> The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain.

> When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did.

> [...] Surely SpaceX has created all that shareholder value more because Musk does what he wants than in spite of Musk doing what he wants; it is hard to accidentally create $1.75 trillion of value. SpaceX’s shareholders signed up for this deal — letting Musk cook — and have been rewarded;

the piece explains how modern finance is de facto built on the shoulders of the privatization of the welfare state. i find it particularly relevant here: the finance class - in this case musk - wants pensioners money via mutual funds, even modifying the rules of indexing...

it’s not a great sight tbh.

The funny part of all this is that SpaceX has achieved a lot but what might break them, or at least weight them down heavily, is the impulsive and forced purchase of Twitter. Before anyone claims it was some kind of master plan, Elon went to court to get out of it but was forced into it [1].

What happened? Mass firings, pushing his own tweets because his fragile ego couldn't handle Joe Biden getting more likes [2] and Twitter opened the floodgates for hate speech [3] and worse [4]. Advertisers fled. Fidelity (who foolishly was part of the acquisition) massively wrote down the value [5]. Elon had used Tesla shares as collateral and was possibly facing a margin call.

How did he get out of it? Well, in 2023 Elon founded xAI to challenge OpenAI. People invested in this for some reason. And by 2025, Elon merged Twitter with xAI, overvaluing Twitter at $33 billion (which is still down 25% from the purchase) [6].

Now, I imagine the xAI investors were unhappy with Elon using xAI to bail out himself so what did he do? Easy. Make SpaceX acquire xAI of course [7].

Thing is, xAI and Twitter/Grok are a massive drain on SpaceX's finances, losing more than $10 billion annually allegedly [8].

Twitter did not have to end up as part of SpaceX. SpaceX would've been a better company without it. SpaceX already faces headwinds from the incredibly expensive and behind-schedule Starship program. Part of all of this regulatory fixing is to make sure the insiders (and Elon himself) get bailed out.

It's also not the first time [9].

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musk-offers-to-end...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/twitter...

[5]: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/29/fidelity-twitter-x-value-el...

[6]: https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/xai-acquires...

[7]: https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-spacex-merge-with-xai...

[8]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xa...

[9]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/21/13698314/tesla-completes...