Musk's Insane October

In tech, there's exactly one person you'll never run out of things to say about: Elon Musk. But even by Musk's own standards, this October turned into an absolute headline factory.

For starters, Musk has been diving deeper and deeper into politics — firing off political tweets daily, even showing up to stump for Trump, and helping raise $75 million for a pro-Trump super PAC. That's made him a lightning rod for hatred in an America where the election is running red-hot, and he's picked up plenty of haters along the way. Then there's the fact that, after repeatedly missing deadlines, Tesla finally unveiled its Robotaxi self-driving car this month — and threw in a robot demo for good measure.

The month's final feat was SpaceX catching its rocket back on the launch tower after landing it. It's hard to imagine one single human pulling off all of this at once — some of it genuinely stunning, some of it, like plenty of Musk's earlier promises, looking like it was announced a bit prematurely. Let's take it one at a time.

Start with Robotaxi. Self-driving cars are a relatively mature industry at this point — I've noted in this column before that Google's Waymo has succeeded above all by not causing bodily harm to anyone. Purely on the technology, plenty of companies already have it. The one genuinely unusual thing about Tesla's Cybercab robotaxi is that it skips both the pedals and the steering wheel entirely. So really, it all comes down to execution.

As for the robot Musk has already shown off — even though it's still being demonstrated via remote control for now, that's also a relatively predictable technology, and the real question is what mass-production costs will look like a few years out. So it's telling that after the unveiling event wrapped up, Tesla's stock still fell.

Tesla Unveils Robotaxi — Cybercab Takes the Stage

Then there's Twitter and Trump — the two are practically a linked project at this point. Musk has thrown his full weight behind Trump, and Twitter's brand advertisers have fled as a result; that part's common knowledge. What people tend to overlook is that Musk's AI gets to use data from Twitter (X) for free — X even rewrote its terms of service, so users are now effectively data cattle, to be used however X sees fit. And data needs compute, which ties into the AI data center Musk claims to have built in just 19 days (a project that would normally take a year or two) — even Jensen Huang couldn't stop praising the execution. So Musk still has cards to play on the Twitter front, even if exactly where things are headed remains murky for now.

Last but not least: SpaceX catching its Starship rocket on the launch tower using its chopstick-shaped arms. This one is a completely different animal from everything above — it's a genuine, concrete feat, with zero hype and zero "we'll deliver it eventually" hand-waving.

Previously, Musk's Starship would land itself on its own landing legs after launch — already an extraordinarily difficult engineering feat that helped a lot with costs. But launching a rocket and catching it back on the launch tower is on another level entirely, practically science fiction. Looking ahead, you can imagine a rocket that only needs minimal servicing and a refuel before it's ready to launch again. The fuel itself isn't even expensive — the Raptor engine runs on liquid methane, which is basically just natural gas, nothing exotic. The oxidizer, liquid oxygen, isn't exotic either — oxygen is everywhere on Earth.

SpaceX's Technical Breakthrough — Reusing the Rocket

What makes rockets expensive is that they've traditionally been single-use. Landing-leg recovery already saved a huge amount of cost, but tower-catch recovery solves a different problem: fitting giant landing legs onto a rocket as massive as Starship is genuinely hard, and the biggest "landing leg" in the world happens to be the launch tower itself. As long as the rocket can fly itself back to the tower, it doesn't need legs at all to launch again.

To hammer the cost point home again: the bigger the rocket, the lower the per-unit cost. Musk strapped together a pile of engines into one giant rocket, and that giant rocket can fly itself back to the tower for recovery — which means, in theory, the cost boils down to fuel plus some fixed depreciation. Nobody can compete with that cost structure. Building a rocket that lands itself was already brutally hard; building a giant rocket that can also fly back and refuel itself, like some oversized robot vacuum, is another matter entirely. Competitors simply can't touch this cost basis.

SpaceX's current valuation is roughly $210 billion, which puts it right in the neighborhood of TikTok's valuation. Is that too expensive? Not once you factor in launch-tower recovery.

SpaceX already commands more than 80% of the U.S. launch market and 60-70% globally, but the truly striking part is that with tower-catch recovery in hand, near-total dominance is well within reach — if virtually every orbital payload on the planet ends up launching on SpaceX rockets, that valuation genuinely wouldn't be expensive at all.

So it's fair to say Musk has, in a first-order sense, already achieved what he originally set out to do with SpaceX: driving the cost of getting something into orbit down close to the cost of fuel. On that front, dominance is already a done deal. Other pieces, like Tesla's Robotaxi, will hinge on how U.S. regulators handle it — for now, that's still more talk than action.

Robots are a comparatively distant future — one with deeper implications, but Tesla's robot demos still can't fully break free of remote-control puppeteering, so Musk's robotics ambitions still have a ways to go. Besides, the stakes in robotics are simply too large for Musk to be the only one doing it, or doing it well.

Whether or not you're a fan of Musk, as Jensen Huang put it: "As far as I know, there is only one person on the planet who can do that. Elon's understanding of engineering and construction, large systems, and resource allocation is unlike anyone else's — it's honestly hard to believe." Right on the heels of an autonomous-driving unveiling that drew plenty of boos, he went and pulled off a rocket catch in front of everyone. There's really nothing left to say.