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If you just ignore the political news and Wall Street, Elon Musk had an incredible week.
His company SpaceX pulled off an engineering marvel on Sunday when it launched the largest, most powerful rocket in the world — and on the first try, caught the 23-story-tall booster in midair using chopstick-like mechanical arms. The feat was unique in the history of spaceflight and duly impressed both government officials and aerospace experts.
“To manage to be that successful on your first attempt, I think it’s just remarkable,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who had not expected the catch to work.
Just a few days before, during a theatrical corporate unveiling at a Hollywood studio, Tesla showed off its prototype for the robotaxi Musk has been promising for years and trotted out a squad of bartending robot entertainers that he forecasted will be the “biggest product ever of any kind.” The flashy launch earned Musk a wave of social media adoration for the car’s sleek, futuristic design and the humanoid robots’ stunts.
But at the same time, an entirely separate set of dramas was swirling around Musk. On Oct. 5, he appeared at a Trump rally, leaping around the stage and proclaiming himself “Dark MAGA,” with a hat to match. In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, he used his platform X to promote a torrent of misinformation around the federal response, evidently tailored to hurt Democrats.
A clear problem has emerged for a man who became rich, famous and increasingly powerful by retailing himself to Americans as a tribune of the human future: It’s now more difficult than ever to separate Musk the businessman from Musk the political figure.
This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO’s afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here.
To see what that might be costing him, look at Musk’s brewing arguments with California and Washington.
Last Thursday, the California Coastal Commission rejected plans that would allow SpaceX to launch rockets more frequently from Vandenberg Air Force Base. In doing so, the agency cited his political antics: “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at a Thursday meeting.
The Starship launch — SpaceX’s biggest test of the year — was also nearly derailed this weekend due to Musk’s clashes with regulators. In recent months, SpaceX has butted heads with the Federal Aviation Administration over license requirements, with the agency slapping the company with hefty fines for allegedly failing to follow them before launches, and Musk openly threatening to sue for “regulatory overreach.” Even as Musk promoted the Starship test and targeted Sunday for its flight, it remained unclear if he would get the green light from the FAA until the day before.
Musk’s recklessness in the public sphere isn’t necessarily hurting his federal contracting business, at least for now. Jerry McGinn, an expert on government contracting at George Mason University, said that government officials buying capabilities from SpaceX “are not looking at his kind of tweets or whatever … they’re focused on their thing, their rockets, their launch capabilities and how SpaceX can meet that or not.”
And in the extremely long term, he has some goals that transcend politics, like getting humans off Earth and onto other planets. Musk has massive ambitions for Starship, including using it to eventually return American astronauts to the moon. (The moon is, in fact, a shared priority for both presidential campaigns.) Even further out into the future, he wants to send people to Mars. Those off-planet missions would launch from the East Coast , or possibly Texas, and are not expected to be affected if his arguments with California hamper SpaceX’s ability to launch on the West Coast.
But in the shorter term, his interest in electing Trump seems to have eclipsed some of those other priorities. Musk has funded a super PAC with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for the former president, proposed going on a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and even suggested he would be thrown in prison under a Harris administration. Trump has promised Musk a role in the administration if he wins. Musk’s sudden, full-scale insertion into the presidential campaign has fed his appetite for attention, but may not be doing much to advance his bottom line.
That part of his future depends on one other constituency Musk will need to worry about: Wall Street. He’s the world’s richest man mostly by virtue of Tesla’s off-the-charts valuation as a company, and the robotaxi — despite the cool factor — left investors underwhelmed.
Without a clear path to go from reality to Musk’s lavish business promises, the stock took a bath, losing $68 billion in value almost overnight — suggesting that there is still at least one force that can pull the tycoon back toward Earth.
That’s a problem for SpaceX as well. While Starship would change the economics of spaceflight enormously, McDowell said “there’s a whole bunch of different steps before we’re ready to go to the moon.”
“What’s not clear is how deep his pockets really are at the moment, and can he get it working reliably before the money runs out?” he said of Musk. “If Starlink is making enough profit, it’s not a problem, but it’s hard to tell.”
Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.
