Elon Musk’s House Child Is Ignoring His Drama

It hasn’t been a fantastic summer time for Elon Musk’s empire. The billionaire has been making headlines not for rockets or robots, however for explosive political drama. After pouring almost $290 million of his personal cash into the 2024 election cycle to assist Donald Trump return to the White Home, Musk has now shaped his personal “America Get together.” This unprecedented transfer has accelerated a public and bitter finish to his one-time bromance with Trump.

The fracture deepened after Musk sharply criticized Trump’s signature “One Large Lovely Invoice” as an enormous spending catastrophe and publicly accused the administration of a cover-up involving the Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata. Trump, for his half, hit again laborious, famously calling Musk a “practice wreck” and threatening his firms with federal motion, escalating what has develop into a high-stakes feud.

Tesla, the jewel of Musk’s public holdings, has paid the worth. The electrical car firm has shed over $350 billion in market cap because the begin of the yr. X, previously often known as Twitter, hasn’t fared a lot better: its AI chatbot Grok has been caught spewing antisemitic content material, and CEO Linda Yaccarino simply introduced her resignation on July 9.

However whereas Musk’s political stunts and tech misfires dominate headlines, SpaceX is quietly thriving.

The rocket firm is reportedly in talks to boost new funding that might raise its valuation to round $400 billion, in keeping with Bloomberg. If the deal goes via, SpaceX would additional cement its standing as probably the most helpful non-public firms on the planet.

That’s a good distance from the place it began.

Based in 2002 by Musk with the purpose of constructing humanity multi-planetary, SpaceX is now the undisputed chief in business spaceflight. It has launched lots of of rockets, carried NASA astronauts to the Worldwide House Station, and constructed the Starlink satellite tv for pc web service, which now boasts over 6 million customers globally as of June 2025.

Its present CEO remains to be Elon Musk, however day-to-day operations are largely overseen by Gwynne Shotwell, the long-serving President and COO broadly credited with holding the corporate centered and useful amid Musk’s distractions. Shotwell has been with SpaceX since 2002 and is broadly credited with overseeing the corporate’s operational successes, buyer relations, and making certain the execution of its bold improvement packages. This established administration construction permits the corporate to keep up concentrate on its core mission, whilst its founder navigates exterior controversies.

This newest fundraising effort isn’t uncommon. SpaceX sometimes holds two tender presents per yr, permitting workers to promote shares whereas bringing in new capital. These discussions are nonetheless ongoing, and the ultimate valuation may shift relying on market situations.

In October 2021, SpaceX was valued at $100 billion. That quantity surged to $350 billion in December 2023. Now, simply seven months later, the rocket firm seems poised to leap once more whilst Musk’s different ventures are weighed down by scandal.

SpaceX declined to remark.

A $400 billion valuation regardless of the exterior “Musk impact” demonstrates that buyers view SpaceX as a basically sturdy, unbiased entity with strong enterprise fundamentals. They’re betting on its expertise, its contracts (together with profitable authorities offers with NASA and the Pentagon), and its long-term imaginative and prescient for house exploration and international web connectivity, somewhat than being deterred by the controversies surrounding its founder.

The capital raised will gas SpaceX’s colossal tasks, together with the event of Starship, its next-generation totally reusable rocket system designed for missions to the Moon and Mars, and the continued enlargement of the Starlink constellation. This funding is essential for attaining Musk’s long-term imaginative and prescient of constructing humanity multiplanetary.