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Does Elon Musk hold the moral high ground in the commercial space race? Jeff Bezos might disagree.
In the minds of technology-aware people around the globe, Elon Musk holds unique positions in the world of commercial spaceflight:
- Launching and landing rockets.
- Launching and landing reused rockets.
- Launching and landing private rockets funded by the paying customers of a spaceflight company founded with totally private capital.
None of that is to be taken lightly, especially considering Musk’s stated goal of colonizing Mars (and beyond?). All of that combined with the fact that SpaceX’s closest competitors are either centered on rich tourists (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin) or almost entirely government (contract) funded (Boeing, ULA), and Elon Musk looks to have a type of moral “high ground” over other industry players with a humanity-first approach.
That might not be an entirely fair assessment, though. It’s helpful to first have the full(er) history of commercial spaceflight on hand, and second to have the long-term goals of other players in mind in order to consider where SpaceX really fits in.
A SHORT HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL SPACEFLIGHT
The commercial space industry started shortly after the first satellite was launched in 1957 when the privately-owned Telstar I satellite was put into orbit using a commercially-sponsored rocket in 1962. Congress provided the regulatory framework for such missions shortly after, and hundreds of private satellites were launched in the years following. SpaceX’s earliest predecessor, Space Services, Inc. of America (SSIA), was the first to put a privately owned and operated rocket into space, albeit not into orbit.
- Fun Fact: SSIA is now a star-naming company which has previously contracted cargo space with SpaceX.
After the government provided a better regulatory environment for commercial spaceflight in 1984, SSIA also became the first private company to acquire and use a launch license. In case you’re curious, the rocket didn’t make it to space.
Who was the first private company to make it to orbit on a privately developed rocket, then? That honor would go to Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK, another SpaceX contractor) in 1990, although the rocket was air launched from an airplane. That achievement was followed up by Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne in 2004, another air launched vehicle, although it was a rocket-powered aircraft rather than just a rocket. It still holds the title as the first and only privately-funded manned craft to reach space. Virgin Galactic has taken over its successor, SpaceShipTwo, which is still under development with the primary goal of shuttling rich tourists on suborbital thrill rides.
- Fun Fact: United Launch Alliance (ULA), SpaceX’s only bidding competitor for Air Force contracts, was actually formed only to serve government rocket launch needs after legislation was passed requiring NASA to use private spaceflight companies for non-Space Shuttle essential missions. Boeing and Lockheed Martin, traditional government space and defense contractors, came together to form the ULA venture to serve this need, and the rest is mostly guaranteed-NASA-contract-friendly history. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are also the primary contractors developing NASA’s new Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule. For these reasons, I don’t really consider ULA to be a true part of the “new space race”.
SpaceX entered the history records in 2008 when Falcon 1 reached orbit as the first privately developed liquid fueled rocket. Their record list entries have grown ever since:
- 2010, the Dragon capsule was successfully launched into orbit and recovered, making it the first private capsule to do so.
- 2012, the Dragon capsule made a successful trip to the International Space Station (ISS) as the first private spacecraft to do so.
- 2015, Falcon 9 successfully landed after returning from orbit, the first orbital rocket to do so.
- 2017, a reused Falcon 9 core was successfully launched and landed after returning from orbit, making it the first privately owned rocket to do so.
Right before SpaceX’s 2015 landing, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos finally revealed what his secretive space company, Blue Origin, had been up to. Beating SpaceX’s landing by a month, Bezos revealed footage of Blue Origins’ tourist-industry rocket, New Shepard, successfully launching into space and landing itself. The differences between the two companies’ landing achievements are notable; however, Blue Origin still walked away with first prize.
Even so, in commercial spaceflight history, SpaceX’s reputation as an innovator driving the privatization of the space industry is well deserved. But does Elon Musk get to claim a moral “high ground” given SpaceX’s autonomous origins and humanity-centric goals?
JEFF BEZOS IS A DREAMER, TOO
Blue Origin might call that designation into question. How so, especially when Blue Origin’s rocket is a tourist attraction (with no restroom or regurgitation facilities I might add)?
Well, first of all, according to Bezos it doesn’t have to just be a tourist vehicle. In a recent talk given at the 33rd annual Space Symposium, Bezos suggested that the New Shepard could be used as the first stage of another multi-stage rocket rather than just the single stage for his “Astronaut Experience” tourist adventure. That could (potentially) put New Shepard in line with Falcon 9’s customer base.
Most importantly, though, New Shepard is just the beginning of Blue Origin’s long-term goals for space travel. The engine (BE-4) for their expandable heavy launch vehicle, New Glenn, is under development and will be a prime competitor with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy once in operation.
Back to the “high ground” question, the founder of Amazon had dreams of being a space entrepreneur way before that concept truly existed, and Bezos went into computer science knowing he needed plenty of money to reach that goal. Musk didn’t consider space technology exclusively, but rather went in as a way to be part of pushing humanity’s development forward. Purity of intent? Points for both.
Bezos himself has acknowledged that there are similarities in the goals of both SpaceX and Blue Origin, citing the two companies’ pursuit of vertical landings and quick reusability as the primary ones. For a time, SpaceX was unique in the “new space” arena by not using space tourism as a funding mechanism, but now that they’ve announced their contract to take some very rich customers on a trip around the Moon, they’ve lost that designation. What’s more, Blue Origin has also announced their own Moon program, but it will be to assist with cargo needs for development of a permanent Moon base.
Plus one for Blue Origin.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin were founded with private funds, and the funding for their developments to date come from a mix of both government and private sources. Technically, Blue Origin is almost entirely privately funded, but they received two rounds of funding from NASA as part of their Commercial Crew Development program that can’t be ignored. Also, their contract with ULA to develop the BE-4 engine (to be used on both Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket series and ULA’s upcoming Vulcan rocket) makes the designation murky. ULA only launches rockets for government cargo, so whether the money Blue Origin receives from them is truly “private” is a matter of money-trail opinion. On a further note, Bezos has pledged to invest an annual billion dollars of his own funds into Blue Origin.
Plus one for Blue Origin, but plus two for SpaceX for already running a viable, profitable space launch company with plenty of private customers.
What about Mars? Well, Elon Musk has made it no secret that Mars is the primary goal of SpaceX’s technology achievements, and he really, really wants to settle humans there to save the species from potential future disaster. Bezos, on the other hand, has likened the purpose of going to Mars as “because it’s cool”. However, Bezos also wants to do all the “heavy lifting” in building the infrastructure necessary for space commercialization to take off. He used the existing Internet and shipping systems to build Amazon, so now he wants to build the Internet and shipping system equivalents in space with Blue Origin’s technology.
Plus one for both, and I think that means the two are even.
MORAL HIGH GROUND?
The answer to the question of moral standing is then, of course, entirely based on one’s opinion of the future of human spaceflight and the roles we should pursue outside of our home planet. Also as an honorable mention for consideration is one’s economic persuasion in the form of a “chicken or the egg” scenario.
Government has taken us to space and enabled a booming satellite communications market, but we haven’t even returned to the Moon since 1972. Would a privatized space industry have us on Mars already? We can further consider that NASA gave us memory foam, Tang, and underwater pens; however, would better, cheaper versions been developed on their own in the commercial sector as the need for such products for Earth-based activities developed independent of government projects?
Once again returning to the question of a greater-purpose-driven space program, does space tourism lead to trickle-down space exploration, i.e., eventual space travel for the average citizen? Or will it take an “infrastructure first” approach to really make that sort of space travel be a reality?
If a space company claims that its long-term goal is to benefit the future of human kind, the use of space tourism certainly looks to be economically justified as a funding mechanism. But does that then mean that the future of humanity in space is being bred on the “bread” (sorry) of the super-rich?
While it wouldn’t be the first time an industry grew in such a way, there exists a population of folks that prefer a little more “purity” in their spaceflight. Yours truly happens to be such a crab, but I also acknowledge that such sentiments come from growing up only knowing space as taught by a science-centric NASA. Space has always been cool because it gives us a broader perspective of our place in the universe. I never fantasized about opening the first deep space McDonald’s (or Rudy Tyler’s Burger Shack if you understand a bad Space Camp movie reference).
Elon Musk was a game changer in the commercial space world by pursuing rockets as a means of bettering humanity. That gave him a “one-up” over Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin for the purist crowd. Now that SpaceX has added millionaire Moon tourism to its manifest, however, and Blue Origin is moving along into non-tourist space developments to build infrastructure, the field is evening out. It’s also prudent to mention that there are many other rocket companies out there developing private vehicles that we’ll be hearing from eventually.
COMING UP
So what’s up next for SpaceX? The Hawthorne-based rocket company will be back to its regularly scheduled history-making programming this summer with the launch of Falcon Heavy, and later this year Crew Dragon is set to launch, making SpaceX one step closer to launching American astronauts on American soil.
First up, however, Falcon 9 will launch on April 30th, carrying NROL-76 into a secretive orbit from SpaceX’s refurbished Apollo pad, Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Not many other details are available about payload, though. It’s for the National Reconnaissance Office, so publicly available information is slim. We should see the first stage make a ground landing as consolation – fingers crossed the video doesn’t cut out!
We can also add this launch to the history books again for SpaceX. This is the first payload SpaceX will have ever launched for the U.S. Department of Defense, having beaten ULA for the contract after threatening to sue the Air Force for the right to bid. Watch out, traditional government launch contractors. SpaceX is moving in to your turf. When Blue Origin is ready to start the bidding war, it will be interesting to see how they work out that ULA relationship.
Stay tuned!
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
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SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
In the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
When Elon Musk founded Tesla in 2003, it was a plucky electric car startup betting everything on lithium-ion batteries and a niche luxury Roadster.
Two decades later, Tesla is far more than a car company. Its valuation increasingly hinges on Full Self-Driving software, the Optimus humanoid robot, the Robotaxi program, and the Dojo supercomputer cluster purpose-built for AI training.
Musk has repeatedly described Tesla as an AI and robotics company that happens to sell vehicles. The cars, in this view, are merely the first scalable platform for real-world AI.
Now, SpaceX is tracing an eerily similar path, only faster and in a direction almost no one anticipated. Founded in 2002 to make spaceflight routine and eventually multiplanetary, SpaceX spent its first two decades perfecting reusable rockets, landing Falcon 9 boosters, and building the Starlink megaconstellation.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
It was an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse, not a software play. Yet, in the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
The xAI deal, announced on February 2, was structured as an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion—SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. In a memo to employees, Musk framed the merger as the creation of “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”
The new SpaceX now owns Grok, the large language model family that powers the chatbot of the same name, along with xAI’s massive training infrastructure. More importantly, it has a declared mission to move AI compute off-planet.
Earth-based data centers are hitting hard limits on power, cooling, and land. Musk’s solution is orbital data centers, or constellations of solar-powered satellites that act as supercomputers in the sky.
SpaceX has already asked regulators for permission to launch up to one million such satellites. Starship, the company’s fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle, is the only rocket capable of delivering the necessary mass at the required cadence.
Each orbital node would enjoy near-constant sunlight, vast radiator surfaces for passive cooling, and zero terrestrial real-estate costs. Musk has predicted that within two to three years, space-based AI inference and training could become cheaper than anything possible on the ground.
This is not a side project; it is the strategic centerpiece Musk has envisioned for SpaceX. Starlink already provides the global low-latency backbone; next-generation V3 satellites will carry onboard AI accelerators. Rockets deliver the hardware, while AI optimizes every aspect of launch, landing, and constellation management.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing, too. Better AI makes better rockets, which launch more AI infrastructure.
Just yesterday, on April 21, SpaceX doubled down.
It secured an option to acquire Cursor—the fast-growing AI coding tool beloved by software engineers—for $60 billion later this year, or pay a $10 billion partnership fee if the full deal does not close.
Cursor’s models already help engineers write code at superhuman speed. Pairing that technology with SpaceX’s Colossus-scale training clusters (the same ones powering Grok) positions the company to dominate AI developer tools, much as Tesla dominates autonomous driving software.
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The parallels with Tesla are striking. Both companies began in a single, capital-intensive sector: Tesla with EVs, SpaceX with launch vehicles. Both used early hardware success to fund AI at scale. Tesla’s Dojo supercomputers train neural nets on billions of miles of real-world driving data; SpaceX now trains on telemetry from thousands of orbital assets and re-entries.
Tesla’s FSD chip runs inference on cars; SpaceX’s future satellites will run inference in orbit.
Tesla’s Optimus robot will work in factories; SpaceX envisions lunar factories manufacturing more AI satellites, eventually using electromagnetic mass drivers to fling them into deep space.
Critics once dismissed Musk’s multi-company empire as unfocused. The 2026 moves reveal the opposite: deliberate convergence.
SpaceX is no longer merely a rocket company that sells internet from space. It is an AI company whose competitive moat is literal orbital infrastructure and the only vehicle that can service it at scale. The forthcoming IPO, expected later this year, will almost certainly be pitched not as a space play but as the purest bet on AI infrastructure the public market has ever seen.
Whether the orbital data-center vision survives regulatory scrutiny, astronomical concerns about light pollution, or the sheer engineering challenge remains to be seen.
Yet the strategic direction is unmistakable. Just as Tesla proved that software and AI could redefine the century-old automobile, SpaceX is proving that rockets are merely the delivery mechanism for the next great computing platform—one that floats above the clouds, powered by the sun, and limited only by the physics of orbit.
In that unexpected sense, history is repeating. Tesla stopped being “just a car company” years ago. SpaceX has now stopped being “just a rocket company.” Both are becoming something far larger: AI powerhouses with hardware moats so deep that competitors will need their own reusable megaconstellations to keep up.
The age of terrestrial AI is ending. The age of space-based AI is beginning—and SpaceX is building the launchpad.
Elon Musk
Tesla Earnings: financial expectations and what we should to hear about
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 this evening after the market closes, and analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s first three months of the year.
Additionally, there will be plenty of things that will be discussed, including the recent expansion of the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) approvals across the globe.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.36, while revenues are expected to come in around $22.35 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.27 and $19.34 billion compared to Tesla’s Q1 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.50 on $29.4 billion of revenue.
Tesla beat analyst expectations last quarter, but the next trading day, the stock fell nearly 3.5 percent. We never quite can gauge how the market will respond to Tesla’s earnings; we’ve seen shares rise on a miss and fall on a beat.
It really goes on the news, and investor consensus, it seems.
What to Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects. Right now, the big focus of investors is the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and what the outlook for Full Self-Driving’s expansion throughout Europe and the rest of the world looks like.
Robotaxi
Tesla just recently expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi program to Dallas and Houston, joining Austin as the first cities in the U.S. to have access to the company’s ride-hailing suite.
Tesla expands Unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities
Some saw this move as a quick effort to turn attention away from a delivery miss and an anticipated miss on earnings. However, we’ve seen Tesla be more than deliberate with its expansion of the Robotaxi suite, so it’s hard to believe the company would make this move if it were not truly ready to do so.
The company is also working to expand its U.S. ride-hailing service outside of Texas and California, and recently filed paperwork to build a Robotaxi-exclusive Supercharger stall.
Expansion is planned for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona at some point this year, with more states to follow.
Roadster Unveiling
The Roadster unveiling was slated for April 1, and then pushed back (once again) to “probably late April,” according to Elon Musk.
It does not appear that the Roadster unveiling will happen within that time frame, at least not to our knowledge. Nobody has received media or press invites for a Roadster unveiling, and given the lofty expectations set for the vehicle by Musk and Co., it seems like something they’d want to show off to the public.
The Roadster has become a truly frustrating project for Tesla and its fans; evidently, there is something that is not up to the expectations Musk and others have. Meanwhile, fans are essentially waiting for something that is six years late.
At this point, also given the company’s focus on autonomy, it almost seems more worth it to just cancel it, remove any and all timelines and expectations, and surprise people with something crazy down the line, maybe in two or three years. There should be no talk of it.
Full Self-Driving Global Expansion
We expect Musk and Co. to shed some details on where it stands with other European government bodies, as it recently was able to roll out FSD (Supervised) to customers in the Netherlands.
Spain is also working with Tesla to assess FSD’s viability as a publicly available option for owners.
With that being said, there should be some additional information for investors as they listen to the call; no talk of it would be a pretty big letdown.
Optimus
There will likely be a date set for the Gen 3 Optimus unveiling, and we’re hopeful Tesla can keep that date set in stone and meet it. Not reaching timelines is a relatively minor issue, but a company can only do this for so long before its fans and investors start to lose trust and disregard any talk about dates.
It seems this is happening already.
Optimus has been pegged as Tesla’s big money maker for the future. The goals and expectations are high, but it is a privilege to have that sort of pressure when investors know the company’s capability.
Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
