the investment portfolios and retirement funds of millions.

And, don’t think that Musk won’t get involved just because his loans are locked up. He is infamous for using his stock as collateral for loans to the tune of billions of dollars, and you can do that pretty much immediately after the IPO. This means that Musk could pull a an astronomical amount of cash from this IPO without ever violating his lock-in period.

Admittedly, we don’t know that these are their immediate plans. The only way we could get an inkling of that is if the IPO included provisions to give them cover to make such a brash exit.

Oh wait… It does that too!

This IPO makes it very clear that upon buying SpaceX shares, you waive all right to sue the company or its leadership. In other words, investors, retirement funds, and even banks can’t raise a class action lawsuit to hold these insiders accountable if they pull the rug out from everyone else. For the life of me, I can’t think of another reason why his IPO would include this stipulation (given that such a provision will reduce the value of the stock) apart from clearing the way for these insiders to jump the sinking ship.

Summary

If not a pump-and-dump, why is it pump-and-dump-shaped?

Most of the SpaceX insiders only own their shares because they were stupid enough to invest in Musk’s catastrophic Twitter purchase or his cash-burning xAI. But even the actual shareholders who invested in SpaceX must be noticing how badly Starship is failing and how comparatively little money Starlink is making and feel worried about whether their cash will disappear into thin air. Sure, these are all heinously greedy billionaires with venture capital firms; they could easily stand to take such a loss, and quite frankly, it would be good for them to learn a lesson about not backing dumb ideas.

But no, it seems they refuse to take the hit. They are instead trying to make this our problem by grifting the stock market and clearing the way for the biggest rug-pull dump the world has ever seen. At least, that is what all of this looks like.

I can’t help but feel like these oligarchic morons have stolen control of the ship, immediately crashed it into an iceberg, and are now frantically making their way to the lifeboats while locking the rest of us below deck as the ship begins to slip under the waves.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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SpaceX is going public in a matter of weeks, which means they have filed an S1, a document that lets us finally see some of the company’s murky financial machinations. There are a tonne of revelations to be found in here — that is, once you get past the painful levels of hollow hype that come across as desperation more than vision. One revelation is about Starlink, as this S1 paints it as the crown jewel of SpaceX, not just because it is the only profitable division of SpaceX, but because it seems to suggest Starlink will dominate the internet provider market. I have even talked to people who want to invest in SpaceX’s ludicrously overvalued IPO just to get a slice of the Starlink pie. But sadly, when you look at the numbers and their actual meaning, this narrative totally falls apart.

Let’s start with the 2026 Q1 figures for Starlink as laid out by this S1 filing. Starlink had a total of 10.3 million paying users, just over double the number they had this time last year, with each paying an average of $66 per month (a sharp fall from $99 a month in 2023), generating $3.26 billion in revenue and $1.19 billion in operational profit.

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The fact that Starlink is profitable at all is utterly remarkable. For years, Starlink was wildly unprofitable, and thanks to the fact that its satellites only last a few years, it was set to never reach profitability. There are many experts and non-experts, like myself, who believed Starlink would never reach this point. You have to hand it to the engineers and sales team for pulling off this utter miracle (even though I have my suspicions about this figure). But we will get to that topic in a minute.

The Market

What was almost side-splittingly funny was seeing the projected addressable market, or how much of the internet provider market they believe they can secure for Starlink, which this IPO set at $870 billion. That equates to 67 times their current revenue! Now, the global internet service provider market size was estimated at just $598.70 billion in 2024 and is predicted to rise to $1125.10 billion by 2035. In other words, Musk predicts Starlink will dominate this market with roughly 80% market share!

This is the problem with Starlink, because that is simply not possible.

Let’s start with the fact that in order to take a majority share of the market, Starlink will need to offer better-than-average internet speeds and below-average cost.

The numbers in the S1 suggest that currently, Starlink’s operational cost per user is $50 per month ($2.07 billion in operational costs for 10.3 million users over a quarter). This broadly means that Starlink currently can’t offer its services for less than that per user without operating at a loss. This is a significant problem if Musk wants global market domination. You see, internet in the US is extremely expensive, averaging $68 per month, which makes Starlink a middle-ground option, whereas internet in Europe is significantly cheaper, at just $56.59 per month, making Starlink comparatively expensive. What’s more, the average internet speed in Europe and the US is noticeably faster than Starlink’s maximum speeds, and the average connection is more stable (with more on that in a minute).

In other words, Starlink’s current cost of operation per user prices it out of being a market dominator, because if it dropped its prices to become broadly competitive across the market, it would operate at a loss.

Here is where people will mention that the cost per user will go down, just as it seems to have done over the past few years, which is why Starlink is now profitable when it wasn’t before.

But hold your horses! There are two very significant reasons why that might not be the case: depreciation and the city problem.

Depreciation

Starlink satellites are designed to only orbit Earth for five years before naturally deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere. SpaceX had to agree to this condition to get permission to launch so many satellites, as this restriction inherently keeps space junk to a minimum. However, it does mean that the entire Starlink internet infrastructure needs to be completely replaced every five years! As a result, the depreciation costs Starlink incurs are enormous!

This is why I am not so sure about that $1.19 billion profit. You see, companies can write off 100% of the first year’s depreciation costs thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill Musk helped get enacted in the US. So, depreciation on a good number of their satellites may not currently be recorded, making their profit margin appear higher than reality.

What’s more, the replacement costs will likely exceed depreciation. The new generation of Starlink satellites (V2 Mini) is about four times as expensive as the previous generation, but it doesn’t appear to support four times as many simultaneous users. So, when they replace all the V1 and V1.5 satellites with new V2 satellites, it could increase the cost of serving each user. Why does this matter? Well, a large portion of the Starlink constellation consists of V1 and V1.5 satellites launched three to four years ago. They are nearing the end of their lives and will be replaced by V2 Mini satellites, which, again, are likely more expensive per user.

In other words, the depreciation cost Starlink will have to absorb per user seems set to increase very soon, once they start replacing older satellites with newer, faster and more expensive ones. Let’s also not forget that, thanks to the Rampocalypse and rising fuel prices, the cost of building and launching these satellites is almost certainly increasing, too, which exacerbates the problem.

But, on top of that, I also suspect that Starlink is, on paper, extending the lifespan of these satellites to artificially lessen their depreciation cost. While this five-year lifespan has been tossed around a lot, we know Starlink has performed premature mass deorbits of satellites and that there is a notable rate of newer hardware failing and deorbiting early, too. As such, the actual average lifespan of a Starlink satellite is likely less than five years. If that is the case, and current or early hardware is depreciating over five years on the books, it may artificially boost the recorded profit margin far above where it actually is by egregiously underreporting the depreciation costs.

When you have a company that has literally billions of dollars worth of annual depreciation on its books for novel hardware, there is ample room for this type of accounting shenanigans. And we all know Musk loves that kind of stuff.

As such, that $1.19 billion profit margin and $50 per customer per month operational costs might be the result of incredibly rose-tinted glasses.

The City Problem

But arguably, the largest problem is cities.

Starlink works great in rural, less densely populated areas, where only a small number of users will connect to a single satellite at a time. But in densely populated areas, tens of thousands of users may be trying to connect to a single satellite, which exceeds the satellite’s capability, causing outages. Indeed, this is why Starlink’s service in cities is consistently very patchy and noticeably slower than advertised.

Why is this a problem? Well, globally, 55% of people live in densely populated cities. Also, most people who can afford Starlink don’t live in rural towns, which tend to be poor, but in developed urban cities. Logically, if Starlink wants to take a majority market share in the internet provider market, as they say they do, they have to solve this bottleneck problem.

This is where Starlink relying on satellites bites it in the ass. Other forms of internet infrastructure, like fibre-optic, can simply deploy more capacity locally, keeping their network utilisation rate high and their operational costs down.

But Starlink’s satellites are orbiting the Earth. You can’t make them exclusively hover over a city. So, to get rid of the city bottleneck, SpaceX has to deploy an oversupply of satellite capacity to ensure that there are always enough satellites above a city to exceed demand. They can’t just increase capacity locally; they have to do so across basically the entire globe! This means the network utilisation rate will decrease, and the number of satellites needed to service each user will increase.

In other words, to solve the bottleneck problem and make Starlink a competitive option for the vast majority of internet users, the per-user operational cost will have to spike dramatically. As we have seen, if that were to happen, Starlink would very rapidly lose its profitability.

I hear those who claim that Starship will bring down the cost to launch Starlink and make larger satellites with far greater capacity possible. But as it stands, Starship is not a viable launch vehicle and is still far from actually launching satellites, let alone doing it regularly and cheaper than the Falcon 9. Based on what SpaceX has actually shown us, not what Elon claims is coming ‘round the mountain, this problem isn’t going to be solved any time soon.

Summary

This is why Starlink’s rapidly growing user base and profitability are so damn impressive. It has demonstrated that it can be a viable, sustainable business in the niche sector of decent internet access in low-population-density areas. That is great and means that, as a standalone business, Starlink is likely worth a few tens of billions of dollars. To what degree this profit is due to accounting shenanigans and timing, I do not know. But simply registering a profit at all is huge! Again, huge kudos to the amazing workers under Musk’s thumb.

Unfortunately, Starlink’s figures and reality do not paint a picture of a company that can get anywhere close to an $870 billion market share. It shows that its recent growth is remarkable, but it is likely approaching the upper limit of its addressable market. I have no doubt that its user base will grow; after all, for many, it is a compelling product. But the fact of the matter is, it is too expensive, slow, and unreliable to be the source for how the majority of humanity connects to the internet, and something drastic will need to happen for that to change. Pretending otherwise, or attempting to claim this is what makes SpaceX worth nearly $2 trillion, is dangerously fanciful thinking.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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The media buzz around Starship has officially died. I was expecting this “highly anticipated” launch to be painted across the headlines, but it seems people simply don’t care that another one of Musk’s giant phalluses exploded in the Indian Ocean. By all accounts, the polish on this turd has tarnished as people have grown tired of waiting for this “revolutionary” tech to actually materialise instead of being an expensive trash fire. This is one of Musk’s seriously bad patterns. He has overpromised himself into multiple corners, from self-driving cars to Mars-bound rockets and even pathetic C-3PO wannabes, and now people want him to put up or shut up. The trouble is, as we have seen with DOGE and the Cybertruck, Musk can’t deliver, but he likes to ‘look like’ he has — and this launch was yet another example. If you buy SpaceX’s line, they have made a serious step forward. But if you actually look at the launch with even a slightly critical lens, that narrative totally falls apart.

The Launch

This was the first launch of the Starship V3. For this article, all you need to know is that this is a major redesign from V2. It’s bigger, carries more fuel, has upgraded Raptor 3 engines (which burn fuel faster and therefore produce more thrust), and the booster has more engines. Primarily, V3’s goal is to dramatically increase the payload of Starship. V2 was pathetic, with Musk claiming it could take just 35 tonnes to LEO, or more than a 65% shortfall in promised payload, but in reality, it only ever took 16 tonnes on a suborbital flight. V3 is aiming to reach the promised 100 tonnes to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) mark, which is critical to meeting all of Starship’s planned use cases. In other words, if they can’t achieve a payload of 100 tonnes to LEO, the project is a failure.

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So, how did the launch go? Well, despite some glowing reports, not great.

The rocket launched, and the stages separated fine. But the Booster lost an engine during launch, and then the engines failed to reignite after separation, causing it to crash into the Gulf of Mexico at 900 mph! Not exactly conducive to being reusable. The upper stage carried on its suborbital trajectory without a hitch. It reached a maximum altitude of 194 km (121 miles) at a speed of just over 26,300 km/h (16,300 mph), where it deployed its payload of 44 tonnes worth of dummy satellites. It then conducted a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, with the heat shield looking extremely charred but intact.

That sounds like a relative success, right? Sure, the Booster failed spectacularly, but SpaceX has seemingly more than doubled the payload! That is a serious step forward towards their goal, right?

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but no.

The Sleight Of Hand

It is very important to mention that this isn’t 44 tonnes to orbit. This is 44 tonnes on a suborbital flight that reached a maximum altitude of just 194 km (121 miles) and only 26,300 km/h (16,300 mph). For some context, a Starlink satellite orbits at an altitude of 550 km (340 miles), which is nearly three times as high as this Starship reached. These Starlink satellites also travel at 27,320 km/h (16,976 mph), or a thousand kilometres an hour faster than this Starship!

I don’t think people realise what a colossal difference this small detail makes. The media is seemingly parroting SpaceX’s narrative that this means Starship now has a usable payload of 44 tonnes. But it doesn’t! Instead, the only thing this does is heavily imply that Starship still has a major payload deficit. Not just a small underperformance, but an underlying critical flaw which makes it totally unusable. But, by running with the 44-tonne figure and not the 194 km figure, that isn’t what people notice.

So, let me explain what all of this implies.

The Payload Problem №1: Set Up

Based on what we know, let’s figure out roughly how much payload V3 could actually take to orbit.

In order to do this, I will have to make some assumptions.

My first assumption is that this Starship was pushing its payload limits, which is supported by the failed engine, as with Flights 7 to 11, which experienced engine failure with a high payload and had no failures with a lower payload. It also makes sense for SpaceX to try to reach the highest payload figure possible, as it will help their upcoming IPO.

I also have to make some assumptions about its mass. We know the payload was 44 tonnes, but we don’t know the dry mass of the upper stage, or the mass of the reserve propellant it was carrying when it reached its maximum altitude. I will be exceedingly generous and assume a 150-tonne dry mass, which is on the lower end of estimates, and a reserve fuel mass of 30 tonnes, which is on the higher end of other estimates. These dry mass and propellant capacity estimates are realistic because they are more than enough to enable landing, given that this propellant, plus aerodynamic drag, is theoretically enough to reduce speed to zero during landing.

This gives our Starship a total mass of 224 tonnes (150 tonne dry mass, 30 tonne reserve propellant and 44 tonnes of payload) as it reached its maximum altitude of 194 km at a velocity of 26,300 km/h.

Okay, so what would this Starship have to do to travel from here to orbit?

The Payload Problem №2: Into VLEO

Technically speaking, 194 km is just about high enough for a stable orbit. At that altitude, you are slightly above the edge of the atmosphere, so there is functionally no aerodynamic drag, and if you travel fast enough, you could technically enter orbit. However, events like small geomagnetic storms can easily create atmospheric drag at this altitude, rendering the orbit unstable. This is why orbits below 400 km are called VLEO (Very Low Earth Orbit) and are rarely used, as they are too risky for typical satellite operations.

So, even though 194 km is far too low for Starlink satellites, could this Starship have entered orbit at this altitude?

Orbital velocity at an altitude of 194 km is 28,051 km/h. So, at its maximum altitude, this Starship would need to gain an additional 1,700 km/h (1,056 mph) in velocity to enter orbit.

However, let’s say that at this max altitude, this Starship turned on its engines until it gained this extra velocity. How much fuel would it burn through? The answer is about 21 tonnes, or two-thirds of the reserve fuel it requires to land (using the rocket equation and a vacuum exhaust velocity of 3,700 m/s). The nine tonnes of reserve fuel left is not enough to complete the landing. It can only scrub off 604 km/h (375 mph) of velocity during landing, and, as the Booster from this launch demonstrated, far more speed needs to be scrubbed off for a safe landing.

In other words, this Starship could transport 44 tonnes into the lowest possible orbit, but it wouldn’t have enough fuel to land the upper stage. Also, don’t forget, I was generous with Starship’s dry mass and its reserve propellant here; there is always a chance these figures are worse.

This is one of the lowest energy orbits possible. But higher orbits will require much higher total orbit energy (the sum of an orbital object’s kinetic and gravitational potential energy). This energy comes from a rocket’s propellant and engines. Therefore, Starship can’t reach much higher orbits with this payload without also expending the upper stage.

The Payload Problem №3: Into LEO

But VLEO is utterly useless for most satellites. How much more fuel would be needed to expand this orbit out to 550 km so that Starship can actually deliver a Starlink satellite? You know, the simplest and easiest to achieve of all Starships’ designed use cases.

Using a Hohmann Transfer Calculator, we can calculate that it would require another 13.5 tonnes of propellant to transfer into this higher orbit (based on a specific impulse of 355 m/s, a commonly cited value spec for the Raptor 3 vacuum engine).

But wow! Hang on, our Starship only has nine tonnes left! So, four tonnes of our payload have to be sacrificed to gain four extra tonnes of propellant.

In other words, this Starship could deliver 40 tonnes of payload to a usable LEO in a ‘partially reusable’ configuration, where only the Booster was recovered. But the Booster wasn’t recovered! So, as far as we can tell, this hypothetical 40 tonnes to LEO would expend both the Booster and upper stage, which together cost some $500 million to build, putting the launch cost at roughly $550 million for 40 tonnes to LEO. For some context, Falcon Heavy can launch 63,800 kg to LEO when fully expended at a cost of just $150 million. That makes Starship V3 5.8 times more expensive per kg to LEO than a rocket that has been in operation for nearly a decade.

Just to remind you, even having to expend the upper stage of Starship totally ruins the premise of this launch vehicle, as even if the booster is recovered, Falcon Heavy will still be cheaper and more reliable.

If it isn’t obvious, this all proves that Starship could, in theory, reach LEO and still land the upper stage — it would just have functionally zero payload capacity (the payload to LEO when the upper stage is expended is roughly the same as the fuel needed to land from a 550 km orbit), which kind of defeats the point of this moronic rocket.

Summary

Now, I may be off with my assumptions. Maybe this Starship had far more reserve fuel in the tanks, though I can’t think of a single reason why it would. Maybe it wasn’t being pushed to its payload limit, even though the engine failures made it seem that way, and even though the IPO pressure will be motivating SpaceX to make it look like the payload capacity is improving. But it could very easily swing the other way, too. I assumed the Booster failed to land because of engine failure. Maybe it was actually because it used all its landing fuel during the launch to give the upper stage an extra push, leaving it no option but to tumble back to Earth and artificially increase the payload? Musk has done significantly shadier stuff in the past, after all.

Either way, I hope this has shown you why deploying a 44-tonne payload on a suborbital flight that maxed out at an altitude of 194 km is not a step forward for Starship, despite what many in the media are spouting. Yes, it is better than the V2’s performance, but it hasn’t really got closer to its target. It’s still a functionally useless rocket.

So, no, this test flight was not a success. It hasn’t really moved the needle forward. What’s worse is that it strongly implies the fatal flaw here is not in the minutiae. The brilliant miracleworker engineers at SpaceX can’t solve this problem because the fatal flaw lies in the underlying concept of Starship as a fully reusable two-stage rocket that Musk insists on pushing. It is even more evidence that the fuel required to land the upper stage is roughly the same weight as the payload to orbit, making this vehicle fundamentally useless and an unsalvageable dead end.

In time, we will see if my assumptions and analysis are correct. But as it stands, SpaceX hasn’t actually demonstrated any meaningful progress. As such, this launch just looks like a pathetic attempt to polish a giant festering turd. Sadly, the media seems to have lost all critical thinking abilities and is eating up SpaceX’s faecal polish hook, line and sinker.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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There has been this meme floating around the internet for a while about how stupid the ‘AI revolution’ is. All these tech bros have been loudly claiming that AI will take everyone’s jobs and revolutionise the economy. But, as the meme goes, if no one has a job, then no one can buy anything, and the economy collapses. This idea that AI is actually a fatal own-goal for oligarchic big tech has become so common that many have been treating it as true. But we now have evidence to back this notion up.

This takes the form of a peer-reviewed paper by economists Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas, titled The AI Layoff Trap. In this paper, they created a model that assumed AI automation will make businesses more efficient by replacing jobs previously held by workers, and then saw what played out. It turns out it will create competitive market pressure so intense that individual businesses will be forced to adopt massive AI automation to compete. But this will create mass AI layoffs, which will ultimately eliminate the consumer demand these companies depend upon by destroying the working and middle classes, and so these companies will fail. As the authors put it, each individual business acts ‘logically’ in isolation, meeting market demand, but collectively they drive the economy towards systemic failure.

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Because, yes, economists, that is the lesson here. AI automation is bad because businesses fail, not that the majority of the population will be driven into crippling poverty. Will nobody think about the shareholders?!

If you think billionaires are going to go for Universal Basic Income (UBI) to solve this rather than create a giant permanent underclass ripe for exploitation, you may want to check if there is anything between your ears. Yes, the likes of Sam Altman have championed UBI as a solution for the damage AI will wreak on us, but he has since flipped his stance. Quite simply, it was always a bait and switch. They needed something to soften the blow, to make us welcome their economy-crushing machines, to get permission to build them. But they were never going to follow through.

So, is this what is actually going to happen?

Well, so far, it looks like no, not at all.

You see, AI layoffs aren’t actually happening. As Oxford Economics found, companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and instead suggest that they are actually using the AI layoff narrative to cover up their own shortcomings. In other words, the massive Big Tech layoffs aren’t about AI automation, but to pay for bad performance and AI expenditure.

Why? Because AI doesn’t increase productivity on a business or economic scale. One of the best lines from the Oxford Economics report is when it directly asks, “If jobs are being replaced, where’s the productivity surge?” Everyone seems to have forgotten that productivity is something we measure, and if the AI rhetoric is true, that metric ought to be skyrocketing. But it isn’t; it is stagnating.

Other studies have backed this up. Like this one published in February, which surveyed 6,000 CEOs, CFOs and other C-suite executives across various countries. They found that nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years. Or what about Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, who said in an interview with the Atlantic Council that AI has basically zero contribution to the US GDP growth in 2025. GDP is directly tied to productivity, meaning even large financial institutions don’t think AI is driving productivity gains. Hell, even Anthropic found that using their coding tools did not increase programmer productivity.

If AI isn’t increasing productivity, then the competitive market pressure that the Falk and Tsoukalas’s model was based on cannot occur because there is no individual advantage to automating jobs with AI.

So, good news, we aren’t going to be turned into a permanent underclass as AI takes all our jobs! Yay!

But that doesn’t mean our economy is safe.

For one, its use is deskilling us at a remarkable rate. We have known that overexposure to AI in the workplace damages expertise and skill for a while now, thanks to studies like those from JYX and Carnegie Mellon. Even Anthropic found that coders using its tools lost coding skills and comprehension. But researchers and professors are starting to notice a striking, consistent trend in recent findings: workers using AI at work are deskilling at disturbingly rapid rates.

Why is this a problem? Well, thanks to constant hallucinations (which aren’t going to stop any time soon, read more here) and shocking high costs, AI can’t replace workers. So, this deskilling will inevitably harm the economy.

But, as I have covered before, AI has also placed a ticking time bomb at the core of our economy too. No AI lab is profitable; they are all running on venture capital and debt. In fact, they have already generated over $1.2 trillion of AAA-rated debt. That not only means that AI is now tied to more debt than banks, but it has also flooded the bond market. A bond is effectively debt sold as an investment. The riskier the debt is, i.e., the more likely the debtor is to default, the lower-ranked it is, with AAA at the tippy top, considered investment-grade, and good enough for our financial system to invest in.

But wait, did you catch that? How can debt be tied to companies which are miles away from profitability, with debt being the only thing keeping them going, be considered AAA rated? Surely, that is risky debt. It sounds like this debt has been mis-sold.

Missed bond payments caused the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

But here is the kicker, AI debt almost certainly makes up a larger proportion of the bond market than subprime mortgages did in 2007 (read more here).

You don’t need to be an economist to add one and two together here.

AI is a massive threat to our economy. However, can we stop pretending that it is because these hollow plagiarism tools are themselves a threat because they are so capable? They aren’t; they cannot replace us, and it is moronic to suggest otherwise. The real threat is big tech grifting the stock and debt markets to turn their value into a perpetual-motion machine and, as a result, undermining the financial systems our economy is built on.

I am sure Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas meant well with their paper, but it absolutely reeks of billionaire big-tech propaganda. AI itself is not a threat; it is the maniacs wielding it, and those enabling them, that are.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Thanks to SpaceX bailing out — I mean, merging with — xAI, its upcoming IPO is as much about investing in the future of AI, Grok, and the promised terawatts worth of orbital data centres soon to be powering it as it is Musk’s feudal techno slave colonies on the barren red planet. That is the only way the utterly bonkers proposed valuation of $1.75 trillion makes even the slightest bit of sense, and even then, it is still hare-brained. There is just one teeny tiny problem with this narrative. xAI, the cornerstone of the speculative value, is rapidly dying before our eyes. So, in no particular order, let’s go through all the different ways it is failing, and what this means for SpaceX.

Lower Users & Low Utilisation

xAI’s main product is the chatbot Grok. But it sucks, as many users find it wildly inaccurate and almost useless. So, while it does appear to do well in benchmarks, that means nothing as its real-world performance is dire. There is a reason it hasn’t threatened the market share of OpenAI or Anthropic. Indeed, it seems Grok’s main value proposition as a ‘nudifyer’ tool for creepy perverts (more on that in a minute).

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This is reflected in the numbers. Forbes recently reported that Grok’s weekly users dropped a whopping 10% from March to April, and the Grok app fell from 2nd place globally in January to 5th place by April, behind Claude and Gemini. In other words, no one is using xAI main product.

Which is a bit of a problem for Musk, as he built a giant, multi-billion-dollar data centre called Colossus to run Grok. However, The Information recently reported that xAI’s utilisation rate was just 11%, way below the typical 40% of its rivals. In other words, so few people are using Grok that this eye-waveringly expensive data centre is mostly sitting idle.

There are two problems with this.

Firstly, Musk’s plan to deploy multiple terawatts of orbital AI data centres to power xAI is a load-bearing promise for SpaceX’s speculative value, and is hinged on the notion that xAI would require a biblical amount of computing power to meet demand. The fact that even xAI’s comparatively small data centres (most likely less than a GW) are already a massive oversupply totally undermines that narrative, and in part, the speculative value it holds up.

But also, xAI went into a vast amount of debt to build these data centres, reportedly around $17.5 billion! That means this oversupply will be a massive drain on xAI’s books, as the huge amount of largely unnecessary debt eats away at its balance sheet. From a business management point of view, this is catastrophic.

The Anthropic Deal

But don’t fear, Elon has a solution! Kind of…

He has rented the entirety of xAI’s 300 MW Colossus 1 data centre to Anthropic. This works out great for Anthropic, which is massively struggling to meet demand with constant outages, as its user base has exploded in recent months, and it doesn’t have enough compute on hand to deal with it. This deal should help solve that. It also means that this data centre will be fully used, and bring in some cash to help cover the debt costs xAI took on to build it.

But let’s not forget that Anthropic is a direct competitor to xAI. Indeed, just a few months ago, Musk was saying Anthropic was “misanthropic and evil.” Handing over this data centre to Anthropic will directly impact xAI’s bottom line, as it will strengthen Anthropic, which in turn will take xAI users. Don’t forget that an xAI user is likely far more profitable to xAI than an Anthropic user using their data centres via this deal, thanks to vertical integration and lack of a middleman.

As such, this deal is not really a solution, as in the long run, it will likely harm xAI more than it will help them. As such, it is more of an admission of just how desperate xAI is.

The Cursor Deal

But this isn’t the first deal like this, Musk has done. In fact, he has kind of double-booked himself.

You see, a few weeks ago, SpaceX/xAI signed a deal that gave them the option to purchase the AI coding company Cursor for $60 billion in SpaceX stock. Oddly, this deal included a breakup clause in which SpaceX would have to pay Cursor $10 billion if it failed to buy them.

This deal appeared to make sense for xAI because Grok is losing the AI coding race badly, so merging with Cursor could help them compete with the likes of Anthropic, as they are faring much better in this race.

This deal made a ton of sense for Cursor, too. For one, they were previously valued at $29.3 billion, so this deal doubles their value. But previously, they just used ChatGPT or Anthropic tokens and sold them on to their customers at a lower price. That is why they were competitive in the AI coding tool race; it was the same AI as the competitor, just cheaper. Terrible business model, but a great way to drum up a customer base. So, they wanted to switch to using their own AI to stem the losses, but they needed the infrastructure to do that. This deal did exactly that, as part of it was for Cursor to run its models on xAI’s Colossus data centre.

You know, the one Anthropic now has exclusive use of… More on that in a bit.

But here is the funny part. You’d think this means that SpaceX/xAI signed this deal to buy Cursor’s own proprietary coding AI tool, right? Or, if not that, power Cursor with Grok and use their expertise to make Grok better at coding. After all, this seems to be what’s so valuable here.

Well, Cursor do not have its own AI. Instead, their current tools are powered by Kimi 2.5, an open-source, free-to-use Chinese AI model. So, SpaceX just signed a $60 billion deal to run an open-source AI in their data centres, which they could have just run themselves for free. It makes no sense.

In other words, SpaceX/xAI didn’t agree to buy Cursor for its technology, expertise, or to expand Grok into its product line. They did so to get more usage out of their desperately under-utilised data centre. It is an admission that Grok is a failure, and they have too much expensive compute on hand, and desperately need to plug that financial hole.

What This Means For SpaceX/xAI Compute

Okay, so what does this all mean for Grok, xAI and SpaceX? Well, the implications aren’t exactly good.

With Anthropic taking up all of Colossus 1, where will Cursor and xAI operate from?

Well, xAI has a second data centre called Colossus 2. It has been widely touted as the world’s first gigawatt-capable data centre, and back in January, that it had reached 1 GW capacity, or more than three times the power of Colossus 1. As always with Mr Pants on Fire, this wasn’t exactly true, with satellite data showing that it was more like 300 MW, or the same size as Colossus 1. It has probably grown in capacity since then, but considering the lack of reporting and the fact that xAI has a compute over supply, it might still be down at the 300 MW mark.

With Anthropic getting all of Colossus 1, Cursor and Grok will have to share Colossus 2. But, Cursors has over a million daily users, and those users are using it for demanding coding tasks. So, they will likely require several hundred MW of compute just to meet that demand. Now, SpaceX/xAI has effectively given them compute for free, so it makes sense for them to use as much of that as possible. There isn’t enough data out there to accurately predict how much of Colossus 2 will be taken up by Cursor, but there is a good chance it is most of the currently installed power.

So, where does that leave xAI and Grok?

Their low utilisation rate shows that they only need a small amount of computing to meet inference (querying the AI) demand. Therefore, I’m sure there will be enough compute space left in Colossus 2 for that.

But Grok needs far more than just inference. In March, Musk said that xAI needed rebuilding from the ground up, as the models were built wrong the first time around. This raised the question as to what the hell SpaceX had just bought a month beforehand. But, in other words, Grok doesn’t just need retraining, but an entire new model built from scratch. That will take an enormous amount of training, which requires a huge amount of computing power.

So, where are they going to get that computing power from? Again, by solving the underutilisation problem, they have shot themselves in the foot.

There is also another issue here. Yes, Anthropic will pay SpaceX/xAI for this deal, and yes, buying Cursor will effectively buy them a ton of paying users. In theory, both deals will bring in revenue that can be used to pay xAI’s vast debts. But, Musk seems to have forgotten that AI data centres are not profitable. You can’t solve xAI financial woes by letting Grok die and selling the compute power you built for it to other competitors.

That is a huge problem because like very other giant AI lab, xAI is bleeding cash. xAI was bleeding $1 billion a month in 2025, and it was projected to lose $13 billion last year. SpaceX posted a $5 billion loss in 2025 likely because it took on xAI’s debt and losses. That’s right, xAI is in such a bad financial position that it took the giant company that bailed it out into the red.

Failed Premise

Musk’s SpaceX $1 trillion payment packet is tied to him hitting certain targets, one of which is deploying 100 TW of orbital data centres. If you want to know just how utterly stupid that is, read my previous article here. But the entire narrative of this promised vast orbital computing power was that the xAI needed it. SpaceX is selling itself as a ‘vertically integrated innovation engine’, where its rockets launch AI data centres that power cutting-edge AI and humanoid robots that would dominate the economy. Maximum efficiency, no middle man, unrivalled impact.

But, SpaceX/xAI is having to sign two massive deals to fill less than a gigawatt of compute capacity, or just 0.001% of Musk’s 100 TW target. That undermines the entire premise of this vertically integrated innovation machine. It shows that the demand for their AI is pitiful, and doesn’t need that amount of power. It shows that, even at this tiny scale compared to where they want to go, they have to literally buy customer bases for twice what they are worth (cursor) and rent their compute power to rivals who are already crushing them.

The narrative of xAI and in turn SpaceX’s speculative value is demolished by this revelation.

The Illegality

All of that is pretty damning evidence that xAI ain’t doing so well. But let’s also not forget that xAI is in deep legal trouble.

Musk has snubbed being summoned by French prosecutors regarding a criminal investigation into xAI over Grok’s rampant production of non-consensual sexual deepfakes, including CP, and other illegal content. In fact, xAI’s French offices were recently raided as part of this investigation, and other countries, such as the UK, have opened their own investigations into xAI. In short, over the coming months, xAI and Musk may be held accountable for the heinous things Musk not only let Grok do, but openly advertised it would do. Legally, ethically and operationally speaking, this is horrific news for both Musk and xAI.

It’s also bad news financially, as it appears that a serious portion of Grok users are solely using it as a ‘nudifier tool’, and in the wake of these investigations, the EU is looking to ban such tools.

This, on its own, could be the death blow for xAI, but everything else we have talked about, it’s more like the last sprinkling of soil on its coffin.

Summary

With all of this in mind, it is obvious that xAI is dying. Its user base is rapidly disappearing, it is having to buy users at exorbitant prices, it is giving its compute away to its main rival, the entire premise that it will one day need orbital data centres is dead in the water, and legally speaking, its main value proposition as a nudifier tool for internet creeps is being banned, and the company is up to its neck in s**t. All of that while it bleeds so much cash that it has sent its newfound parent company into the red, and not the planetary kind. This is not sustainable; this is the death rattle of a failing company.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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One of the few upsides to SpaceX’s rapidly approaching IPO is that we finally get to glimpse the murky world of its obscure finances. They are legally obligated to show us how cash moves through this beast, and the picture painted by the recent filings is not pretty. You see, from orbital data centres to Starlink, NASA missions, and even Musk’s fabled anarcho-capitalist feudal settlement on Mars, Starship is critical to unlocking SpaceX’s future. Yet, these IPO filings only highlight that it is a biblically expensive mess going nowhere fast. But I don’t think people realise just how damning this revelation is, because it proves that Starship is nothing more than a hopeless money pit.

The Gap

Let’s start with this revelation. Reuters reported that, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings, the company has spent more than $15 billion on Starship so far. That validates my previous estimate that Starship “costs are close to $10 billion, if not significantly more”. Now, in our current crazy times, that might not sound especially expensive, but it is. For some context, Falcon 9 cost just $400 million to develop, and the initial budget for Starship was $5 billion. So, Musk has already blown the budget more than two times over.

Yet, Starship isn’t even close to finished, let alone being a viable, functional launch vehicle.

The only real targets it has achieved so far are completing a suborbital flight, reaching orbital velocity (but not orbit), landing and relaunching the booster (which is much easier than the upper stage), and conducting a splashdown landing of the upper stage. For spending three times the initial budget, that is pathetic progress.

So, how far does Starship have to go?

Well, Starship has two main use cases.

The easiest and simplest is launching Starlink satellites into LEO (Low Earth Orbit). For Starship to be a viable and profitable way to launch Starlink satellites, it needs to reach LEO with its promised 100-ton payload, land both stages, and ensure both stages are rapidly reusable with virtually no maintenance costs. That way, it will be able to launch around 40 Starlink V3 satellites per launch for a nominal cost of $70 million per launch. This would reduce the cost of launching Starlink satellites by roughly over 50%, enabling Starlink to firmly operate at a profit, not just a positive EBITDA.

The much more difficult use case is for out-of-orbit flights like NASA’s Artemis missions and Musk’s Mars missions. This is because Starship can’t travel directly to these planets; it needs to use other Starships to refuel in LEO. This creates quite a complex and highly risky mission profile. First, a ‘depot’ variant of Starship is sent into orbit, then multiple ‘tanker’ variants of Starship shuttle fuel to the depot, 100 tons at a time, until the depot is full. After this, the Mars/Moon-bound Starship launches to LEO, rendezvous with the depot, fully refuels itself from the depot, and then fires off to its destination. Each Starship variant will have complex, unique systems, and each fuel transfer will carry a risk of a mission-ending catastrophic explosion. As such, this mission profile is significantly more complex than a simple Starlink launch.

So, what targets does Starship need to meet to be able to conduct Starlink launches, and how many more do they need to meet to pull off Moon/Mars missions?

In truth, there are loads of targets, and they are much harder to achieve than what SpaceX has accomplished so far.

So, let’s go through them, shall we?

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Targets Until Starship Reaches Usability

1. Reach Orbit

Let’s start with the main one: Starship needs to actually reach orbit. So far, the most it has achieved is take 16 tons on a transatmospheric flight at orbital velocity. ‘Transatmospheric’ means it just skimmed the upper atmosphere, so it reaches a lower altitude than ‘suborbital’, which in itself is (typically) lower than required to reach proper orbit. Transatmospheric and suborbital flights, even at orbital velocities, can’t deploy satellites into orbit. But this isn’t as simple as it might sound, given that rockets have to expend kinetic energy (speed) in order to gain altitude. So, even though Starship has reached orbital velocity, it needs to expend a lot more energy to reach orbit, which requires burning more fuel — and, crucially, Starship might not have this fuel available. The extra fuel required to take Starship from its current transatmospheric path up to LEO is roughly 20 tonnes (as calculated by Thunderf00t), which suggests that Starship can currently reach only the lowest possible orbit if it carries no payload! So as it stands, just reaching orbit is a potentially difficult target to meet.

2. Increase Payload

Getting to orbit alone isn’t enough to make Starship viable; it has to actually carry stuff there, and for the economics to work out, it needs to meet its target payload-to-LEO of 100 tons. So, Starship needs to transition from a max payload of 16 tons on a non-orbital flight to 100 tons, or sixfold its current payload, on an orbital flight.

That would be a monumental leap for SpaceX. Is there any evidence in SpaceX’s past that suggests they can increase payloads to this degree? Well, not really. The first-ever Falcon 9 rocket (V1.1) had just a 13.5-ton payload to LEO, but the completely redesigned Falcon 9 V1.2 wasn’t just SpaceX’s first partially reusable rocket; it upped this payload to 22.8 tons to LEO. That looks like a 73% increase. But in reality, it isn’t. For one, V1.1 wasn’t reusable, and V1.2 could only reach 22.8 tons when fully expended; its reusable payload to LEO is much lower at 17.5 tons. As such, V1.1 and V1.2 are almost totally different rockets. V1.1 was basically a scale test bed for developing the booster landing technology, and SpaceX needed to redesign and scale the entire thing from the ground up to both introduce reusability and increase payload. But crucially, since the introduction of V1.2 (also known as Block 4) in 2015, Falcon 9’s payload to LEO has not increased.

In other words, there is very little precedent for SpaceX, let alone the entire rocket industry, to dramatically increase the payload of a rocket without a total redesign, let alone increase it by over sixfold. I cannot overstate the size of this challenge, especially when making Starship bigger alone won’t solve it.

3. Deploy Payload To Orbit

Starship has already tested its payload bay doors by ejecting Starlink dummy satellites during one of its transatmospheric flights. But, as Blue Origin recently demonstrated, it is one thing to carry a payload to orbit and eject it, and another to deploy it in the correct orbit. Starship is a large,, unregulated vehicle that is still suffering from engine failures during ascent. These issues can cause rockets to deliver satellites to the wrong orbit, which is simply not acceptable. So, not only does SpaceX need to get Starship into orbit and then somehow increase its payload to a colossal 100 tons, it also has to solve these reliability and accuracy issues so that it can actually be useful for delivering payloads, not just taking them on a scenic flight.

4. Land And Catch Upper Stage

To reduce weight by removing the landing legs and increase landing precision, SpaceX has opted for both of Starship’s stages to land using ‘chopsticks’. Essentially, the rocket has to come to a hovering stop just above the landing pad, and two giant arms will catch it in mid-air. It is an impressive technical feat, as you have to be pinpoint precise, and SpaceX has proven they can handle it with the Super Heavy Booster. But, if they want Starship to be a fully reusable rocket (which the economics of the rocket entirely depend upon), then they need to catch the upper stage, too.

You might think landing the booster and the upper stage are similarly difficult tasks, but that isn’t the case. The upper stage will land at three times the velocity, meaning the amount of kinetic energy that has to be scrubbed off compared to landing the booster is enormous. On top of that, it has to re-enter the upper atmosphere, which adds incredibly complex fluid dynamics to the equation. The forces involved are immense, and even a slight error could shift the landing spot by tens of metres. Despite these challenges, it seems SpaceX has nearly got this down to a tee, with recent upper-stage splashdowns being just 3m from the target landing spot. That is impressive, but potentially too inaccurate to catch the upper stage.

Plus, there is the issue of safety. Musk has stated that “SpaceX will only try to catch the ship [upper stage] with the tower after two perfect soft landings in the ocean. The risk of ship breakup over land needs to be very low.” When you consider that Starship is still losing critical heat shield tiles during landing, that Musk has admitted this could cause horrific failure and that explosive engine failures have been commonplace for the past year, the chances of meeting this safety threshold in the near future are not looking likely.

5. Reuse Upper Stage

It’s one thing to land a rocket and another thing to send it back up into the heavens. To do that, the rocket needs to be, at the very least, salvageable. The main structure should not be exposed to too much heat during re-entry, given that it could be too malformed or brittle to be reused. Likewise, the engines, fuel tanks, and heat shield need to be in good enough nick so that they only require light maintenance. Otherwise, it could very easily be cheaper, quicker and easier to just scrap the one you landed and build a new one from scratch. But that would defeat the purpose of landing it.

It’s like trying to restore a crashed car. Sometimes the car can outwardly not look too bad. But once you get into the nitty-gritty, they aren’t always salvageable. Ask me how I know…

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The Musk-Altman court case is nothing short of hilarious. Musk is angry that Altman runs a for-profit AI company, while he himself runs an openly for-profit one. He is also rather miffed that Altman isn’t developing an AI for the betterment of humanity, as was OpenAI’s founding goal, all while his AI’s most prominent feature is the violation of women and girls and the generation of child sexual abuse material. Yet Musk seems totally unaware of this painfully deep hypocrisy. As usual, Musk’s cavernous ignorance, utter stupidity, and blatant superficiality were also on full display. Despite being a founding investor in OpenAI, Musk admitted in court that he “did not read the fine print” of an OpenAI term sheet Altman had sent his way in 2018 when Musk stepped off the OpenAI board. The opposing lawyer retorted in dismay, “It’s a four-page document.” Yowch. But don’t go thinking Sammy Boy comes across well either. This lawsuit is also airing his manipulative leadership and wild greed for everyone to see. No one is coming out of this fight clean. But there was one detail that came to light that I simply can’t get out of my head. One that destroys the load-bearing myth of Musk’s and Tesla’s entire narrative.

When taking the stand under oath, Musk told the court that Tesla has no plans to pursue AGI.

That is completely at odds with what he has repeatedly claimed publicly and with what he has told Tesla shareholders.

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Back in 2023, he claimed that Tesla may have “figured out some aspects of AGI”, as he believes that Tesla vehicles now have “a mind”. In 2024, he predicted AGI would arrive in 2025, heavily implying his companies would be the ones to achieve it. When that didn’t happen, he predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence by the end of 2026, again with the heavy implication that his companies would lead the way. As recently as this March, he claimed that Tesla would be “one of the companies to make AGI” and “probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form”. What’s more, Tesla’s most important projects, FSD, Robotaxis and the Optimus robot — you know, the projects that make Tesla so valuable to investors — all depend on eventually unlocking AGI to function correctly.

So, either Musk lied under oath, or he has committed a Theranos-level amount of fraud.

It’s also possible that he is so damn stupid, ignorant and careless that he doesn’t understand AI, AGI or what on Earth is going on at Tesla. Now, while that very well may be true (read more here and here), such an admission would warrant his immediate ousting as CEO.

Either way, Musk has been forced to tell the truth or face genuine legal repercussions, and in doing so, he has trapped himself between a rock and a hard place.

But this disclosure goes quite a bit deeper than ‘He said Tesla would have AGI, and now he is saying they won’t.’ You see, Tesla’s entire roadmap, future prospects and current valuation all depend on it unlocking AGI.

Let’s start with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD), the system designed to make all Teslas drive themselves and power Tesla’s Robotaxis. Because of the utterly deranged way Elon designed the system, it needs AGI to be even remotely safe.

Musk forced Tesla engineers to make FSD vision-only, relying solely on cameras to interpret the world around it. FSD, unlike almost all other self-driving systems, also runs without referencing detailed 3D maps. In other words, the AI is operating alone, and there is no redundancy in the system. This means that FSD’s computer vision and self-driving AIs need to have near-perfect human-level reasoning abilities for FSD to understand and navigate the roads as safely as a human.

This is especially true for edge cases. These are exceedingly rare scenarios that aren’t well represented in the AI’s training data. The only thing modern AI systems do is use statistical trends in training data to calculate what the next step should statistically be. This means modern AIs almost always fail on edge cases they encounter, as they don’t have enough data to form accurate trends. Individual edge cases are exceedingly rare, but there are practically an infinite number of different edge cases, especially with self-driving cars (since public roads are highly chaotic), so this is quite a frequent problem. This also means that training an AI on data to solve this issue isn’t viable, as each individual edge case happens so infrequently that we can’t gather enough data. Because FSD has no other systems to help it navigate edge cases safely, it needs to develop human-level reasoning abilities to do so.

To put it another way, for FSD and, in turn, self-driving Teslas, such as Tesla Robotaxis, to function safely, Tesla has to create an AI that matches or surpasses human reasoning abilities. That is literally the definition of AGI! So, no AGI, no autonomous Teslas. And that isn’t just my opinion; many experts believe this to be the case. Indeed, Musk’s claims back in 2023 that Tesla may have “figured out some aspects of AGI” point to the fact that he knows this!

Just to remind you, ARK Invest has estimated that Tesla’s FSD-powered Robotaxis will generate Tesla $4 trillion a year in revenue by 2030.

But how can that possibly happen if Tesla isn’t pursuing AGI? You can’t have one without the other. Tesla not pursuing AGI totally undermines ARK Invest and Tesla’s Robotaxi narrative.

The same is true of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot.

Musk has publicly claimed he aims to sell a million of these bots a year. Indeed, the volume of production is key to the value Tesla investors see in the Optimus project. To find a million buyers per year, this robot needs to be able to do almost anything and be easy to use. In other words, it needs to be general-purpose, and programming it to complete tasks needs to take no technical ability. Indeed, Musk has said that “it’ll do anything you want” and that it will be programmed to complete tasks using natural language; in other words, all you have to do is tell it what to do, and it will follow your instructions.

I cannot fathom an AI application that depends on AGI more than Optimus. Not only does this AI need to interpret human commands into real-world actions, which is infinitely more complex than what AI chatbots do, but it also needs to have a human-level understanding and reasoning of the world, how it works, and the aim of the task at hand. Humanoid robots also exist in far more chaotic environments than self-driving cars, and even the simplest tasks they will be asked to do are much more complex, chaotic, and unstructured than driving a car. To put it simply, these robots will encounter exponentially more edge cases than FSD will. Overcoming those hurdles will require human-level reasoning. For Optimus to work as promised and even have a chance of being the commercial success Musk says it will be, it needs AGI.

As a side note, rival humanoid robot companies like Boston Dynamics solve this problem by training their robots to do specific tasks for each deployment, deploying them in more controlled environments like factories, and aiming to sell them at far smaller scales to allow for more precise technical support.

Again, Ark Invest and many other Tesla investors believe that Optimus will eventually bring more value to Tesla than Robotaxis.

But how can it do that if Optimus depends on AGI and Tesla isn’t even pursuing AGI?

Musk admitting under oath that Tesla isn’t chasing AGI jeopardises the load-bearing myth of the narrative that keeps Tesla’s valuation so sky-high.

Now, don’t get me wrong; AGI is not possible with today’s AI technology. We need something totally different, a revolution from the ground up, and a move from statistical extrapolation to actual cognition. We are not even close to being able to create AGI. In a way, Musk is right not to pursue AGI, because as it stands, it is a fool’s errand. Had Musk not bet the entire future of his most valuable company on unlocking AGI in the next few years, I would be absolutely fine with him not chasing it. But he has bet the entire future of Tesla on creating AGI in the next few years.

This tiny moment in this giant, sprawling, chaotic court case is an example of Musk shooting himself in the foot for the world to see. It proves that Musk is a manipulative, deceitful, ignorant and — quite frankly — deranged CEO who is leading Tesla towards a crushing dead end. I wonder how many more blatant examples like this Tesla investors will need to witness before they either jump ship or vote this rot out of his technothrone

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Musk’s exploding rocket company is shooting for an IPO later this year, which is shaping up to be utterly insane. From a two-tier share structure that effectively crowns Musk as a pathetic monarch to bat-s**t crazy pay packets, the usual Musk moronic f**kery is on full display. But why? What is Musk trying to achieve here? All of this lunacy can make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. But remember, that isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Like a guy getting all up in your face so that you don’t notice him pickpocketing your wallet. So, let’s look past Musk’s bulls**t and see what is actually going on. Strap in—this is a long one.

Red Flags

Let’s start off with the red flags.

The first is the valuation. SpaceX’s IPO is slated to happen within the next few months, and they aim to value the company at $1.75 trillion, with some suggesting it could reach $2 trillion, and raise over $75 billion in capital. That is an insanely high valuation!

Then there is Musk’s cuckoo pay packet. As Reuters reported a week ago, Musk and SpaceX already agreed on a new $1 trillion stock-based pay packet back in January. Like his Tesla deal, Musk is expected to meet certain criteria for this to happen, namely, helping SpaceX reach a $7.5 trillion valuation, creating a lasting human colony on Mars of at least one million people, and deploying 100 TW of orbital data centres. There is no deadline, and once these targets are reached, Musk will be granted 200 million ‘supervoting’ restricted shares in SpaceX, equivalent to $1 trillion at the time of valuation.

Then there is what I can only describe as the god-complex red flag. According to its IPO filing, SpaceX is pursuing a two-tiered share structure. After the IPO, Musk will hold Class B ‘supervoting’ shares, which are worth ten votes each, while almost everyone else will receive normal shares. This effectively means Musk has a majority vote over SpaceX, despite holding a minority share, even after it goes public. In other words, removing Elon as CEO will become impossible, as he would have to personally vote himself out. What’s more, it gives him insane control over the SpaceX board, effectively allowing him to remove whoever he likes. Musk called himself the ‘technoking’ of Tesla a while back, and this is what that title actually represents. It is authoritarian to the nth degree.

We can all innately tell that these terms are bad, right? Unless you have taken the Musk-sphere suppository and mandatory lobotomy, then you can tell that the vibes are most certainly off.

But what is going on here? What do these red flags tell us?

Well, let’s start with what is actually wrong with them.

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What Is Wrong?

I don’t think people quite realise just how overvalued this supposed $1.75 trillion IPO is. In 2025, SpaceX posted a net loss of $5 billion, which was largely attributed to their xAI bailout—I mean, purchase—but because that was an all-stock purchase, this doesn’t quite ring true. In reality, spending on Starship and AI was likely very high, and Starlink’s profitability is questionable at best, which presumably dragged SpaceX into the red. However, SpaceX also posted an EBITDA of just $7.5 billion for 2025 (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation). That means that with a valuation of $1.75 trillion, SpaceX has an EV/EBITDA ratio of roughly 220! For now, you don’t need to know the details of what an EV/EBITDA ratio is, just that it measures how over- or undervalued a company is compared to its revenue and that a ‘healthy’ one is between 8 and 30.

For comparison, Tesla’s EV/EBITDA is stupidly high at around 120. To give you an idea of how overvalued Tesla is, critics like me estimate that its true value is 90% lower than its current value, while even major institutional analysts believe it should be valued 60% lower than it is currently (read more here). Yet SpaceX’s IPO is gunning for an EV/EBITDA nearly double that of Tesla! This pushes this IPO beyond speculative value and into truly unreal territory.

To put it simply, there is nothing to justify this insane price. And what’s worse, the vast majority of IPOs experience an initial ‘pop’ where the company’s value increases the first few days, then steadily loses value over time. In short, investing in IPOs is a great way to lose money. This shooting for an utterly bananas overvaluation will almost certainly greatly exacerbate these losses.

Then there is Musk’s dreaded pay packet. The targets are so moronically outlandish that if you understand the context, you can’t help but wet yourself laughing.

Firstly, SpaceX could achieve a $7.5 trillion valuation purely through inflation if given enough time. $1.75 in 1978 is equivalent to $7.96 today. Using that information to extrapolate, we can estimate that SpaceX would be worth $7.5 trillion by 2074 without actually delivering any growth. Quite simply, without a deadline, this target is utterly meaningless.

Next comes this one-million-person Mars colony. That is quite simply never going to happen. It isn’t even on the table.

SpaceX itself says that establishing a Mars colony will require taking millions of tons of payload to the Red Planet. So, what would that look like with Starship? It can’t go directly to Mars. Instead, a ‘tanker’ Starship in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) will need to be fully refuelled by other Starships, and then this tanker will transfer all its fuel to our Mars-bound Starship, giving it enough propellant to make the journey with its 100-ton payload. As per my previous article, which generously assumes Starship can reach a 100-ton payload to LEO, can launch at a rate of once per week, can actually handle orbital refuelling, and has a low 1% per day boil-off rate in orbit, I found that it would take 110 launches to fully refuel this orbital tanker. Only then could you launch and fully refuel the Mars-bound Starship. With a realistic launch cost of $70 million, that puts the price tag of a single 100-ton payload Starship Mars mission at $7.7 billion. It would also take a whopping two years for this hypothetical mission to even leave LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

Let’s be generous and assume that just setting up a million-person colony on Mars would require two million tons of payload to be shipped from Earth to Mars via Starship. It will take 20,000 100-ton payload missions to deliver that quantity. But remember, each mission requires at least 111 Starship launches, each costing $70 million a pop. Therefore, SpaceX would need to conduct 2.2 million Starship launches, totalling around $155.4 trillion in launch costs alone! That is equivalent to five times the current USD GDP. But let’s say Musk wanted to get the job done in 50 years, making him 104 when he finally achieves this goal. Well, SpaceX would have to launch more than 120 Starships every single day starting now in order for that to happen.

So, even if we are insanely generous with Starship’s potential capabilities, Musk is NEVER going to create this million-person Mars colony. It is beyond absurd to suggest this is even possible, and anyone who implies otherwise has already disqualified themselves from this conversation.

But again, this all assumes Starship will eventually work as promised. All the evidence points to the fact that this simply won’t happen.

Starship has conducted 11 test launches over three years, costing SpaceX tens of billions of dollars. Yet, during that time, it has barely improved. It still hasn’t made it to orbit, and even then, it has only successfully launched with just 16% of its promised payload capacity, forcing Musk to admit it has a fatal payload deficit. In fact, the extra mass of fuel needed to launch it to orbit is likely the same as its current payload capacity (read more here), so its current functional payload might be zero. Just to remind you, Starship is so catastrophically delayed that it was already supposed to have landed on the Moon by now. It is a cripplingly expensive project that is going nowhere.

SpaceX has a barrage of problems to solve to make Starship capable of taking humans to Mars. They need to actually reach orbit; increase Starship’s payload so that its orbital payload is more than six times its current non-orbital payload; land the upper stage; make the upper stage rapidly reusable without requiring extensive repairs between launches; develop reliable and extremely safe orbital cryogenic fuel transfer systems (which is something no one has even attempted because of how potentially explosive it is); reduce orbital fuel boil-off to acceptable levels; develop in-transit life support and radiation shielding; develop a Mars lander; develop Mars-based fuel generation for returning trips; and acquire a human spaceflight certification, despite the fact that there are no, and can never be any, redundant systems for landing, which is critical to certification.

If Starship is a marathon, SpaceX has only run the first few steps, which has taken them three years and tens of billions of dollars. The idea that they can solve all of these problems in the near-term using the $75 billion they plan to raise is f**king moronic on its face.

But hold on, did you catch that? Musk is saying he wants SpaceX to create a million-person Mars colony while also appointing himself the unfireable authoritarian head of SpaceX. Even if Musk hadn’t publicly shown his broken, deranged and damaging political ideals, this decision should be seen as a dangerous dead end. Henry Ford tried to create the same ‘benevolent’ technocratic top-down capitalist utopia in the Amazon with Fordlandia. It failed spectacularly, and if you would like to know more details, I recommend watching Donut Media’s surprisingly well-researched podcast episode on the topic. We know societies set up like this catastrophically fail. This should not be seen as even remotely ethical, let alone a viable investment.

Then there is the 100 TW target for orbital data centres. Like the SpaceX valuation, I don’t think people realise just how comedically overinflated these numbers are.

Musk previously claimed that SpaceX aimed to deploy 100 GW of orbital computing power. In an earlier article, I calculated how long it would take and how expensive it would be for SpaceX to deploy 100 GW worth of their proposed AI Sat Mini into orbit using a 100-ton payload-capable Starship. It would take nine Starship launches every day for 15 years straight to reach 100 GW of operational orbital data centres. The cost of the launches and satellites would total $17.8 trillion. Not to mention that AI chips fail at a staggering rate, so maintaining 100 GW in orbit would cost $886 billion a year.

And here’s the really bad part: 100 GW is equivalent to just 0.1 TW, or 0.01% of Musk’s 100 TW target. So, to deploy 100 TW of orbital data centres in 15 years would take 9,000 Starship launches per day and cost hundreds of times the current global GDP.

I cannot stress enough that this is utterly impossible. Again, it goes so far beyond the realms of reality or even speculation that anyone who parrots this target remotely seriously should probably sit at the children’s table during dinner parties.

Okay, so now that we know what is actually wrong, what is the purpose of all of this?

What Is Going On Here?

Sadly, I do not have a crystal ball. My D&D character, Kenneth The Profane, does, but it doesn’t work all that well either, so I can’t say for certain what Musk is attempting here. Quite honestly, I’m not even sure he knows. Musk has an air of hiding his drug-addled egotistical mania with the veneer of playing 4D chess. He isn’t a genius, and we shouldn’t treat him as such. So, I have a few possible answers as to what Musk is ‘trying’ to do here.

Let’s start with this insane pay packet. Despite what some people claim, this is not designed to motivate Musk. The two main targets are pure fantasy; he will never meet them. As such, this isn’t a carrot for the billionaire. It is blatant propaganda for the IPO.

To reach that $1.75 trillion valuation, investors need to speculate that SpaceX will experience biblical levels of growth in the near future and want to pile in. They need to think that Musk is sitting on a veritable pot of gold. The reality is that this simply isn’t the case. SpaceX’s launches aren’t exactly profitable, nor is Starlink, and its prospects with Starship, orbital data centres and Mars colonies are fanciful dead ends. But signing such a pay packet with Musk lends credibility to the speculation that he can pull off these obviously idiotic ideas. It is enough to entice the gullible into lining up to buy SpaceX, creating the perception of value—and as we will soon see, that is all Musk needs.

But why pursue an IPO now? Why try to sell this blatant manipulation when most people are already deeply suspicious of you?

Well, as Patrick Boyle pointed out, this is Musk cashing out of a business going nowhere.

SpaceX makes very little money from commercial rocket launches (with 90% of its EBITDA coming from Starlink instead) and has tens of billions of dollars in debt; xAI is a money-burning machine; Starship has astronomical R&D costs; and Starlink isn’t actually profitable, given that it has colossal depreciation costs due to each satellite only lasting five years. This is why SpaceX makes billions of dollars in EBITDA, but when you take factors like debt and depreciation into account, it’s not at all a profitable business. As I pointed out, orbital data centres can’t be profitable, and because Starship is a failure, Starlink can’t bring its per-customer costs down.

In other words, SpaceX is set to remain an unprofitable mess. It makes sense for big investors to cash out as soon as the valuation peaks. But that requires buyers.

As a side note, I think this is why Musk has structured this IPO so he can’t be fired. Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX. After this IPO, the finances and prospects of Starlink, Starship development, xAI and SpaceX’s proposed orbital data centres will become significantly more transparent. The chances of investors baulking at the reality of SpaceX’s unprofitable dead-end ventures and voting to oust Musk are a lot higher than you might think, particularly when SpaceX keeps digging a bigger hole, and the myth of Musk is falling apart. Musk needed to retain an overwhelming voting majority and major control over the board to ensure he wasn’t held accountable for the mess he created for SpaceX. So, you could consider this move an example of corporate authoritarianism or an admission of guilt for the grift he has pulled. Or both!

But that doesn’t explain why now.

I think it is a perfect storm of two forces that means SpaceX’s potential valuation is about to peak, making it the ideal time for Musk and his mates to cash out.

Firstly, there is still a modicum of hype and copium around Starship. The media and pundits around the world continue to treat it as if it will one day soon work. But unless SpaceX makes some colossal leaps in the near future and actually delivers on their rapidly approaching NASA contracts, that good faith will vanish as the mounting evidence that this company is a failure will become too significant to ignore. In other words, there is a rapidly closing window where Starship and SpaceX are widely seen favourably, and that favourability is key to drastically inflating its valuation.

There is also something weird going on with the stock market right now. For the first time ever, there is more cash invested passively through ETFs, indices, and pensions than actively invested in buying and selling individual stocks. This basically means that large IPOs, like SpaceX’s, are guaranteed to soak up huge amounts of investment. For example, an S&P500 tracker index fund will sell other stocks to buy SpaceX’s IPO to rebalance its spread to ensure it reflects the market, regardless of how ‘good’ an investment it is.

In other words, SpaceX only needs to drum up a small amount of loud, gullible investors to position its IPO value so high that it forces millions of passive investors to involuntarily buy up huge amounts of SpaceX stock. Musk can effectively force people to buy his hot potato.

As Tom Nicholas points out, this is a bit of a bubble and is, arguably, the reason why events like the Iran war haven’t impacted stocks as much as expected. Passive investments do not react as frequently or as quickly as active investments, which artificially keep stocks high. But equally, when retail investors get hit by the skyrocketing cost of living, they are likely to pull their cash out of these passive investments so they can afford to live. So, this bubble is at risk of, at the very least, deflating in the near future.

Indeed, many believe that SpaceX’s IPO is designed to capitalise on this bubble and grift value from the stock market it doesn’t deserve. But the window of opportunity to do this appears to be closing. This passive investment effect will boost SpaceX’s valuation to a peak, but it also might disappear soon, meaning that if Musk wants to cash out, SpaceX needs to go public as soon as possible.

With an unprofitable business going nowhere, these two perfectly timed forces allow Musk and his other investors to offload shares. It wouldn’t just be finding willing bagholders but using the current market setup to force millions to hold their bags too. In theory, they get to walk away with their gains realised, while others have to stand on the ship they sunk.

Summary

We have known Musk is a grifter for a long time now, so we shouldn’t be all too surprised by this. What I am surprised by is that most mainstream analyses of SpaceX’s IPO fail to assess SpaceX’s moves even remotely critically or attempt to debunk Musk’s blatant lies and manipulations. They just peddle the hype and let Musk get away with it. They are as complicit in this grift as Musk himself. How this all unfolds, I don’t know. Again, I do not have a crystal ball. All I know is that there are enough giant red flags for me to actively seek shelter from Musk’s disaster.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Previously, I have rambled on and on about how AI is far too inaccurate and broken to replace human workers (such as this article, for example). From its constant hallucinations to its failure to perform basic tasks, it isn’t really a suitable replacement, let alone a viable alternative, for a cognitive human worker. But what if I am wildly wrong? What if, by some miracle, Altman and Amodei pull a metaphorical rabbit out of the hat and AI can magically achieve what they constantly claim it can? Well, it turns out, your job is likely still safe, because believe it or not, we humans are cheaper than a giant plagiarism machine! But is that really good news?

Axios recently reported that Uber has announced it has already blown its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months! On top of that, the vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia told Axios that “for my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees”. That sounds an awful lot like these AI systems are quite a bit more expensive than the people they were designed to replace.

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But why?

Well, some have pointed to an idiotic new trend known as ‘tokenmaxxing’. That name alone is proof that the entire corporate world is suffering from a debilitating case of brain rot.

‘Tokenmaxxing’ is when a company measures an employee’s performance based on the number of AI tokens they use. In other words, the more frequently an employee uses an AI, the more they will be considered ‘higher performance’. This isn’t a niche idea, with companies like Spotify, Meta, Nvidia and Uber jumping on the tokenmaxxing bandwagon.

But it is an entirely nonsensical idea. Tokenmaxxing doesn’t measure HOW an employee is using AI — for example, they could use it woefully inefficiently. Likewise, the work they produce with it could be so dreadful that it creates an exorbitant load for their colleagues to manage. Additionally, we know that overrelying on AI tools significantly erodes a person’s skills and expertise, so maximising exposure to AI in a pre-professional environment likely indicates dangerous levels of brain drain.

In short, this metric prioritises the idea of work, not results. It is telling that all the companies rolling out tokenmaxxing have a vested interest in the AI boom actualising. It implies that they can extract more value from the concept of AI doing well than from their actual workforce.

So, is that what is happening at Uber and Nvidia — is tokenmaxxing causing these AIs to cost more than the workers they are meant to replace? Are they using these tools so inefficiently that the costs spiral away from them?

Well, tokenmaxxing almost certainly hasn’t helped!

But we have known for a long time now that AI is almost always a more expensive solution than human workers, even when deployed correctly.

Take, for example, the 2024 MIT study, which found that AI could only cost-effectively replace 23% of basic workers’ wages. In other words, AI was so expensive that 77% of the time, hiring a human was the cheaper option. Furthermore, these researchers found that, even if AI prices dropped 20% per year, it would still take decades for AI to become the cheaper option for the majority of jobs.

Amazon kindly proved this study correct by taking it from theory into real-world practice. Their “Just Walk Out” grocery stores used facial-recognition cameras, shelf sensors, and AI to track which items a customer had taken and charge their Amazon account when they left, eliminating the need for a cashier or self-checkout. They replaced retail staff with simple AI, not even a more expensive, complex and less accurate LLM. But, unsurprisingly, it didn’t go to plan. A report found that over a thousand remote workers had to be hired to monitor the video feeds and verify 70% of the customers’ purchases, given that the AI was consistently making mistakes. Despite these workers effectively being paid a slave wage, the costs added up, and Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” AI system became significantly more expensive than simply hiring regular cashier staff. As such, Amazon failed to sell the system to third parties, which resulted in the closure of almost all of these stores.

And here’s the really inconvenient part: AI isn’t getting cheaper; it’s getting more expensive.

Let’s start with the fact that, right now, AI is subsidised to the gills. For example, using a series of very roundabout deals, Microsoft currently rents compute power to OpenAI at a staggering discount. Other AI data centre companies like Coreweave rent out compute at such astronomically discounted prices that they remain insanely unprofitable. But, despite the heavily discounted infrastructure, AI companies all run at colossal losses. OpenAI loses huge sums of money per customer, and even its $200 plans are loss-makers. No wonder they likely reached losses of more than $10 billion in 2025.

With a flurry of AI IPOs from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI/SpaceX, combined with growing economic risks, all of these companies are now under increased financial scrutiny. As such, they need to reduce their losses, which means easing all this subsidisation and dramatically increasing the cost of using AI.

However, there are other factors increasing the cost of AI. As these models become larger, the energy and infrastructure costs of running them (also known as inference) increase dramatically. Indeed, OpenAI’s inference costs appear to be dramatically increasing right now. But the Rampocalypse these AI companies created is also beginning to affect them, as the cost to buy the computer chips they need has gone absolutely bananas. Other data centre costs are rising too, such as energy and construction.

All of these factors dramatically elevate the cost of AI. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT5.2 costs $1.75 per token when its predecessor, ChatGPT5.1, cost just $1.25. That is a 40% cost increase in a matter of months! And it is only set to rise from there.

So, with all of this in mind, AI is too damn expensive to replace the vast majority of human workers, even if it were capable of doing the same job to the same standard.

Now, is that a good thing?

From one perspective, yes. It means people’s livelihoods are safe. After all, it appears as if AI is not actually causing any layoffs at the moment (read more here). When you consider the horrific damage such widespread job losses could cause, AI being this terrible is objectively a good thing.

But what does it say about wages that a statistical machine trained on copious amounts of stolen data and that can only ever hope to be a hollow, inaccurate, badly puppeteered imitation of us is more expensive than just hiring actual people? What does that say about the state of wage theft today?

In our modern climate, anyone seriously considering replacing human workers with AI is just fetishising the idea of a robotic slave workforce that allows them to avoid having to treat their fellow humans with dignity. Why? Because it makes no business sense to replace workers with AI! The fact that this is even a point of contention proves there is a sickness in our society.

Either way, this doesn’t feel like something to celebrate. It’s like finding out the killer whale at SeaWorld has grown accustomed to its tank and so can never return to the ocean. The fact that workers are cheaper than the hollow plagiarism machine designed to badly imitate them shows exactly how abused, neglected and shortchanged the modern workforce is.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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With crashing sales, plummeting profits, vehicle launches that flopped so badly they’re openly mocked in the street, a glacially slow Robotaxi rollout, and the loss of its monopolistic hold on the EV market, Tesla is on a generational downward spiral. But you wouldn’t know that from its rhetoric, or even its share price. It’s almost like reality doesn’t matter. However, that might change soon, as Musk has just admitted something that could not only put the final nail in Tesla’s financial coffin but also destroy the myth that props up its insane value. You have probably seen this news plastered everywhere by now, but Musk has confessed that, despite his previous claims, HW3 can’t achieve full autonomy, and millions of customers who bought a car with the promise that it will one day drive itself will need to upgrade. The implications of such a damning admission go a lot deeper than you might think.

But, before we dig into everything, let’s quickly recap how the whole mess started.

The Hardware Debacle

Way back in 2017, Tesla proudly proclaimed that it sold all its vehicles with “all the hardware necessary for full self-driving capability”. Owners were promised that, at some point down the line, the only thing it would take is a software update, and their car would suddenly be able to drive itself — no human input required. In short, Musk promised that the HW2.5 computer and sensor suite installed in all sold Teslas would one day be capable of full autonomy.

But in 2019, that narrative began to fall apart. Tesla launched its updated HW3, which had a substantially more powerful computer. Why? Well, the self-driving AI Tesla had developed was simply too large to run on the HW2.5 computer. Musk and Tesla had flat-out lied about its capability. All new Teslas going forward would have HW3, and Musk rolled out a free upgrade program to anyone who bought a HW2.5 Tesla with the FSD (Full Self-Driving) package. But anyone who wanted to upgrade that hadn’t bought FSD was expected to shell out $1,500 (later discounted to $1,000).

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Then, even worse, this entire debacle repeated itself. In early 2023, Tesla launched its HW4 computer, which again was dramatically more powerful than the previous generation, with eight times the memory bandwidth! It was widely known that HW3 simply didn’t have the power for full autonomy, and in January 2025, Musk finally admitted to it.

There were some rumours that a kind of ‘FSD lite’ software would be available for HW3 vehicles. But now, Musk has fully confirmed that it’s not happening. During a recent earnings call, Musk confessed that HW3 can’t cut the mustard. “Unfortunately, Hardware 3 — I wish it were otherwise — but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD.” His solution is a rinse and repeat from last time. “I do think over time its gonna make sense for us to convert all HW3 cars to HW4, because that’s what enables them to enter the Robotaxi fleet and have unsupervised FSD,” Musk said before he proposed setting up ‘microfactories’ to convert Tesla’s fleet.

The Scale

But what Musk failed to mention is the sheer scale of such an operation, because Tesla has sold a lot more cars since 2019.

Electrek estimates that there are roughly four million Teslas with HW3. That is roughly eight times the number of Teslas that were fitted with HW2.5! An HW4 upgrade includes not just a much more capable computer, which in the current chip market will be substantially more expensive than the HW3 computer, but also upgrading the camera suite FSD uses. There will also be significant overheads for these ‘microfactories’ needed to process the sheer volume of upgrades.

Tesla sold those vehicles with the explicit promise that they would one day soon drive themselves. To avoid running foul of fraud laws, Tesla will either have to upgrade all these vehicles at its own expense (which Musk has hinted towards) or compensate these owners.

So, how much will that cost Tesla?

Well, let’s be incredibly generous and assume an HW4 upgrade will cost Tesla $2,000, or $500 more than the HW3 upgrade cost consumers. Multiply that by four million, and you get a total bill of $8 billion!

You might think Tesla is large enough to absorb such a cost without much issue, but it isn’t. Especially right now. Tesla’s total profit for 2025 was just $4.4 billion. Given the lowballing nature of my estimate, this bill could easily wipe out Tesla’s profits for two years straight.

This is assuming Tesla has to upgrade all these cars. In order to force Tesla’s hand, you could make a case for something like a class-action lawsuit. But these things are never so certain, particularly when it comes to someone as slimy as Musk.

However, Musk admitting HW3 is a failure and that Tesla will need to do some sort of upgrade scheme has overarching implications, many of which people don’t seem to be discussing at all. So, let’s break them down in no particular order.

Financial Implications

Tesla is expected to triple its capex this year, almost entirely driven by AI spending. This, combined with shrinking sales, means Tesla won’t be cash-flow positive for the rest of the year. In other words, Tesla will most likely operate at a loss this year. So announcing that Tesla will be forced to shell out billions of dollars to upgrade or compensate millions of customers because the CEO and company lied about a product’s capability is an enormous blow. It means this cost won’t gently tip them into the red — it will bury them in it.

Accountability Implications

On that note, if any other CEO had announced that a lie they had been heavily pushing for years was about to cost the company billions of dollars to correct, they would face severe disciplinary actions. We’re talking about more than simply being ousted. The board has the option to try to hold Musk personally liable, given that this lie originated solely with him. For example, they could sue him personally for the damages he has caused the business. If Tesla’s compliance and management were even vaguely functional, this would be the natural course of action. But no, nothing. Musk just admitted to blatantly lying to Tesla customers for a decade, and not just a small lie, but one that undermines something critical to the overall value of Tesla. Yet nothing has happened to him.

This demonstrates exactly how broken Tesla is. It proves it requires zero accountability, and that is a recipe for catastrophe.

Musk’s Capability Implications

But this also heavily implies that Musk is not capable.

By making a mistake this severe, it suggests he was either too stupid to understand the task at hand or he was lying and grifting the whole time. There is no other option here. Either he believed HW3 was capable — despite it demonstrably lacking the oomph needed to run the gigantic AI that Tesla’s moronic vision-only system requires, which completely writes him off as a competent leader — or he knew it wasn’t going to be good enough but openly lied about it anyway to grift and pump Tesla’s stock (which, again, disqualifies him as a competent leader).

Either way, this admission paints Musk as dangerously incompetent. Especially when it’s the second time he has done this! Despite his claims, both HW2.5 and HW3 were nowhere near good enough. Therefore, he is automatically a repeat moron or a repeat charlatan.

Future Implications

But who is to say that HW4 will solve the problem?

I, like many autonomous experts, believe that FSD fundamentally can’t reach safe autonomy. The vision-only system lacks any redundancy, meaning it requires nearly 100% accurate AI to function safely, and even then, only in ideal conditions. But AI physically can’t reach those levels of accuracy. So, it doesn’t matter how good HW4 is; there is a reasonable chance that the system will require a complete overhaul in the future, with a suite of new sensors like radar and lidar, and more powerful computers capable of running multiple AI models to cross-reference each other and create these layers of redundancy. If you want to know more about this topic, read my previous article here.

Keep in mind that Musk believed HW2.5 and HW3 were good enough. What are the chances that he has got it wrong again? Statistically speaking, it’s damn high.

But by far the most telling sign is that Tesla is already getting ready to launch HW5, also known as AI5. This computer is supposed to be ten times more powerful than HW4! I ask you, if Musk or Tesla had faith that HE4 was good enough, why would they be moving to replace it with something astronomically more powerful just a few years after launching the HW4?

There are currently around three million HW4 Teslas on the road, and Tesla is presently selling more than a million a year. So could Tesla be forced to upgrade another four or five million vehicles to AI5 in a few years’ time for another multi-billion-dollar price tag?

Possibly, and that should terrify anyone connected to Tesla.

Summary

This response skirts around the deeply broken ideology at Tesla. It is no secret that the Tesla board and investors value Musk’s lying. His ‘overexaggerations’ about Tesla’s capabilities are what have made the company so ludicrously valuable, after all. But sooner or later, reality will come home to roost. This has the potential to be the first time Tesla is pressured to sit up and pay attention. Rather than boosting its value, this lie is set to pile Tesla deeper and deeper into the red. As soon as they realise his falsehoods are a liability and not a boon, I wonder how quickly they will all turn on him.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s brilliant exposé on Sam Altman has gone bananas viral, and rightly so; it’s bloody brilliant. Go read it. Now, everyone is teaming up against Altman and calling out his long history of bullshit. But what I haven’t seen much of is an explanation as to why Altman has thrived in spite of everything. Or, should I say, why he has thrived because of everything. I think there are a variety of legitimate ways to answer that question. So, let me walk you through Altman’s actions, and I will let you come to your own conclusions about his true intentions. Then I will try to explain my opinion about the situation, as from my perspective, Altman is a lot more similar to another tech bro we all know and hate than you might think.

The Lies

Let’s start with why Farrow and Marantz’s piece went so viral. Ultimately, Altman is a serial liar and manipulator with a strong streak of sociopathy. While Farrow and Marantz’s piece was the first to make the wider public aware of this, we have known about his devastatingly loose connection to the truth for years.

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The OpenAI Files prove this perfectly. It is a catalogue of sources detailing his deceitfulness going back decades. So, let me give you the major highlights in chronological order.

1. 2010s: On two separate occasions, employees at Altman’s first venture, Loopt, attempted to oust him from his CEO position for recurrent “deceptive and chaotic” behaviour. Senior executives even threatened to leave if Altman wasn’t removed as CEO.

2. 2019: Altman was forced out of his role as president of VC firm Y Combinator (YC). He was allegedly accused of prioritising his own personal enrichment at the cost of the company’s needs He spearheaded YC’s investment in OpenAI, which granted him the position of co-chairman of OpenAI. This moonlighting distracted him from his YC duties. He also ‘double-dipped’ by getting his own personal investment firm to back startups he helped YC invest in. All of these decisions were kept hiddenfrom leadership at YC, who fired him when they found out.

3. 2019–2023: Altman repeatedly claimed he wasn’t fired but promoted to be a chairman of Y Combinator, despite never receiving such a promotion and never holding such a position. He even falsely listed himself as chairman on his SEC filing for years.

4. 2021–2023: Altman hid his ownership of OpenAI’s Startup Fund from the board. The fund was set up in a way that would financially benefit Altman and it raised serious conflict of interest issues because it invested in companies in which Altman also had personal investments.

5. 2023: OpenAI executives, Chief Technical Officer Mira Murati and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, lost confidence in Altman due to his long pattern of documented dishonesty and manipulation.

6. 2023: Altman attempted to gain control over employee-board communications, which is vital for employees reporting issues at the company and holding Altman’s questionable conduct to account.

7. 2023: According to former members of the OpenAI board, Altman fabricated claims about certain board members’ views, possibly in an attempt to pit them against each other.

8. 2023: While being reinstated as OpenAI CEO just days after being ousted for rampant lying and manipulation, Altman used his leverage to restructure OpenAI’s board, removing every member who acted against him and replacing them with close allies.

9. 2024: A former OpenAI board member publicly stated that Altman made oversight difficult by overtly lying and withholding information from the board.

10. 2024: Law firm WilmerHale was hired to conduct an independent review of Altman. Despite verifying the accusations of lying and manipulation, the review was never released to the public and was even kept to verbal briefings, in an apparent attempt to whitewash Altman’s image.

Farrow and Marantz’s article adds even more juicy details to this shit heap. By now, you get the picture — if Altman says the glass is half full of wine, it’s brimming with piss. The man lies more than he breathes.

Firing & Rehiring

But did you catch that? Altman was kicked out of OpenAI because of his sociopathic levels of lying and manipulation. Originally, he was held accountable. But then, he was brought back. This is a critical puzzle piece we need in order to understand what is actually going on here.

Altman was explicitly let go because of mounting complaints of abusive behaviour, the fact that he was not “consistently candid” and his repeated pattern of lying to the board and employees. But there was another factor. It turns out the board had known about all this for years. The tipping point was when they found out that Altman had hidden his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund from them. This major breach of trust and attempt to conceal a serious conflict of interest (given that the fund had invested in ventures Altman had personally backed) was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

So, board members moved to oust Altman, and he was out by November 17th, 2023. It would be another year until he was removed as owner of the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Then, by November 22nd, Altman was reinstated as CEO. Why? Why on Earth would a company take back someone who is such a blatant liability?

Well, when you look at who wanted him back and why, it makes perfect sense.

Microsoft, by far OpenAI’s largest investor, put immense pressure on OpenAI to reinstate Altman. They hired Altman as head of their AI division and welcomed in any employee who wanted to jump ship with him. Microsoft even backed a letter from employees threatening to quit if Altman wasn’t reinstated. After their backing, more than 90% of OpenAI’s 770 strong workforce signed the letter.

Why did they do this? Well, OpenAI employees were paid in part in shares, and Microsoft held a major stake in OpenAI’s for-profit division. When Altman was let go, he was in the process of signing an employee share sale deal with Thrive Capital which would have valued the company at $86 billion, or more than double its previous worth.

In other words, Altman was about to make Microsoft and OpenAI employees a bucketload of money. Employees could cash out their equity before the company went public, and Microsoft’s shares in OpenAI would be valued higher.

Crucially, Thrive Capital is totally controlled by Joshua Kushner. As Farrow and Marantz pointed out, Kushner and Altman have a deep personal connection, having known each other since 2011. Kushner reportedly believed that the value of OpenAI was Altman, not its proprietary technology, and was worried his investment would be worthless after Altman’s departure. Bear in mind that OpenAI employees have since claimed that Altman can’t code and doesn’t understand basic machine learning concepts. Altman’s value to Kushner was not as an AI savant but something else. So, he withheld the giant investment until Altman was reinstated. We will get onto why he valued Altman so highly in a minute.

OpenAI’s board was essentially strong-armed into bringing Altman back.

However, Altman had some demands. He would only agree to come back if the board was completely reshuffled and stuffed with his allies. This effectively rigged the one system meant to hold him to account in his favour. Because OpenAI had no choice, they submitted to his demands, and Altman was back as CEO less than a week after his firing.

So now Altman is back at the helm and, instead of being punished for his conduct, he has been praised and rewarded for it, with one of the few systems in place to prevent his deceitfulness being eroded to the point of futility.

What did Altman do next?

The Conflicts of Interest

Before we carry on, it’s worth reminding you that OpenAI is a cash-burning machine that is running deeper and deeper into the red as it gets further away from profitability. It does not have the available cash to do anything other than fund its own survival. If you want to know more, read my previous article here.

Yet, despite all of these factors, since his return, Altman has channeled OpenAI’s investment into several major and questionable deals.

Recently, Altman asked OpenAI to invest a whopping $500 million into nuclear fusion startup Helion. Helion, like every other company, is still lightyears away from generating power from fusion, let alone making it commercially viable. Did I mention that Altman is one of their biggest investors, having piled $375 million of his own money into the venture, and that if OpenAI had invested this money, his shares would jump in value? Unsurprisingly, Altman didn’t step down from his role as chairman at Helion to make this deal; instead, he waited until his efforts to push it through were made public before stepping down! This was such a blatant conflict of interest that OpenAI employees avoided discussing it in their Slack channel out of fear that what they said there might end up in court.

OpenAI did refuse to invest $500 million, almost certainly because of the legal mess and optics involved. But it still signed an agreement to buy 50 GW of future power from Helion by 2035, equivalent to 12.5% of Helion’s own projected power output. This deal, along with similar ones from Microsoft (given that the ties between Altman and Microsoft run much deeper than you might think) legitimises Helion’s laughably fanciful power generation projections, which has enabled it to raise billions of dollars elsewhere. So, while OpenAI prevented Altman’s open attempt at corruption, it did allow for a wild abuse of power.

Something similar happened a few months prior with Stoke Space, which is a SpaceX clone startup that aims to produce its own reusable rockets. Despite being founded seven years ago, they have yet to even attempt a launch. Altman is also a major investor in Stoke Space through his VC firm Hydrazine. Yet, Altman wanted OpenAI to acquire Stoke Space under the guise that it would enable OpenAI to compete with SpaceX’s orbital data centres. Just to clarify, the idea of orbital data centres is utterly fucking moronic (read more here), and Stoke Space is years away from being able to launch anything into space, let alone a tonne of them. Such an acquisition would not only have been a considerable drain on OpenAI’s finances, but it also wouldn’t have benefitted them. The only entity that would have benefitted from such a deal is Altman’s wallet. Despite Altman’s attempts, this deal did not go through.

However, others did. For example, in January, OpenAI announced its plans to invest in Merge Labs, a brain-computer communications startup and Neuralink competitor. This was surprising, as Merge is miles behind Neuralink, and even Neuralink’s technology isn’t exactly a paragon of success in this industry. It would make significantly more sense for OpenAI to partner with a company like Synchron, which has leading technology and strategic partnerships with other OpenAI partners like Nvidia. So why choose Merge? Well, while Altman doesn’t have equity in the company, he is still a co-founder and sits on its board. Let’s not forget that just because he doesn’t currently own equity doesn’t mean he won’t in the future. In order to align them with shareholders, board members are often paid overwhelmingly in deferred shares (which involves being paid a fixed number of shares at a later date). So again, while this deal is actively robbing OpenAI of the capital it needs to stay afloat, it has the potential to be a serious boon for Altman.

There are other examples of this grift, such as Altman directing OpenAI to buy his mate’s podcast for more than $100 million dollars. Keep in mind, these are the examples that we know of. He hid his involvement with the OpenAI Startup Fund from OpenAI’s own board members for years, and we know the ways he invests in companies, or obtains vested interests in companies, are varied and complex. Additionally, we know from the likes of A More Perfect Union that Altman’s ties to AI-related companies are colossal and murky. Let’s not forget that the OpenAI’s board is now firmly planted in Altman’s pocket and is likely more willing to conceal his actions.

I’m going to take a moment to ask you a question. What do you think about of all of this? I mean it — please come to your own conclusions. Is there a word in your mind that sums up these actions?

For me, the words ‘corruption’, ‘embezzlement’, ‘fraud’ and ‘conman’ spring to mind.

The Carbon Copy

Now I’m going to ask you a second question. Does this remind you of anyone in particular? Being rewarded for constantly lying, rigging a board, misusing company funds for personal enrichment and investors valuing the CEO over the actual business.

That’s right, Altman is just a subpar copy of Elon Musk.

For one, Musk also lies through his teeth. From deceiving investors and the Tesla board about taking Tesla private, to claiming Teslas will be an appreciating asset, and repeatedly asserting that Tesla will crack the enigma that is self-driving cars next year, he lies more than he urinates. For someone with a ketamine problem, that is damn impressive.

Musk also has similar issues regarding conflict of interest and self-enrichment . He influenced Tesla to buy out his failing solar panel company SolarCity for $2.6 billion and then completely liquidated it. He diverted $500 million worth of AI chips ordered for Tesla to xAI. He instructed SpaceX to buy nearly 20% of Cybertrucks in 2025 Q4, despite not needing them. He even propelled Tesla to invest $2 billion into xAI, which significantly raised the company’s value. However, there are too many malicious and dishonest things Musk has done with Tesla to go into great detail here.

Why haven’t the board held him to account for all of this? Well, Musk’s $56 billion pay packet explains that rather nicely. This ludicrous deal was thrown out by a judge, as she found that the board members were too heavily influenced by Musk to have been impartial enough to approve such an incentive. Indeed, Tesla’s board members are some of the highest paid in the US, and they are predominantly paid in Tesla stock. So, like Altman, Musk has effectively rigged the board.

There have been numerous times shareholders and even Tesla’s board have moved to replace Musk. But they always fail. Why?

It is because they value Musk’s lies and manipulation more than Tesla. For example, Gary Black, a hedge fund manager who heavily backs Tesla, publicly stated that if Musk stepped down, Tesla’s stock could fall by 20% to 25%. A recent report from Ryan Brinkman at JP Morgan found that Tesla shares are 60% over-valued because of Musk’s ‘cult of personality’.

But what is Musk’s personality? He has no charm, no charisma. His only valuable trait is his lying. He claims to have all the answers when he has nothing, which is the definition of all brag, no shorts. All he does is use a diatribe of lies to bamboozle, create an illusion, and sell it to the gullible.

That is why investors back Musk — not in spite of his lies and manipulation, but because that is what is valuable. It doesn’t matter that Musk’s actions are damaging Tesla beyond belief (read more here). That is not what they invested in. They invested in the narrative, the lies, the grift.

Altman has done the same. Using his tsunami of bullshit as a weapon to extract value from the market, he has investors backing his giant fibby whoppers to the hilt He has divided and conquered the corporate structure of OpenAI to enable this deceit to go unchecked. Under the cover of all of this, he uses his position of power to corruptly self-enrich himself to an enormous extent. Yet the investors who gave him all this power do nothing to stop it, because that is the point of it all.

The Modern Reality

This is what happens when you do nothing but prioritise shareholder value. When the entire focus is to ‘make line go up,’ and totally ignore what is actually propping it up. It is the result of an economy and a corporate elite that have devolved into hollow, blind greed. Rather than valuing actual growth, tangible results, or even simple business fundamentals, these corporations place their value in the slimiest sociopaths ever to grace this beautiful Earth, as they are the ones who can extract the most from it and us.

Yes, Altman is a double-dealing, deceitful weirdo. We should be pointing at him and demanding he is removed from his position of power. But this is a sickness that goes far deeper than OpenAI.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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The giant rusting dumpster swasticar that is the Cybertruck is one of the largest automotive flops in history. It is a criminally ugly projection of just how moronic, ignorant and pathetic Elon Musk is. It is the vehicular form of halitosis. If the ‘ick’ could be personified on four wheels, it would be the Cybertruck. As such, it is the closest thing we have to a commercial male birth control. Considering its only target market is sci-fi-illiterate, emasculated, deeply sexually frustrated, doomsday-prepping divorced dads, its sales have been utterly woeful. I have addressed this subject before, so if, somehow, you don’t know the backstory, feel free to read my article here. But it turns out the Cybertruck’s downward spiral is much steeper than expected! Not only was it recently revealed that Musk has been quietly inflating the Cybertruck’s ‘sales figures’, but it turns out he might have been doing it significantly more than we thought. While this is a damning revelation for the Cybertruck and Tesla, that, sadly, isn’t really the issue at hand. It is the precedent it sets and what that means for the future of Musk’s little empire.

Registrations

By now, you have likely seen the headlines that roughly 20% of Cybertrucks sold in 2025 Q4 were ‘bought’ by SpaceX. This statistic comes from S&P Global, which found that of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US during 2025 Q4, 1,279 of them were delivered to SpaceX, while 60 others were delivered to Musk’s other companies, like Neuralink and xAI. So, to be accurate, 18.09% of Cybertrucks registered during this period went to Musk. That is equivalent to around $100 million worth of stock.

Why is this bad? Well, SpaceX doesn’t need that many Cybertrucks. They are likely just going to sit in a parking lot on SpaceX’s grounds and rust away. The ones that are used will probably be used for hauling engineers around — you know, a job a far cheaper and less brittle vehicle could manage. This stinks of Musk inflating the numbers by buying his own product.

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The fact that this was done in secret, too, makes it all the worse. This is by far the largest fleet ‘order’ the Cybertruck has ever had! You’d think Tesla and SpaceX would be screaming from the rooftops about how good it all is. In fact, this ‘purchase’ was a related-party transaction, which occurs when any transaction, even without the exchange of funds, takes place between entities with common control or influence. Public companies, like Tesla, are required to disclose such transactions, particularly ones of this size, to maintain transparency and prevent corruption or manipulation. But no, in order for the public to become aware of this transaction, it required third-party analysis. So, this is at least damn suspicious, and at worst, illegal. Because I am no legal expert, I cannot say which.

This secrecy means we don’t know what was exchanged here, if anything at all, which is an important detail. Tesla may have simply donated SpaceX these trucks for functionally nothing, secretly wiping out $100 million worth of inventory. On the other hand, if SpaceX exchanged something of equal value, that would arguably be a gargantuan misuse of company funds. Either way, Musk’s role as CEO for either company is cast in serious doubt due to the colossal misuse of company funds and resources as well as the dire conflict of interest. This issue is horrific enough, but it is only amplified by SpaceX’s looming IPO, as it raises serious questions about what investor funds will actually be spent on.

And it gets worse.

On top of these 1,279 Cybertrucks being delivered to SpaceX, we also know that Tesla has absorbed a sizeable amount of Cybertruck inventory internally, adding them to its own servicing and production facility fleets. Again, these are jobs that the Cybertruck is arguably not suited for, and while we don’t know the exact figures, reports suggest that Tesla is internally assigning more Cybertrucks to its fleets than it needs. So, the actual number of Cybertrucks making their way to paying customers’ hands might be far lower than S&P Global has found.

Purchases, Not Registrations

This is where Cox Automotive comes in. Rather than tracking registrations, they count market purchases. In other words, they probably wouldn’t count Cybertrucks being shipped off to SpaceX or Tesla’s fleet as a sale. So, we can use Cox’s analysis as a way to accurately estimate how many Cybertrucks are actually making their way to paying customers’ hands and how many Musk is ‘buying’ himself.

Below is a graph of Cybertruck sales by quarter from Cox Automotive.

Before we dive into the question at hand, let’s first take a second to bask in the glorious inadequacy of these numbers. Musk wanted to sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year by now, equivalent to 62,500 per quarter; yet, they are currently 94.4% below that target! The Cybertruck’s sales fell faster than any other EV in 2025, and that trend has only continued, with 2026 Q1 being its worst quarter since its official launch, with sales down 45% compared to 2025 Q1! These are the numbers of a vehicle begging to be discontinued.

Now, back to our question. Cox reported 4,140 Cybertruck sales in Q4 of 2025, compared to S&P Global’s 7,071 registered Cybertrucks for the same period. In other words, it looks like 2,931 units, equivalent to $205 million worth of inventory, or 42% of Cybertrucks registered in 2025 Q4, weren’t sold to paying customers. This discrepancy implies that in 2025 Q4, SpaceX acquired 1,279 Cybertrucks, Musk’s other venture acquired 60, and Tesla may have absorbed some 1,592 Cybertrucks internally.

Admittedly, I can’t claim that every single one of these 1,592 registered-but-not-sold Cybertrucks went to Tesla’s internal fleet. Maybe Musk is giving them for free to people he hates. Or maybe there is some weird purchasing method that bypasses Cox’s radar. All I can say is that these figures suggest Tesla is absorbing FAR more Cybertrucks than we believed, and that Musk seems to have effectively bought up to 42% of Cybertrucks registered in 2025 Q4. That is more than double the amount previously suggested!

Why?

This is an obviously hollow attempt by Musk to make the Cybertruck’s annual numbers look less embarrassing. But that hasn’t really been the effect. Even if this swizz hadn’t been uncovered, shifting 7,071 Cybertrucks per quarter would still be a total disaster for Tesla.

So, what has been the actual effect?

You would think S&P Global’s findings would have had a huge impact on both companies given the potential legal dubiousness of hiding these purchases, the impending SpaceX IPO and the increased scrutiny surrounding Musk’s role as Tesla CEO. It portrays Musk as a manipulative, deceitful leader who potentially illegally conceals a huge conflict of interest and misuses funds and resources to ostensibly enrich himself.

But no, Tesla’s share price hasn’t budged, and I can’t find a single article questioning whether investors should be worried about Musk using SpaceX to potentially ‘buy’ $100 million worth of vehicles he doesn’t need from himself.

This is why this transaction is so much worse than a crap attempt at making the Cybertruck look better than it is.

I fear Musk is testing the waters and setting a precedent.

In a previous article, I discussed how Musk could meet his $1 trillion pay packet targets without actually delivering any growth at all, and this debacle has paved the way for a few of them.

For example, the fourth target was for Musk to deliver one million Bots by 2035. Tesla defines “Bot” as “any robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the company” — yet, somehow, the company’s vehicles do not count. After putting this Cybertruck precedent in place, Musk could just create a million useless AI robots and have SpaceX, now flush with IPO proceeds, buy them all.

Likewise, the sixth target was to create a succession plan for the CEO position. Is it now possible that SpaceX will simply buy out Tesla? Or better yet, what if SpaceX only agrees to buy Tesla for the $8.5 trillion that Musk needs for his pay packet to be worth the reported $1 trillion?

I’m not saying this is what will happen. What I am saying is that a precedent has been set by Musk ‘selling’ a large number of Cybertrucks to his other companies without experiencing any legal or material consequences. The boundaries, rules, and social expectations that separate these corporations have been eroded away. This will enable Musk to create his own self-cronyism-flavoured circular economy, acting like a perpetual motion machine that produces nothing but still makes Musk more theoretically wealthy.

Musk is nothing but a grifter, and this mess reeks of a potential for future grifting. We should be pretty damn suspicious of what is going on with the Cybertruck, not because it is a hilarious failure, but because of what it might allow Musk to enact down the line.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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The first Space Race was an intercontinental ideological battle that eventually culminated in one of the most complex acts of cross-border cooperation: the ISS. By comparison, the new ‘space race’ is just a billionaire dick-measuring contest, and, like most men who peaked twenty years ago, some are struggling to even get it up (i.e., Starship). Now, Blue Origin is beginning to overtake SpaceX, much like the tortoise to the hare. However, unlike Starship, their New Glenn rocket (which is Starship’s direct competitor) is actually walking the walk. Last Sunday, Blue Origin launched its New Glenn rocket for the third time, and while it experienced some rather major hiccups, it once again proved that it is miles ahead of Starship. But should we celebrate Musk taking an L here?

NG-3

Let’s start with this launch, which was called NG-3, because despite it being called a test launch, it wasn’t really a ‘test launch’. NG-3 carried a paying customer’s payload, a gigantic AST SpaceMobile cellular internet satellite called BlueBird 7, which New Glenn was tasked with taking to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

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However, NG-3 did have other objectives; namely, this was the first time they reflew a booster. From a conceptual standpoint, New Glenn is essentially a larger, more powerful and more efficient version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 because it is partially reusable, with the upper stage/fairing being a consumable part and the booster using retro-rockets to safely return to Earth for future use. Blue Origin failed to land the booster from the first launch but successfully landed it on the second. NG-3 used that landed booster, making it the first time a New Glenn booster had been reflown. Proving reusability was a key target for this mission, which is exactly what they did.

For the most part, NG-3 went well. It left the launch pad, the stages separated successfully, the booster flew back and landed safely, the upper stage reached orbit, and the payload was successfully delivered to orbit. It was a nearly perfect mission, except for one giant caveat.

The payload was delivered to the wrong orbit!

As TechCrunch reported, just two hours after launch, Blue Origin announced that it had placed the $30 million, 6.1-metric-ton, 233-square-metre satellite in an “off-nominal orbit”. Then, AST SpaceMobile released a statement that New Glenn had placed the BlueBird 7 satellite into an orbit that was “lower than planned”, that this orbit was too low “to sustain operations”, and that the giant BlueBird 7 satellite would need to be deorbited as soon as possible.

That is… less than ideal and does mean that Blue Origin failed its primary mission.

Since then, the FAA has grounded New Glenn and launched an investigation. That might sound alarming, but it’s just standard procedure. Plus, Blue Origin has already admitted to its mistakes. Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, claimed that this error occurred because of a lack of “sufficient thrust” in a single engine — which is, most likely, a fixable issue, given that these engines have worked well enough before.

In Context

Delivering a satellite to the wrong orbit might sound like a biggie, and I’m sure it is to AST SpaceMobile, but in the grand scheme of things, NG-3 was still a sizeable leap forward for Blue Origin.

Let’s not forget that this is just its third launch. New Glenn’s first launch, NG-1, was partially successful, as it placed a dummy satellite in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) but failed to land its booster. Its second launch, NG-2, was a complete success, launching two NASA missions to Mars and safely landing the booster (read more here). So, the fact that NG-3 was only a partial success is still a significant step in the right direction, as they have demonstrated their booster can be relaunched.

Let’s also not forget the name of New Glenn’s biggest competitor. New Glenn is a reusable heavy-lift vehicle designed to lower the cost of launching satellite constellations and crewed missions to the lunar surface. It has exactly the same mission brief as Starship; it just goes about its role in a very different way.

Additionally, by Starship’s third test flight, it had failed to land a booster (let alone relaunch it), launch with a payload, launch without significant engine issues and make it to orbit. In terms of progress per launch or progress per development spend, New Glenn is still miles ahead of Starship. In fact, NG-3 proves it has leapfrogged Starship, as even after 11 test flights, Starship has yet to reach orbit or deliver a payload to orbit. In fact, the updated second-generation Starship has explosively failed during three out of five launches. This means that not only is New Glenn demonstrably more capable now, but it is also statistically more reliable, even after the failure of the NC-3 launch.

So, yes, NG-3 was technically a failure, but not to the same extent as the Starship launches.

The Moon

This is really important, because it looks like Blue Origin is on track to take Starship’s Artemis III contract!

Thanks to Starship’s glacially slow development pace, NASA has opened up its contract to launch Artemis III to others, mainly Blue Origin, as they are the only other company with a launch vehicle and a lunar lander in the works.

Blue Origin is making rapid progress developing its MK1 Blue Moon lunar lander, which is designed to carry three tons of cargo to the lunar surface. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 is set to complete a lunar landing demonstrator mission later this year and will be launched by New Glenn.

But Blue Origin is also making rapid progress on their MK2 Blue Moon lander, which can carry either 20 tons or two astronauts to the lunar surface. This lander does require the upgraded super-heavy variant of New Glenn, the 9x4 (read more here); however, with New Glenn’s fast progress, they seem to be on target to launch this variant by early 2027. This is ideal, as Blue Moon MK2 was selected as the lander for NASA’s 2030 Artemis V lunar mission on the caveat that Blue Origin undertakes an uncrewed demonstrator mission before 2029.

With Starship currently totally unusable, New Glenn 9x4 and Blue Origin MK2 might be NASA’s only viable option. There is a growing consensus that unless something drastic changes, NASA will give these lander contracts to Blue Origin and delay all lunar missions, including the upcoming Artemis III, until they are ready.

So again, while NG-3 was a failure, the fact that Blue Origin is still progressing and is, arguably, mostly on target to complete these deadlines is huge! The main question is whether the FAA investigation will cause significant delays. That entirely depends on the severity of the engine problem, which is a pretty big caveat. However, even with these delays, New Glenn is winning the race against Starship.

SpaceX has essentially set itself up assuming it would receive these multi-billion-dollar contracts, so the fact that there is a real chance someone else could take them might leave Musk in the lurch. This is especially true when you consider that SpaceX’s upcoming IPO will put the company’s financials and business practices under the spotlight.

Is This A Win?

This might ‘feel’ like a win for common sense and decency, given that Musk is potentially taking a huge loss here. But let’s not forget that Jeff Bezos is behind Blue Origin, and he isn’t exactly any less oligarchical than Musk. He is just marginally better at protecting his public image.

Firstly, it’s not like Bezos’s plans for New Glenn make significantly more sense than Musk’s. After all, Blue Origin also hopes to launch thousands of satellite data centres into orbit. If you want to know why that is an utterly moronic idea, read the article here.

However, Bezos’s overall plan for New Glenn is functionally identical to Musk’s for Starship — to make NASA dependent on them, potentially shuttling tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds into their coffers, and to use the rocket to build a giant satellite internet constellation, giving them incredible power over how information is accessed and shared across the globe.

I trust I do not need to explain why all of that is bad…

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad someone is challenging SpaceX and its insanity. And I do think in the long term, New Glenn will be a far more successful rocket than Starship. In that sense, New Glenn’s development is a win for real-world engineering and common sense.

But if you value ethics, denounce oligarchic structures of power, or believe resources like the internet or space should be democratically owned and operated, this is far from a win for anyone but Bezos, despite the mishap.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Back in February, OpenAI began stuffing ChatGPT with hyper-targeted adverts that exploited its users’ deeply personal connection to the slop bot, which was a decision Altman originally considered a last resort. Now, according to Axios, OpenAI has already reached $100 billion in annual recurring revenue from these adverts, and they expect to reach $2.6 billion in ad revenue by the end of the year, as well as $100 billion in annual revenue by 2030! So, the big question is, has this last resort paid off? Has transforming ChatGPT into an ad-based data farming slop machine secured OpenAI’s future? Hell no! I don’t think people realise just how big of a hole Altman has dug for himself. This doesn’t even touch the sides!

Earlier this year, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar stated that OpenAI received $20 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from paying users in December 2025, which means she claims OpenAI made $1.66 billion in December 2025. There has recently been a mass exodus of users from ChatGPT (with more on that in a bit), so let’s assume that their ARR is approximately the same. That would mean the rollout of ads has increased OpenAI’s revenue by only 0.5%. It has barely moved the needle!

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Now, yes, OpenAI does say it plans to make $2.6 billion in annual revenue from ads by the end of the year. But OpenAI’s projections are almost always exaggerated. I previously estimated that if OpenAI’s revenue continues to grow at its current rate, it will generate approximately $30.8 billion in 2026. So, even in a best-case scenario, these ads might only boost revenue by 8.4%. Note that this is revenue, not profit. In that previous article, I calculated that OpenAI will likely post a loss of at least $22.2 billion for 2026. So again, even in a best-case scenario, these ads will only reduce OpenAI’s losses by just over 10%.

This isn’t ideal in the present moment, but the long-term perspective is even worse.

Let’s be generous and accept OpenAI’s predicted future ad revenue. How much would that projected $100 billion help their overall revenue?

Well, previously, OpenAI predicted it would make $125 billion in revenue in 2029. If we use this new prediction of $100 billion in annual ad revenue by 2030, we can assume that OpenAI is now expecting to make $225 billion in revenue in 2029.

That sounds impressive — but it isn’t enough.

OpenAI’s own predictions reveal the company is on course to post annual losses of $115 billion in 2029, using that $125 billion projected revenue. So even with this projected ad revenue boosting those earnings, the company would still post annual losses of $15 billion! I know there are a lot of zeros here, but that level of loss is not conducive to a sustainable business at all.

Not to mention that is a highly optimistic best-case scenario.

OpenAI has reportedly reduced its spending targets, with investors recently told it aims to spend around $600 billion on total compute by 2030. For some perspective, Ed Zitron found that OpenAI spent around $13 billion on compute with Microsoft in 2025. OpenAI’s internal documents expect a $14 billion loss in 2026 from a $20 billion revenue, suggesting a $34 billion compute spend this year. Let’s then assume a fairly linear increase in compute spending of $100 billion in 2027, $150 billion in 2028, and $303 billion in 2029, for a total of $600 billion in compute spend between now and 2030, just as OpenAI is telling investors.

That would mean that in 2029, OpenAI would have $125 billion in revenue from paying users and $100 billion in revenue from adverts, generating an annual compute spend of $303 billion. That would make for an annual loss of $78 billion!

Even this scenario is based on OpenAI’s ludicrously optimistic revenue figures.

Quite simply, this ad revenue is nowhere near enough to even substantially delay OpenAI’s inevitable collapse.

So, was it worth it?

Well, OpenAI has already lost a major researcher. In a New York Times article, Zoë Hitzig detailed why she is leaving Altman’s company, stating, “I have deep reservations about OpenAI’s [advert] strategy.” She went on to explain that OpenAI plans to exploit its user base with hyper-targeted adverts, leveraging the highly sensitive data its chatbots have gathered on them, which leaves users vulnerable to a new level of manipulation.

OpenAI’s userbase has echoed Hitzig’s sentiment. It has been reported that 1.5 million users left OpenAI over their decision to take the Pentagon contract that Anthropic refused. This mass exodus was almost certainly spurred on by the rollout of adverts to paying ChatGPT users, and thanks to the similar timing of these two events (which, yes, makes Altman and OpenAI look insanely desperate), we will never know how much of this exodus to assign to either cause.

In short, these adverts are likely more of a hindrance to OpenAI than you probably realise, making the question “Was it worth it?” hard to answer.

In a previous article, I said, “OpenAI deploying ads is the equivalent of the captain of the Hindenburg waving a dummy fire extinguisher out of the cockpit window while flames begin to lick up the side of the hydrogen-filled balloon. It isn’t a solution at all, but it kind of looks like one, and it might keep the delusion that everything is okay going for just a little longer.” And it seems I was right! This mess only proves how desperate Altman is to keep the charade up for just a bit longer.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Just over a week ago, Anthropic announced its Claude Mythos model to the world, and boy, did everyone lose their tiny little marbles over it. It’s easy to see why. Mythos is effectively a cybersecurity bot, able to crawl through code, find vulnerabilities, and exploit them. In just a few weeks, Anthropic claim Mythos discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every operating system and web browser. Naturally, Anthropic is so worried about the ramifications of such a model being publicly available and other companies creating similarly dangerous models that they are currently only launching it as a ‘preview’ for researchers, government bodies, and major software developers so they can get ahead of the tidal wave of cyberattacks these models will cause. But it’s fair to say that, like all AI bros, Anthropic has a solid track record of being more marketing spin than trousers. So, is this the AI armada we were warned about? Or is this just a marketing stunt?

Why We Should Be Sceptical

It’s fair to say that the timing of Mythos’s launch is so coincidental that it raises some major suspicions.

A few weeks ago, Anthropic’s main product, Claude Code, was being publicly dragged. AMD’s director trashed the coding assistant for getting dumber and lazier. It simply couldn’t do tasks it once excelled at. This could be explained by a recent OpenAI memo, which details how Anthropic is compute-limited, or the recent report that Claude is experiencing regular, damaging disruptions. Quite simply, Anthropic might be dumbing down Claude to cope with the enormous influx of former OpenAI users. Then, because Anthropic has vibe-coded much of Claude’s scaffolding, its source code was leaked, allowing the entire world to see what made it tick! Ironically, for a company that can only exist by stealing more copyrighted works than nearly anyone else, except OpenAI, Anthropic claimed the code was their IP and issued approximately 8,000 copyright strikes to get the leaked code taken down. Not exactly a good look for Anthropic from an ethical, cybersecurity, or competency angle — especially when you consider they are planning an IPO by the end of the year.

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So, the fact that they have suddenly developed an unimaginably powerful AI that is too dangerous for us to even try, let alone verify, is a little coincidental, don’t you think? It’s almost like this is a perfect marketing tool to bury all the major issues and bad press thrown at Anthropic over the past month. And, while this is in no way proof that Mythos is exclusively a swizz, it at the very least is a sign we need a dose of healthy scepticism here.

Remember: it isn’t just cranks on the internet like me who are urging scepticism. Some of the most influential AI researchers, industry experts, and even Big Tech investors have serious doubts about Mythos.

AI and neuroscientist Gary Marcus stated that Mythos’s risk was “overblown” and that “To a certain degree, I feel that we were played.” Yann LeCun, one of the ‘AI Godfathers’, totally dismissed Mythos, calling it “BS from self-delusion”, and said that other smaller models could already finish the same tasks. Dr Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, declared that the announcement of Mythos used vague language and didn’t include the right metrics to verify the claims Anthropic made, leading her to question whether the announcement was really designed to generate investment without too much scrutiny. David Sacks, arguably one of the most egregious members of the PayPal mafia — who is, in my opinion, an utter wanker and, more importantly for our conversation, a Big Tech investor — maintained that Anthropic has a history of “scare tactics” to drive hype, meaning we should take their claims with a grain of salt. When one of these guys warns that tech claims are too overblown, you know it’s bad!

That is a chorus of deeply informed people across the political and ethical spectrum, all warning that things might not be as they seem with Mythos.

Not to mention that independent analysis has supported this perspective. AISI is one of the organisations that was allowed to preview Mythos and test its capabilities. Though they did consider it a step forward in terms of its ability to perform simulated cybersecurity attacks, they also found it wasn’t as significant a leap forward as Anthropic claimed.

But there is one glaring anecdotal hole in Anthropic’s narrative.

If Mythos is so outstanding, why didn’t they use it to stop the Claude leak? You’d think that the first thing you would do if your company were about to become the de facto experts in software vulnerability detection and a tidal wave of AI-powered cyberattacks were swiftly approaching would be to use said AI cybersecurity tool to make sure all your software was fully patched. It doesn’t quite make sense that Anthropic can have a model that is supposedly as powerful as Mythos and experience a giant breach at the same time. There are a few possible explanations here: Mythos might not be able to accomplish what they claim it can; Claude’s heavily vibe-coded nature could make it nearly impossible to solve bugs and vulnerabilities; or even that Anthropic doesn’t trust Mythos not to completely ruin Claude. But no matter what the truth is here, this discrepancy doesn’t look good.

Okay, so we need to be sceptical. We get it. What questions should we be asking?

The Questions I Am Asking

Because I am not an AI scientist — just a deeply burnt-out autistic man with an internet connection — I can’t give you the ‘right’ answer. What I can do is tell you the questions I am asking to try and get to the bottom of this, which you can potentially use as a starting point.

My first question is, “How ‘good’ are the vulnerabilities?”

Just because Mythos claims it has found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities doesn’t mean they’re actually hackable or exploitable cybersecurity risks. Indeed, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, told The Register that similar tools often incorrectly flag unexploitable bugs as vulnerabilities, adding serious slop-pressure for teams. Anthropic does claim that Mythos Preview can find working exploits 72.4% of the time, but that could just be hype. After all, the definition of ‘exploitable’ is a moving target. We need to see that Mythos isn’t just throwing spaghetti at the wall and can actually identify real-world risks in code. When the organisations with access to Mythos Preview move past lab-bench marking (which AI can famously be tweaked to do well in) and into real-world testing, we should hopefully receive our answer.

The next question is “How narrow is the model?”

For a variety of reasons — such as the Floridi Conjecture (read more here) and the Efficient Compute Frontier (read more here) — it is very difficult to make general-purpose models much better than they are today. As such, Anthropic has almost certainly had to narrow Mythos’ scope to improve it, transforming it from a general-purpose chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT into a specialised cybersecurity tool. The fact that Anthropic is currently compute-strapped is even more evidence that Mythos is likely very narrow. So, how much did Anthropic have to narrow down the Mythos model to make it efficient at this task? This question matters. Firstly, for obvious reasons, a super-narrow model isn’t as commercially viable. It can only complete one task, after all. But if Anthropic did have to significantly narrow down Mythos, it means they consciously created a tool that could unlock cyberattacks on a scale never seen before. Again, that undermines Anthropic’s ‘good guy’ ethical marketing and is a damn good example of why this cowboy industry needs to be regulated. If any other industry began purposefully making machines that could potentially collapse the digital infrastructure upon which our entire society depends, it would be regulated into the ground!

The next question is one some of you may have already been asking: “How expensive is it to run?”

If Mythos requires ungodly amounts of computing power and energy to run properly, then it can’t be the wide-scale risk Anthropic claims it is, can’t be a viable commercial tool, and is arguably a step backwards for the AI industry. Now, we do know that Mythos is very expensive to run, with Anthropic’s own documentation stating that it is “very expensive for us to serve, and will be very expensive for our customers to use.” But just how expensive? Anthropic doesn’t have deep enough pockets to subsidise a tool like this, and because investors are growing increasingly worried about the AI bubble, that is likely to remain the case for a while. Furthermore, if the model is heinously expensive to run, it might be significantly less efficient at finding bugs and vulnerabilities, measured in dollars per vulnerability found, making it commercially useless. Also, such a cost would keep the Mythos service small and out of the hands of more nefarious users.

This is a major issue plaguing all current AI systems. To make them even slightly better than they currently are requires exponentially more computing power and, therefore, exponentially more cost, which prices these tools beyond usability.

The next question is more of a pragmatic one: “How will Anthropic find solutions to the bugs and vulnerabilities Mythos finds?”

You see, it’s one thing to find a vulnerability — it’s another thing to fix it. Indeed, Daniel Stenberg from earlier told The Register that tools like Mythos don’t offer solutions when they report vulnerabilities. You might suggest that Anthropic could pair Mythos with Claude Code to find and vibe-fix these issues, but sadly, that isn’t likely to work. AI coding tools are great at generating small code snippets, but they are fucking awful at understanding entire programs and even worse at independently coding tasks. In a previous article, I discussed the University of Waterloo’s research, which found that even the best generative AI coders only have a 75% accuracy rate when tasked with very basic coding tasks. In other words, even basic AI-generated code doesn’t work a quarter of the time! I also analysed research from Veracode, which found that 45% of AI-generated code contained security flaws, and a study from Coderabbit, which found that AI-generated code has 70% more bugs than human-written code. So, no, Claude Code probably can’t join forces with Mythos to create an automated turn-key solution to cybersecurity.

This is a bit of a problem. It essentially means Anthropic has just shat in the pool and made it everyone else’s problem. If their claims about Mythos are even half-true, then the fact that AI coding can’t solve the issues Mythos finds means that the entire software industry, which is already strained past breaking point, will be lumbered with exponentially more work as they are obligated to race to fix thousands of vulnerabilities.

Again, this isn’t exactly the ethical thing to do, is it, Anthropic? Maybe industry regulation would have been the preferred solution here. But no, you guys desperately want to be the ‘ethical’ oligarch…

This leads me to the final question: “What is the long game here?”

These techbros all believe they are playing 4D chess, when in reality, they are playing tiddlywinks. It’s not that hard to see through their master plans. And that is a feature, not a bug, as it often enables them to dog whistle to potential investors. So, what is Anthropic’s end goal with Mythos? What is the narrative they are trying to subtly spin?

Well, I think it could be a terrible amalgamation of a protection racket and a Trojan horse. Let me explain.

At a time when the industry as a whole, especially the critical open-source sector, is already strained past breaking point, Mythos will apparently flood developers with reports, putting them under immense pressure. So, how are these teams going to cope? Well, they are going to be expected to turn to AI coding tools like Claude Code (particularly as it will likely work better with Mythos than other tools) to speed up patches. But, as we know, these tools produce a ton of bugs, so this isn’t a solution at all. Therefore, the Mythos reports will keep flying in, and Claude Code will rewrite a huge amount of code. Eventually, after this cycle has repeated for a while, most code will be written by AI, making it almost impossible for human coders to rewrite. That will effectively force software makers to use generative AI coding tools to maintain their services.

I think this is the narrative Anthropic is trying to push — that developers will likely pay an exorbitant price for Mythos to improve their cybersecurity, but the tsunami of reports will pressure them to adopt generative AI coding tools, effectively forcing the software industry to become deeply dependent on their AI coding tools.

Now, to be clear, I do not think this is what will actually happen. As I have said before, neither Mythos nor Claude Code is good enough to pull this off. But this is the AI bubble; reality doesn’t matter. What does matter is that investors believe you are going to become a dominating monopoly. That is why the name Mythos is so fitting. It appears to sell a myth of AI dominance, right before Anthropic goes public.

This is just a hypothetical. I don’t know if these are Anthropic’s intentions. I’m just trying to read between the lines.

Summary

Until Anthropic unleashes Mythos into the wild, we likely won’t get solid answers to any of these questions or know if Mythos is just a giant PR stunt. We are just going to have to sit with the knowledge that we are unaware of how much of this is marketing BS or genuine risk. All I know is that, either way, we should keep a healthy amount of scepticism about Anthropic.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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An upcoming $25,000 EV, dubbed the ‘Model 2’, was once one of the main justifications for Tesla’s ludicrous speculative value. Musk announced this model in 2020, with it slated to launch in 2023. Then, 2023 rolled around, and rather than launching the Model 2, Musk announced Tesla had one in the works, which he expected to launch in 2025 and predicted would sell well over a million units a year. Investors were practically drooling at the idea of Tesla gaining such a monopolistic chunk of the car market, which catapulted Tesla’s value. But less than a year later, in 2024, Musk scrapped the Model 2 and redirected all development funds toward Tesla’s limp robotaxi and robot projects. Now, two years later, reports are circulating that Tesla is trying to bring the dead-and-buried Model 2 back to life. You could rightly see this decision as yet another example of inept flip-flopping from an out-of-touch billionaire CEO with far too much unchecked power. But in light of Tesla’s rapidly downward-spiralling financial health, the abject failure of Tesla’s Robotaxis, and institutional investors’ sudden realisation that reality exists, this revived Model 2 looks more like a futile, impotent, and desperate attempt to avoid the imminent death blow coming for Tesla. Let me explain.

The Leak

How do we know that Tesla is trying to revive the Model 2? Well, outlets like Reuters have reported that anonymous sources working with companies in Tesla’s supply chain claim Tesla is developing a new small EV that isn’t based on the Model 3 or Y. The scant details that we know so far about this car is that it will be smaller than a Model Y at 4.3 m long, it will be built in China, be a “wide margin” less expensive than the Model 3, and that Tesla has not yet greenlit this new EV for production. That’s about it.

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Compare that to the ‘old’ Model 2, which was slated to be less than 4 m long, have a base price of $25,000, and be produced in Mexico. That means this new, smaller EV might not even pick up where the old Model 2 project left off.

This is also a remarkable U-turn for Musk. Back in 2024, against the advice of almost every executive (read more here), he cancelled the ‘old’ Model 2, calling affordable EVs “silly” and “pointless”, and claimed that autonomous robotaxis would soon replace vehicle ownership for the majority of people on the affordable end of the market.

So, why backtrack? And why now?

Why This Makes Sense

In simple terms, Tesla isn’t exactly doing well right now, given that every plan Musk has proposed is failing, and the Model 2 might be the only thing that can help soften the blow of these failures.

Tesla’s global sales dropped by 8% in 2025 compared to 2024 to 1.64 million vehicles, and recent sales figures suggest that trend is only intensifying. On top of that, one of Tesla’s main sources of income, emissions credits, is beginning to totally disappear (which we will cover in more detail in a minute). All of this might not sound too bad, but as I covered in a previous article, this has caused Tesla’s net profit to drop 46% compared to 2024 to just $3.79 billion, and its 2026 profit is set to shrink even further.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Tesla was supposed to deliver far more vehicles, rake in billions of dollars from Robotaxis and sell its Optimus robot like hotcakes by now.

Back in 2022, analysts projected that Tesla would sell 1.366 million vehicles in Q1 of 2026, driven by the Cybertruck and the mythical Model 2. Tesla fell short of this prediction by 71%, missing it by more than one million units!

Why did they miss? Well, since its November 2023 launch, Tesla has only cumulatively sold around 50,000 units of the god-awful Cybertruck That is just 20% of the 250,000-unit-per-year production capacity Tesla was hoping to reach by now, and only 5% of the million reservations that the company reportedly had for the vehicle. Musk then cancelled the $25,000 Model 2 and, upon realising this was a mistake, tried to correct the problem by releasing cheaper, stripped-out versions of the Model 3 and Y. However, because of their $37,000 and $40,000 respective prices, they totally failed to boost sales.

But, remember, Musk cancelled the Model 2 because robotaxis were going to make affordable EVs obsolete. Indeed, Musk blatantly put Tesla’s money where his mouth was, given that Tesla has likely sunk somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion into developing FSD. Such an investment had to pay off. Cathy Wood of Ark Invest predicted that by 2026, Robotaxis would account for more than half of Tesla’s EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation) and that by 2027, Robotaxis would bring $200 billion to $600 billion in revenue for Tesla. Those figures imply Tesla was set to take a gigantic bite out of the passenger transport industry.

Yet, here we are in 2026, and Tesla’s Robotaxi service is limited to a handful of human-supervised Model Ys bumbling around Austin, Texas. Not only that, but these Robotaxis with a human supervisor in the car currently have a crash rate four times higher than that of an average human driver (read more here). As such, Tesla is currently pulling in functionally zero Robotaxi revenue, and thanks to this abominable crash rate, the service is unlikely to pass this pilot program stage for an awfully long time. Additionally, the FSD (Full Self-Driving) system these Robotaxis are based on isn’t selling well either. As I covered in a previous article, by the end of 2025, only 12% of the Tesla fleet had bought FSD, and FSD revenue in Q3 2025 was actually lower than in Q3 2024.

So, no, autonomous driving of any kind isn’t adding anything meaningful to Tesla’s bottom line.

But maybe Tesla’s other AI program, its Optimus humanoid robot, is doing better?

In 2022, Musk announced he hoped to have Optimus production ready by 2023 and start selling thousands of them by 2025. Musk then revised this timeline, stating that Tesla would have “genuinely useful” humanoid robots in low production for internal purposes (as in factory work) by 2025. But here we are a year later, and despite trying to claim otherwise, Optimus isn’t being used in Tesla’s own factories, is basically useless, and its development is glacially slow.

In other words, Optimus isn’t doing any better than Tesla’s awful Robotaxi program.

With all of these massive bets obviously failing and Tesla’s core business slowly dying away, launching a more conventional, competitive, affordable EV is one of the few options Tesla has left to try and resolve this mess. So, it makes sense for them to pull an old idea off the corkboard.

Why It Doesn’t Make Sense

Or does it?

Ultimately, Tesla isn’t the first company to move into the affordable EV space. In fact, they are way behind the curve. Renault, MG, BYD, Peugeot, Jeep, Citroen, Nissan, Vauxhall, Leapmotor and even Chevrolet have cars with similar prices and specs as the original promised Model 2. Arguably, the $20,000 to $30,000 section of the EV market is by far the most competitive. In this regard, other brands have already eaten Tesla’s lunch. Take the Renault 5; its price and specs were nearly identical to the promised Model 2’s, and it is now one of the best-selling cars in Europe. With competition like this, combined with Tesla’s current reputation, Tesla will struggle to sell the Model 2 at the scale it needs.

But it is also far too late. EVs take years to develop. Again, take the Renault 5, whose development started in 2020 and only made it to market by late 2024. Tesla isn’t exactly known for its speedy development either. For example, the Cybertruck was delayed for years. So, if Tesla has just begun development of a completely new Model 2, it might not reach the market until 2030 or later. That gives the current affordable end of the EV market time to mature, making it substantially harder for Tesla to compete. But that timeframe is also too late to resolve the mounting issues stacking up against Tesla. If Musk wanted to have a chance of competing in this market and attracting any serious revenue, Tesla should have started development of a Model 2 in 2019 and be preparing a second generation by now.

Tesla’s loss of a technological advantage exacerbates this market problem. Their 4680 battery was touted as the future, but it is less energy-dense and slower to charge than its predecessor; has a horrifically limited production capacity; and can now be replaced by significantly cheaper and better batteries on the market. Proprietary EV tech is also miles ahead of Tesla — for example, BYD’s newest generation of batteries can deliver a 10% to 70% charge in five mins in a £30,940 EV (read more here). In other words, Tesla’s tech no longer makes their cars the cheapest, most efficient, or the fastest charging, so to be competitive, their Model 2 will need to use third-party components, which means they have zero tech advantage over the market. Remember, one of the only reasons Tesla has grown so much is because it had a tech advantage over everyone else.

Then there is the question of how the hell Tesla is going to pay for Model 2 development, given that they are facing a serious cash squeeze! We have already discussed how Tesla’s profits have shrunk by 46%, but with emission credits disappearing rapidly and sales continuing to dwindle, they are predicted to fall more than 36% this year! Also, Bloomberg has just reported that Tesla’s free cash flow is expected to drop by $12 billion, going from $6.2 billion at the end of 2025 to -$5.8 billion! So, where is Tesla going to find the money to pay for their insane AI projects, and source a few billion dollars to fund development of a new Model 2?

Still, that isn’t even the real issue! Musk cancelled the old Model 2 because he believed robotaxis would make it obsolete, and because he heavily gambled on the idea that AI would become autonomous. This huge bet on autonomy, and the speculation that surrounds it, is what is currently keeping Tesla’s insane valuation so damn high. But, uncancelling the Model 2 implies that Tesla knows this bet is failing and that it has squandered its EV lead for nothing. It also proves that Tesla isn’t fully committed to its pivot to autonomy. Not only does this mean Tesla has to divide its R&D budget, reducing how much it can spend on AI, but it also reduces how much speculation can be pushed about its AI future. So, how does Musk launch a Model 2 without destroying the speculation that Tesla relies on?

Basically, no matter how you cut this cake, the Model 2 isn’t really a solution for Tesla’s problems.

In reality, Tesla is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The gargantuan and ill-advised bets Musk has made for Tesla are not paying off. Yet, Musk squandered Tesla’s lead to make those bets. The foundations of Tesla are falling apart, and it is too late to fix them. So, what will happen to Tesla’s towering value now that the pillars that prop up the company have been removed?

The Realisation

Slowly, institutional analysts and investors are starting to realise that reality is about to bite Tesla in the arse.

Take the recent report from Ryan Brinkman at JP Morgan. He discovered that Tesla is currently grossly overvalued at $361 per share. He pointed to Tesla’s dire financial situation and underwhelming sales, and calculated that Tesla is actually worth just $145 per share. According to him, Musk’s cult of personality could explain the discrepancy, but even that value is being slowly eroded as Musk’s promises continue to fall flat. As such, Brinkman thinks Tesla’s valuation is due to experience an imminent 60% collapse.

However, even that figure might be a little too rosy, as at that value, Tesla’s P/E ratio (which is the value of a company compared to its profit) is still substantially higher than that of any other automaker. That is why I previously calculated that if Tesla loses its speculative value, it could fall by some 94% (read more here).

Summary

This is why the Model 2 matters. Even institutional analysts and investors, who were previously happy to ride the speculative wave and make millions from it, are now worried that reality will hit Tesla and incite an imminent collapse. The fact that Tesla is potentially making a desperate attempt to wind back the clock and deliver the Model 2 shows that Musk and Tesla are aware of this, too. They know the Model 2 was their only real option to boost sales, and they know it is one of the only ways to quell this investor anxiety. But this is an impotent attempt. A new Model 2 won’t garner the results Tesla needs to justify itself, and Musk surely knows that. This desperate effort is not designed to solve the problem at hand, but to keep the facade alive for a little longer.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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We all know that Musk can’t get enough of automation. From Optimus to self-driving cars, Musk wants to let his robots take over. But, as it turns out, Musk has been doing a similar thing with his role as Tesla CEO, except rather than replacing himself with AI, he has pulled more of a “Jesus take the wheel” move. You see, the Washington Post recently published an interview with one of Musk’s old Tesla executives, who let slip that Musk wanted to spend as little time working with Tesla as possible. That might sound innocuous, but to anyone who understands business management and business culture, that is horrific. It means Musk is effectively asleep at the wheel and allowing Tesla to drive itself off a cliff. But this is not an accident. When you look at this in the context of what Tesla has become, it makes complete sense and, in my opinion, proves that Musk is doing this on purpose.

The Interview

Let’s start with this Washington Post interview with Jon McNeill, who was Tesla’s president of global sales, delivery and service for three years. In the interview, McNeill stated that “when I asked [Musk] what success looked like, he said, ‘Success is getting me down to one day a week at Tesla so I can get back to my first love, which is rockets.’” This wasn’t a one-time claim. McNeill alleged this was Musk’s main motive throughout his time at Tesla, from 2015 to 2018. That is in stark contrast to the hilariously hollow workaholic mythos Musk has built up around himself in recent years.

His attitude likely hasn’t changed either. Recently, angry shareholders demanded that Musk spend more time at Tesla, and Musk has threatened to walk from Tesla multiple times. So, it is safe to assume that this one-day-a-week goal is still very much relevant.

This revelation alone destroys much of the cult-like mythos Musk has created. But it has far deeper implications when you take the reality of Tesla into context.

Tesla’s Micro Reality

Tesla is on a historic downward spiral and shows no signs of letting up.

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In a previous article, I covered how Tesla’s annual profit fell 46% in 2025 compared to 2024, with its Q4 2025 profits down an astronomical 61% compared to Q4 2024. In fact, regulatory emissions credits accounted for $542 million of Tesla’s $840 million profit in Q4 2025; however, this revenue stream has now functionally collapsed for Tesla (read more here). The only “good” news was that between 2024 and 2025, Tesla’s energy storage revenue increased by 26.5%. At the time, I predicted that this growth would end soon, given that far better products were entering the market. And it turns out I was right! Recent reporting found that in Q1 2026, Tesla’s energy storage installations totalled just 8.8 GWh, an astonishing 39% short of its 14.4 GWh goal, meaning installations actually shrank 15% year-over-year. On top of that, it found that Tesla failed to meet its already low vehicle deliveries projection by 4%, heavily suggesting that the catastrophic sales slump has continued.

So yeah, Tesla isn’t doing so well! Its core business, where it generates the vast majority of its revenue and profit, is collapsing. Why? You could point to the understandable backlash to Musk’s disastrous political actions. But there is a reasonable argument that, in fact, this has been caused by Musk taking Tesla in a totally different direction and him functionally betting the entire company on this hard pivot.

Tesla’s Macro Reality

This is the broader picture of Tesla. Musk is turning Tesla from an EV pioneer into a “leader” in humanoid robots and robotaxis. I have covered this topic before, but at Musk’s behest, Tesla has effectively dropped all its EV development projects to focus entirely on the self-driving Cybercab and the robot Optimus. Because of this, Tesla’s ailing EV business cannot be recovered, and the robot and robotaxi ventures are the only viable route to sustainability or growth. In effect, Musk has bet the entire future of Tesla on these projects paying off.

Even if the underlying technology and concepts are solid, this pivot is a gargantuan, highly risky bet that explains much of the granular downward spiral we are seeing with Tesla. But here is the thing: Tesla executives and insiders have known that the concepts and technology underlying this shift are non-starters.

Optimus

Take Chris Walti, the original lead on the Optimus robot project. In a previous article, I covered how Walti has publicly stated that humanoid robots simply don’t make sense and that the humanoid form factor isn’t “a useful form factor.” Walti shares the same view as other robotics experts, such as Brad Porter (former VP of Robotics at Amazon), Gartneranalysis and Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley roboticist), that the human form factor is highly inefficient. For example, why ask an expensive, slow and difficult-to-set-up general-purpose humanoid robot to use a vacuum when you could use a cheaper and more reliable specialised robot like a Roomba to complete the same task? As such, Walti likely saw Tesla’s Optimus as more of a tech demonstrator than an actual useful product.

Walti would have almost certainly fed his opinion back to Musk. He would have also likely fed back the fact that Optimus is far, far behind the competition from China and Boston Dynamics. Yet Musk has totally ignored Walti and proceeded to make selling millions of Optimus robots integral to Tesla’s future. Indeed, Musk’s ridiculous $1 trillion pay packet includes a condition that Musk must sell a million robots.

Robotaxi

The same is true of Tesla’s Robotaxi. In a previous article, I covered how Rohan Patel, Tesla’s former head of business development and policy, warned Musk that the Robotaxi wouldn’t make any profit and that Tesla should instead focus on more affordable EVs.

We know this because Patel’s internal analysis of Musk’s Robotaxi plans leaked. This analysis found that even if Tesla could get its FSD-powered Robotaxis to work, they wouldn’t make any profit for years to come. Patel concluded that the venture was a dead end and advised Musk against investing heavily in it. Instead, he recommended focusing on developing cheaper, mass-market EVs, such as the proposed Model 2, and keeping Tesla at the forefront of the EV niche.

But again, Musk ignored Patel, scrapped the Model 2, and shifted much of Tesla’s R&D to the Cybercab and Robotaxi projects. Unfortunately, Tesla’s Robotaxi service is so small it is laughable and is certainly not a profit-maker for Tesla, which it won’t be for an awfully long time (read more here). Meanwhile, the Renault 5, which offers basically the same specs and price as the promised Model 2, is now one of the best-selling EVs, proving that Patel was right (read more here).

But remember that Patel’s analysis assumed that the technology powering the Robotaxi, Tesla’s FSD (Full Self-Driving), actually works. And here is the really inconvenient thing: it doesn’t, because, again, Musk ignored and overruled his own experts.

FSD

In yet another previous article, I covered how Musk overruled Tesla engineers and, in the process, kneecapped FSD.

Ultimately, Musk believes that because we humans navigate with vision alone, an AI can do the same. This has caused him to remove all the sensors from Teslas and make them “vision-only” systems. Therefore, the self-driving AI only has a few camera feeds to understand the world around it.

Tesla engineers rightly warned Musk that this is a horrific idea because it leaves the system with no redundancy. When conditions inevitably render the camera feeds useless, the AI can’t see or interpret its environment correctly. Likewise, AI computer vision can’t be 100% accurate, so when it inevitably reads the road wrong, there is nothing in place to catch that error. This method effectively puts all your eggs in an AI basket that has already been proven unreliable. Meanwhile, the industry-standard approach of having an entire suite of different sensors, like lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors, allows separate systems to check and verify against each other, enabling potentially fatal errors to be caught.

Tesla engineers cautioned Musk that switching to a visual-only system would be problematic and unsafe. But again, Musk ignored them and forced the entire Tesla fleet to switch to vision-only.

The engineers were so concerned about the safety implications of this decision that they whistleblew to the Washington Post. The report interviewed nearly a dozen former employees, test drivers, safety officials, and other experts, who all reported an increase in crashes, near-misses, and other embarrassing mistakes by Tesla vehicles once they switched to vision-only. The report even found that Musk rushed the release of FSD (Full Self-Driving) before it was ready and launched it despite the software not being safe for public road use. In fact, a former test operator went on record saying that the company is “nowhere close” to having a finished product.

Even now, five years later, Tesla’s FSD is still far from being safely autonomous. According to FSD Tracker, which uses customer-reported journeys using FSD to calculate the rate of critical disengagement and disengagement rates per mile, the very latest version of FSD has a critical disengagement rate (where the driver must intervene to stop a crash) of once every 2,035 miles on average. For some context, Waymo’s average distance between critical disengagements is more like 17,000 miles. Even worse, when operating on city streets, as a robotaxi does, FSD’s average distance between critical disengagements is just 867 miles. That means that a fully autonomous Tesla Robotaxi, with no human oversight, would crash roughly once a week if let loose on the street today.

Again, Musk ignored critical feedback, and now Tesla is in a significantly worse position because of his ignorance.

How?

When I covered these previous stories, I believed Musk was just an egotistical idiot. Truth be told, he still is. But the revelation of this new Washington Post interview enabled me to answer the “how” and “why” behind these horrific missteps.

If Musk only spends a single day a week at Tesla, that doesn’t give his executives enough time to provide him with proper feedback. It only gives time for Musk to come in, bleat some orders, and then disappear. I cannot stress how important proper feedback is at this level of business. Not only is it critical in making sure different parts of the company function properly together, but it is also essential to creating a culture of responsibility, which is necessary to ensure detrimental actors and decisions are identified and rooted out. Yet Musk decided to reduce his time at Tesla so much that this feedback quite simply isn’t possible, which will have fostered a deep culture of no responsibility.

So, McNeill’s interview shows us the mechanism behind how all these monumental f**k-ups have occurred.

But why has Musk done this?

Why?

Musk doesn’t get paid based on Tesla’s business performance. Even his giant pay packets aren’t contingent on meaningful metrics, like profit. No, Musk gets paid based on Tesla’s stock price. Musk has made billions of dollars through selling Tesla shares and using Tesla shares as collateral for loans. So, if Musk wants to get paid, he doesn’t need to improve Tesla’s business performance — he needs to pump up the stock price.

Once upon a time, those two things were one and the same. But not anymore.

Tesla is one of the most overvalued stocks in the world. Its price has more to do with speculation than material reality. Indeed, you could argue that his cult of personality influences the company’s stock price more than any realistic future earnings. This hyper-speculation has driven Tesla’s share price so far from reality that the two are now functionally separate.

In other words, if Musk wants a big payday, all he needs to do is make some wild claims, pump the hype, and watch the stock tick steadily upwards. At this point, improving Tesla’s actual business doesn’t even move the stock needle.

Inconveniently for him, wild claims like this get dragged down by feedback loops and executives holding each other accountable. Take the Robotaxi. If Musk actually followed Patel’s feedback and took responsibility for how unrealistic his plans were, then Musk couldn’t pump speculation that Tesla’s Robotaxis would take over the world and so couldn’t increase the speculative value of Tesla. Musk needs to break feedback loops and systems of responsibility to push this speculative hype.

It is my opinion that Musk’s lack of time at Tesla was purposefully designed to do exactly this. Musk doesn’t care about Tesla’s reality; it doesn’t affect him if the business itself is in a downward spiral. All he cares about is the speculative value. So, by spending as little time as possible at Tesla, he can still dictate the wider direction Tesla is heading, allowing him to pump speculation while removing any form of feedback or responsibility, which obfuscates the reality of the situation.

Shouldn’t He Be Ousted?

Any other CEO would be ousted for this behaviour. Gutting a company like this is the job of private equity firms, not the CEO, after all. So, why hasn’t Musk been kicked out for decimating Tesla’s core business?

There are two main ways to oust a CEO: being voted out by the board or being voted out by the shareholders.

Musk was once chair of Tesla’s board but has since been forced out by the SEC. However, that isn’t much of a problem, as Musk used his significant influence to jam Tesla’s board, and he pays them more than any other tech company to keep them loyal. They aren’t going to vote him out any time soon.

The same is true of Tesla shareholders. Without Musk’s speculation, Tesla is worth significantly less than its current value. I have previously estimated that if Tesla were valued in line with other tech-forward automakers, it would lose around 90% of its value. Even Tesla bulls are willing to admit that much of what they invested in is Musk and not Tesla. In a previous article, I covered how Tesla bull Gary Black publicly stated that if Musk stepped down, Tesla’s stock could fall by 20% to 25%, wiping out nearly $220 billion in shareholder value. He wasn’t alone in this statement, with hordes of other major investors echoing his sentiment. On top of all of that, Musk owns roughly 20% of Tesla shares! So, to get a majority vote to oust Musk, you would need to get more than 62.5% of the other shares to vote in a way that will utterly tank the company’s value.

In a way, Musk has effectively blackmailed the only people who can hold him accountable. All so he can gut Tesla, exclusively prioritise its speculative value, ignore critical feedback, and avoid even the slightest hint of accountability.

Summary

This is why the implications of McNeill’s interview go much deeper than most people are making out. It heavily implies that Musk is purposely piloting the company blindfolded. He is asleep at the wheel, pandering to an echo chamber of a stock market that laps up his sci-fi bullshit and pushes his grandiose delusions to dangerous heights. There is just one problem with this plan. Speculation doesn’t last forever. Eventually, reality will come back to bite him, and when it does, Musk and Tesla will feel its teeth. The question is when reality will take a mouthful of Musk and Tesla — not if.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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Did you know Starship was meant to land on the Moon two years ago? Yet here we are in 2026, and Starship has not even reached orbit. This rocket is so far behind, it’s beyond a joke. With SpaceX’s IPO rapidly approaching and NASA’s crewed Artemis III mission (which requires Starship) just on the horizon, SpaceX desperately needs to take a monumental leap forward. Well, that is what Starship V3 (version 3) is expected to deliver, and Musk recently announced that the first fully V3 Starship will launch in May. So, the big question is: what does V3 need to accomplish, and by when, to get this car crash of a program back on track?

The Goal Posts

Let’s start with what the actual goal is and how Starship needs to operate to achieve it. Considering how much cash NASA has poured into Starship, Artemis III is arguably Starship’s biggest objective. This mission is supposed to use the Human Landing System variant of Starship to shuttle crew between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. The mission was originally slated to happen last year, but because Starship is so far behind, it has been significantly delayed to late 2028. Indeed, NASA’s Watchdog is now concerned that Starship development is progressing so slowly that this mission will be even further delayed.

So, what does Starship have to do to fulfil this mission?

Well, the crew of Artemis III will take off on board a NASA SLS rocket and travel to lunar orbit in a NASA Orion spacecraft, where they will rendezvous with HLS and use it as a lunar lander shuttle. The HLS is essentially just a modified Starship upper stage, so SpaceX has to be able to launch a Starship upper stage, plus all the HLS gubbins and fuel, to the Moon in two years’ time.

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But Starship can’t go straight to the Moon; it needs refuelling in orbit first. The current idea is that a “tanker” variant of the Starship upper stage will be placed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). It will be refuelled by multiple Starship launches, which will dock with the tanker and transfer their cryogenic propellant into the tanker before coming back down. Once the tanker is full, the HLS will launch, dock with the tanker, fully refuel, and then head to the Moon.

Now, here is the thing: NASA wants SpaceX to demonstrate all of this, as well as lunar landing and ascent with an uncrewed mission, before they conduct a crewed Artemis III mission using HLS.

For some context, the outgoing Starship V2 never made orbit and only ever carried 16 tons, or 16% of its promised payload, on a “successful” suborbital flight. Because it never made orbit, it never even attempted orbital refuelling. It also never successfully landed its upper stage.

So, what needs to be changed in Starship V3 to make it suitable for Artemis III?

Increased Payload to Orbit

Let’s start with the main factor: increasing the payload. As I mentioned previously, the V2 Starship only ever carried 16 tons on suborbital flights, but SpaceX claims it can carry 35 tons to LEO, which might be a bit of an exaggeration, to say the least. Either way, it falls severely short of the promised 100+ ton payload to LEO that is required to make this orbital refuelling shenanigans possible.

Firstly, it needs to successfully reach orbit with a payload, which might be more challenging than you think. The extra fuel required to take Starship to LEO is roughly 20 tonnes (as calculated by Thunderf00t), which suggests that Starship V2 can reach only the lowest possible orbit if it carries no payload!

So, how is Musk solving this horrific problem?

Well, I covered this topic before. The V3 has been fitted with SpaceX’s new Raptor 3 engines. By removing heat shielding and instead using more ablative cooling (which is when cryogenic fuel is used to cool the engine before it is burned), the Raptor 3 is 105 kg lighter than the previous Raptor 2, saving over four tonnes of weight per rocket. The Raptor 3 has also increased its power, delivering 9% more overall thrust. Additionally, the V3 Booster has 12% more propellant than the V2, and the V3 upper stage has 6% more. To accommodate this, the V3 is noticeably longer than the V2, yet its dry mass is reported to be a huge 20% to 30% lower than the V2’s, or 100 tonnes less.

This should increase the payload of Starship, but is it enough to go from a 16 ton payload on a suborbital flight to 100 tons to orbit? I very much doubt it.

There is also the issue of reliability. The Starship V2 upper stage failures were the result of engine flash events (caused by premature propellant ignition, which methods like ablative cooling can induce) and lack of structural integrity. So, increasing the rocket engines’ power, removing the rocket engine heat shields, making the rockets carry far more propellant mass, and transforming the rocket structure to be larger, yet lighter, could very well dramatically increase the risk of catastrophic failure. There is no point in increasing orbital payload if the chances of actually getting to orbit are minimal.

Starship V3 needs to prove that these changes can not only increase payload capacity by over 600% to 100 tons, but that it can achieve this feat reliably. I cannot exaggerate enough how gargantuan a task that is from Starship V2’s currently horrifically low baseline.

Refuelling

Starship V3 has so little time to test and prove it is capable of orbital refuelling that it basically has to do it straight out of the gate. This creates four major challenges.

Firstly, Starship has to prove it can safely remain in LEO for extended periods. This region is incredibly crowded, full of satellites like Starlink and the ISS, as well as a great deal of space debris, so it will need to constantly and actively avoid potential and catastrophically expensive impacts. This might sound trivial, but the “tanker” variant will be one of the largest and by far the heaviest object in LEO, making it incredibly arduous to manoeuvre. SpaceX needs to prove there is functionally zero risk of Starship becoming an LEO bulldozer before they can receive permission to park there for months or years.

Secondly, docking. Starship V2 wasn’t exactly controllable when in space, with the upper stage losing control multiple times during Flight 8 and Flight 9. Yet, to accomplish orbital refuelling, two 70-metre-long Starships, with a total mass of over 3,000 tons, will have to successfully dock with each other in LEO. Orbital docking of such large vehicles has never been attempted before, because it is insanely difficult! It will require pinpoint accurate control, and even then, the forces involved will be colossal. Not to mention the docking systems need to be strong enough to secure these massive bodies together and not fail. Furthermore, Starship needs to be able to pull this off with almost 100% reliability, as a mishap docking with a near-full tanker Starship could cause a horrifically expensive mission-ending explosion.

So, once V3 reaches orbit, it needs to prove it has totally reliable and near-perfect levels of in-orbit control.

Thirdly, there is the issue of actually transferring the propellant (fuel).

For its propellant, Starship uses pressurised cryogenic liquid oxygen and methane. These kinds of fuels are highly challenging to handle. Their freezing cold temperatures apply thermal pressure on components, as they unevenly contract with the drop in temperature, making leaks and total failures far more likely. Likewise, their high-pressure and extremely volatile nature means even a small leak will turn into a devastating explosion. In fact, as I covered in a previous article, handling these fuels is so risky that a Starship exploded while being refuelled down here on Earth! I even roughly calculated that if orbital refuelling has the same explosion rate as the current terrestrial refuelling, a Starship mission to Mars or the Moon has an 82.6% chance of ending in a giant fiery explosion during orbital refuelling.

In other words, Starship V3 not only has to prove it can handle orbital cryogenic refuelling but also that it can handle it with basically zero risk of explosive failure.

This is especially true when you look at the fourth major issue. Most outlets claim that the “tanker” variant of Starship will need refuelling ten times before it can fully refuel a Moon- or Mars-bound Starship. But that isn’t true, because boil-off exists.

Again, I covered this topic in a previous article, but even in space, the warmth of the sun will heat up this cryogenic propellant and cause it to boil-off. The rate of this boil-off could vary from 0.5% to 5% per day in orbit, and this alone could dramatically increase the number of refuelling launches required to get a Starship out of LEO.

For example, in my previous article, I was very generous and assumed a 1% per day boil-off rate, a 100-ton propellant refuel per flight (assuming Starship reaches 100-ton LEO payload), and a refuel flight rate of once per week. With all of those estimates combined, how long do you reckon it would take for the orbital tanker to accumulate the 1,600 tons needed to fully refuel a Starship?

Well, after 110 refuelling missions, which will take more than two years at this refuelling rate, it hits an impassable equilibrium of 1,428 tons of fuel, or 89% capacity. At this point, the tanker is losing 100 tons per week to boil-off, meaning the weekly refuelling flights are simply stemming the losses.

Oh, and I estimate that a realistic cost for a reusable Starship launch is $70 million. That would put the price of a Starship lunar mission launch at $7.7 billion, or nearly four times the cost of an equivalent NASA SLS lunar launch.

Even a tiny amount of boil-off dramatically increases the cost and time required to send a Starship to the Moon. Because each refuelling mission will create a risk of mission-ending tanker explosion, boil-off also dramatically increases the risk of the mission flat-out failing.

So, to be able to conduct the Artemis III mission in late 2028, V3 needs to launch and begin refuelling its orbital tanker by the end of this year. That means that over the next nine months, V3 has to reach orbit, achieve its promised 100-ton payload to LEO, test and demonstrate near-perfect reliability in orbital refuelling, reduce orbital boil-off rates to 1% per day or lower, and increase its launch rate from its current once every two months to once a week. But don’t forget, NASA wants a demo beforehand, so really, SpaceX needs to send a tanker to orbit and refuel it months before this, as well as reaching a launch rate of twice per week to get a demo lunar mission tanker and an Artemis III tanker ready.

That is a monumental leap forward that Starship has to take in just a few months.

Upper Stage Reusability

For this colossal expansion of Starship launch frequency to even be financially possible, the V3 has to crack upper-stage reusability. As I have covered before, a Starship upper stage likely costs well over $100 million to build. So if SpaceX can’t figure out reusability, launch costs will more than double!

For some context, my $70 million-per-launch estimate assumes that a Starship upper and lower section has a lifespan of 33 launches with minimal maintenance. That might not sound that bad, considering a Falcon 9 booster has a lifespan of up to 34 flights, and while it still needs serious refurbishment between flights, they have lowered the reflight time to as little as nine days! Not only that, but SpaceX has conducted soft splashdowns with the upper stage. So, surely they are close to reuse?

Unfortunately, relaunching a booster and an upper stage are very different things. The upper stage of Starship has to reach orbit speeds, and this extreme velocity means that during landing, it has 72 times more kinetic energy to scrub off than the booster! Air friction dissipates a large portion of this energy into the giant heat shield of the upper stage.

And even worse, it doesn’t look like SpaceX has a heat shield for Starship that is capable of surviving this heat and being reusable. Thunderf00t posted a great video analysing a fragment of a Starship heat shield tile, and its old-school material choice and janky construction seem to be optimised to be replaced each flight rather than being suitable for multiple flights. Considering how large and expensive such a heat shield is, that is not a suitable alternative. Indeed, there is speculation that these heat shield tiles aren’t actually good enough and that the inside of Starship is getting excessively hot during landing, which could damage structural integrity and systems, causing it to require extensive refurbishment before reflight can be attempted.

V3 has to demonstrate that SpaceX can successfully land and rapidly reflight a Starship upper stage. That means a heat shield that adequately protects internal systems and structures from thermal damage while being robust enough to survive multiple launches without major maintenance. However, as Thunderf00t points out in his video, science hasn’t yet produced a material capable of this that doesn’t incur a colossal weight penalty (which Starship can’t afford to carry). So, really, V3 has to pull a rabbit out of the hat here.

In Time

Again, Artemis III is slated to launch in late 2028. Even optimistic assumptions about Starship’s payload and boil-off rates mean SpaceX has to put two tanker versions of Starship in LEO and launch two refuelling missions a week by the end of this year to meet that deadline. Consequently, for Artemis III to happen on time, Starship V3 needs to finally reach orbit, increase payload by over 600%, improve launch safety, figure out orbital docking between two Starships, resolve the orbital cryogenic fuel transfer problem, improve the safety of orbital cryogenic fuel transfer, make the entire rocket fully reusable, and scale up launch frequency from once every other month to twice a week (or, in other words, increase launch rate by 1,700%).

Can SpaceX do all of this in time?

Personally, I don’t think so. At most, I think the V3 will be slightly less of a failure than Starship V2. But that is my opinion, and I’m just some guy on the internet. The real question is, do you think SpaceX can do this?

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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You could fit every techbro CEO’s colossal, distended ego inside the gaping chasm between what AI promised to do and reality. Every now and then, we get a perfect snapshot of this discrepancy, and internet sleuths have just provided us with another one. Microslop has been shoving Copilot down users’ throats for a while now, heavily pushing it as the future of professional productivity. However, outlets like TechCrunch, TechRadar, PCMag, and others recently broke the news that Microsoft’s Terms of Service (ToS) state that Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, sparking a tsunami of online derision. Unfortunately, this is so much worse than people realise, because this isn’t just limited to Copilot, and the implications of this run significantly deeper than you might think.

The Terms of Service

To use Copilot, like most modern software, you have to agree to its Terms of Service (ToS). So, let’s start with what Copilot’s ToS actually says. In the “Code of Conduct” section, it states that “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” In other words, Copilot isn’t accurate or reliable enough to be trusted with even remotely important tasks or as a source of information, meaning it should be treated more like a toy than a tool.

But Microsoft also doubled down on that “at your own risk” statement. In the “Important Disclosures And Warnings” section, it states that “You agree to indemnify us and hold us harmless (including our affiliates, employees and any other agents) from and against any claims, losses, and expenses (including attorneys’ fees) arising from or relating to your use of Copilot, including without limitation your use, sharing, or publication of any Prompt, Responses, or Creations, or your breach of these Terms or violation of applicable law.” In layman’s terms, if you use Copilot as a tool and not just for entertainment (you know, like how it is advertised), then you can’t hold Microsoft liable for any damage it may cause to you personally or the business you work for.

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So, let me get this straight — this tool, which has been slated as the next big thing in professional productivity, is so catastrophically unreliable that Microsoft had to not only explicitly state it is just for entertainment purposes but also force users to completely surrender any right to hold them accountable for damages caused by using this unreliable, inaccurate AI as a professional productivity tool. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Some have pointed out that these ToS only cover Copilot as a personal chatbot and don’t apply to Copilot business tools. But that isn’t really a defence. For one, many businesses still use these “individual” versions of Copilot as a chatbot assistant. Secondly, people also use Copilot as a professional assistant chatbot in both their personal and professional lives, as that is essentially how it has been advertised. But finally, these Copilot business tools are based on the same AI models, so they will have similar issues.

And here is the thing: it isn’t just Microslop pulling this legalese bulls**t.

Anthropic, the less-evil AI company, is also doing this. Their consumer ToS (when viewed from a European IP) states that their services are “non-commercial use only” and that users “agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.” I wonder how many developers vibecoding with Claude Code know that.

To be fair to Anthropic, they are still better than Microsoft. They don’t completely retract any liability they have for damage their models may cause — but they do heavily restrict it. The ToS states that Anthropic’s “total liability to you for any loss or damage arising out of or in connection with these Terms, whether in contract (including under any indemnity), tort (including negligence) or otherwise will be limited to the greater of: (a) the amount you paid to us for access to or use of the Services in the six months prior to the event giving rise to the liability, and (b) £100.”

This is the exact same schtick Microsoft has pulled. The AI is so inaccurate that it can’t be trusted with meaningful tasks, so they claim it can’t be used for commercial purposes (even though that is primarily how it has been marketed) and then retract as much liability as possible for their AI’s actions.

OpenAI is not much better.

Their ToS does not contain an agreement not to use their services commercially. But it probably should, as Copilot is practically just a reskinned ChatGPT. Therefore, this lack of a disclaimer can more likely be attributed to Sam Altman’s far looser and riskier “break things and move fast” mentality than an improved product.

What it does include is a giant section in which it painstakingly tells users not to trust the output of their AI. For example, one section reads, “Output may not always be accurate. You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional advice.” It goes on to say, “You must evaluate Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including using human review as appropriate, before using or sharing Output from the Services.” In other words, it shouldn’t be used to automate anything professional, and its output should always be reviewed by a human. That is so close to saying “not for commercial use” without actually saying it.

Also, they fully remove any liability they might incur for their AI’s actions. The ToS states, “NEITHER WE NOR ANY OF OUR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, GOODWILL, USE, OR DATA OR OTHER LOSSES, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.” And you can tell they really meant this because they literally wrote it in block capitals.

These AI companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Supposedly, these AIs are so good that they can replace workers and take businesses to the next level, which is one of the main pumps inflating the AI bubble. Yet they still have to warn users not to trust their AIs, as they are dangerously inaccurate, as well as explicitly rejecting any liability for the tools they release into the world. It’s either one or the other — you can’t have it both ways.

The Liability Paradox

All three ToS documents say virtually the same thing. Firstly, the AI is unreliable and can’t be trusted. Secondly, it can and will cause damage if unchecked, and these companies won’t take liability for such damage. And thirdly, these AIs need to be micromanaged by humans checking every single output to work.

This creates a bit of a paradox. AI is meant to be a productivity tool, capable of augmenting or automating tasks and jobs. But, if it is such an inaccurate liability that a human has to micromanage it, how on Earth can it boost productivity?

I discussed this subject in a previous article, but a number of studies, such as this one from the University of Melbourne, demonstrate that AI is too unreliable to be a productivity tool because it requires more time to micromanage the AI in order to catch and correct its constant errors than it saves.

This Can’t Be Solved

So, what are the implications of all of this?

Well, let’s start with the fact that we knew this was the case, and it isn’t going to improve.

Take this study from Carnegie Mellon University, which found that even the best “agentic” AIs fail basic tasks 70% of the time. Or, what about this study that found that the best current AIs failed 97.5% of realistic real-world freelancing jobs given to them due to AI hallucinations and total failures? We know that these AIs are just statistical models; they aren’t thinking machines, meaning they will statistically get things wrong and hallucinate very frequently. We shouldn’t be surprised that AI companies’ small print warns against using their models commercially and washes their hands of any meaningful liability. Everyone knows, including AI companies, that these models are dangerously inaccurate.

But the promise that these AIs may eventually be good enough is what is driving the currently insane levels of investment in AI. In order to produce AI models capable of replacing human workers, hyperscalers are literally pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building larger data centres and providing AI models with more compute power.

Only, even OpenAI knows that isn’t going to happen. They published a study last year that found that increasing the computing power behind AI, or providing it with more data, can’t reduce AI “hallucinations” (or error rate) below its current level. In fact, they found no viable way to reduce AI hallucinations, which strongly implies these models are doomed to remain as unreliable as they currently are. A more recent paper by Vishal Sikka and his son Varin Sikka has supported this idea, revealing that AIs are mathematically incapable of being reliable or carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity.

So, what does that say about the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into AI to “unlock” it?

The Big Implication

Quite simply, all of these factors point to generative AI being a dead-end economic bubble. The hype and investment are not at all reflected in reality. These ToS documents prove that these AI companies are, at least to some degree, aware of this discrepancy. They know their models aren’t good enough. They know they can and will cause damage. They know they aren’t going to meaningfully improve. Yet, rather than stopping the madness, they are actively attempting to protect themselves while still forcing the hype and inflating the bubble, all to line their already cavernously deep pockets. This is a tale of greed and deception, and we all know how it will end.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!

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