Elon Musk, currently touted as the richest man in the world, has had his fair share of controversies from sending a mini-submarine to rescue a Thai soccer team that had got trapped in a cave in 2018 to replying with a second-place medal on one of Jeff Bezos’ tweet. Many have unmasked Musk to show that he is not really the next-gen genius he is often portrayed as.
Yet, for the first time, it seems that Musk has himself hit the panic button in a leaked email to employees his only original venture SpaceX, which has been at the centre of several accidents.
Musk says SpaceX is facing bankruptcy
In a leaked company-wide email, first obtained by Space Explored and later confirmed by CNBC, the billionaire entrepreneur said that SpaceX will need to achieve an impractical Starship launch rate of one flight every fourteen days to avert a financial disaster.
In the email that was sent over Thanksgiving weekend, Musk said, “Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago.” The SpaceX founder added, “As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.”
In the email, Musk’s frustration was visible and he asked employees to return to work despite it being a holiday weekend. The SpaceX founder said, “Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.”
The billionaire also made a big warning in his leaked email. He said, “What it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”
Top employees exit SpaceX
SpaceX has actually run into some really deep trouble, with three of its top executives- VP of propulsion Will Heltsley, VP of mission and launch operations Lee Rosen, and senior director of mission and launch operations Ricky Lim, leaving the company in the past two weeks.
The top executives have reportedly left the company because of increasing pressure to develop the next-gen rocket. Sources told CNBC that Heltsley was removed from the Raptor engine development process due to lack of progress. These engines are central to SpaceX’s Starship rocket and the Super Heavy boosters, and are a part of its goals to reach the moon.
The only real Musk venture bound to fail?
With SpaceX looking at a bleak future, the myth of Musk being a tech genius gets effectively shattered. Musk was never really the kind of innovator that his PR makes him look like.
Let us tell you some simple facts- Musk is neither the founder of EV manufacturer Tesla nor did he find Confinity- the precursor of digital payments pioneer PayPal. Musk’s only venture is SpaceX, which has been at the centre of several accidents.
Musk however has a great PR. A slew of hagiographic and adulatory news reports about Musk’s ‘grand’ plans is what makes him popular.
Even as the owner of Tesla and other companies, Musk doesn’t really seem like a genius. He has not been able to separate his personal life and business interests. Many of the big announcements of his company’s come through his twitter handle. Often, his erratic tweets tend to leave Tesla shares tumbling in the stock market.
In any case, SpaceX was the only original venture that Elon Musk could boast of. However, now even SpaceX seems bound to fail shattering the myth of Musk’s ability to succeed in next-gen ventures.
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