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Musk shares more on bankruptcy fear

December 2, 2021

Elon Musk’s SpaceX team postponed the planned December 1st launch of another batch of Starlink satellites for 24-hours until around 6pm (Florida time) on December 2nd. However, Musk was again Tweeting over his concerns about raising more capital and the potential risk of failure.

“If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible,” he said.

Musk was responding to a trail of Tweets from Jonathan Goff (who writes as ‘rocketpreneur’ and works at Sir Richard Branson’s Voyager Space Holdings) who said he doubted whether Musk would actually go bankrupt “but they’d definitely have to take drastic measures like triaging, backburnering, or at least delaying one or both of their major projects. I’m glad Elon is being paranoid about this.”

Goff also said that Musk’s problem was that his well-publicised fortune was largely tied up in stock-market valuations, commenting: “If the market corrects to where P/E ratios are in a more typical range, a good fraction of Elon’s wealth would evaporate. I’m struggling to imagine a world where SpaceX can’t raise money, but Tesla’s stock is still sky high and Elon can sell tons of shares without cratering it.”

He added that SpaceX still needs to raise several $1 billion more to get Starship and Starlink to points where they could survive an economic downturn.

Musk added: “The magnitude of the Starship program is not widely appreciated. It is designed to extend life to Mars (and the Moon), which requires ~1000 times more payload to orbit than all current Earth rockets combined.

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