SpaceX CFO: vertical integration is core, Starship paves way for orbital compute
elonmusk · x · 2026-09-11
Elon Musk shared a Grok Bot summary of SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen's talk at Goldman Sachs Communacopia:
- Vertical integration is the core operating model: rockets built in-house from metal to software; Starlink owns launch, satellites, and the end customer; on AI, SpaceX builds its own facilities and power, runs its own models, sells to consumer and enterprise — with "orbital compute" coming next.
- Starship underpins everything: Flight 13 delivered demo V3 payloads, relit a Raptor engine, and achieved a soft, precise second-stage splashdown; the recovery team towed the stage back so engineers could study the heat shield.
More from Companies & People
- Mathematicians' open letter threatens student organizers' reputations to cancel Caltech Mathathon backed by $2M from Anthropic and OpenAI — ignite_intelligence · 2026-09-11
- xAI to livestream Grok Bot building an entire company from scratch, Sept 15-17 — Polymarket · 2026-09-11
- Ex-OpenAI safety researchers slam Paul joining board: "Altman is accountable to nobody" — RichardMCNgo · 2026-09-11
- Actor Labs and Physical Intelligence to host 36-hour physical AI hackathon in Mountain View — Darpinian · 2026-09-11
- Anthropic pretraining researcher quits over safety; critic maps the funding web behind AI-safety advocacy — r0ck3t23 · 2026-09-11
- NVIDIA and Red Hat host 33B-cap Small Models Hackathon in Raleigh, vLLM adds a bounty — vllm_project · 2026-09-11