Elon Musk is demonstrating that a business dependent on one man can have a serious downside. The electric carmaker Tesla, once beloved by progressives, has become, for many, a poisoned brand amid Mr. Musk’s turn to the hard right, and its value is falling fast. What is meant to be his great leap into space, the new Starship, has had two successive and spectacular test failures. To use his own flippant term: Mr. Musk’s wunderkind status could be experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
In rebuttal, he could point to a recent achievement: providing the vehicle for the safe return of two astronauts from the International Space Station. The astronauts had been marooned for nine months because of a flawed Boeing crew capsule, adding to the long list of Boeing fiascos.
The contrast between Mr. Musk and Boeing fits into the folklore of pioneering American businesses, in which the determined risk-taker supplants a doddering legacy competitor. Superficially, that is true — Mr. Musk’s SpaceX has eclipsed Boeing in aerospace just as Tesla, at least for a time, outstripped the conventional auto business. Those were singular achievements. As you look deeper, it’s clear that Mr. Musk’s innovative willpower can become, in the public eye, as much a liability as an asset.
That is clear from the test failures of Starship, a giant rocket designed to be fully reusable. Both of them sprayed flaming debris over the Caribbean and disrupted commercial air traffic, while garnering fewer headlines than the astronauts’ safe return. Behind Mr. Musk’s casual brushing away of these incidents lies a serious test of his approach to building space vehicles. The objective is to deliver a version of Starship that NASA will use as part of its Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon’s surface. This would require a ship that not only can be launched into orbit, it would also need to be refueled once there. Clearly, the goal date of 2027 is highly unrealistic.
The first stage of the flights, using Super Heavy booster rockets, is not the problem. That has worked, including the recent spectacular recapturing of the expended booster at the launchpad. But failures near the engines that get Starship into orbit are what’s causing the ship to explode in ways that, according to experts, will require extensive (and expensive) redesign.
SpaceX has never been a one-man show. Its success has as much to do with its current president, Gwynne Shotwell, as it has with Mr. Musk. She gathered a brilliant team of engineers and underpinned his imagination and appetite for risk-taking with disciplined management, while never coming between Mr. Musk and the limelight. Starship, however, has become like a personal shot of testosterone for him, the most audacious expression of his intention to go beyond the moon to Mars. Its challenges have intensified just as he switched his attention to the Department of Government Efficiency.
In his Inaugural Address, President Trump declared that America would pursue “our manifest destiny to the stars” and said that astronauts would plant the American flag on Mars. Though Mr. Trump has said this would happen by the end of his term, the troubled trajectory of Starship shows just how fanciful that ambition is. Returning to the moon is perhaps, for the moment, as much as NASA can deliver by that date. Colonizing the moon is also a rich commercial prospect, as China also realizes.
The moon became a symbolic measure of the exceptional American spirit in July 1969. With the first lunar landing, the Apollo program became a triumph of the analog age. Boeing provided the enormous rocket that lofted the astronauts into space. In 2014 NASA, trusting Boeing’s reputation, called on it to provide the new generation crew capsule, as well as employing SpaceX.
But 2014 was also the year that the then-Boeing chief executive, Jim McNerney, disavowed the moonshot level of risk-taking that helped make the company an icon. Boeing’s former strategy of shooting for game-changing new models, he said, is “the wrong way to pursue this business. The more-for-less world will not let you pursue moonshots.”
That upheld the company’s switch from a collegiate style of management to one in which pumping money back to shareholders had priority. Slashing costs cut quality control. Two fatal crashes of the new 737 Max jets followed, and Airbus succeeded Boeing as the benchmark for new jets.
That reversal of fortunes was also the making of the alternative Musk legend, of a risk-tolerant business leader who delivered to NASA on budget, on time and with a consistently safe performance. And Space X’s earlier launches of Falcon 9 — reusable rockets that land majestically on earth after launching their capsules into orbit — demonstrated mastery of a trick that Boeing has still not managed.
Now, the failures of Starship cast a shadow over that legend, the first sign that SpaceX’s next challenge takes Mr. Musk into far more demanding territory. Meanwhile, his Tesla problem has been brewing for a while. The company was losing its novelty and momentum long before he boarded the Trump ship. China is flooding Europe with inexpensive and high-quality electric vehicles, taking Mr. Musk’s original concept and mass-producing a model that the people who build it can actually afford.
Even then, Tesla could have held its place in the luxury market segment alongside the likes of BMW. But then Mr. Musk saw fit to applaud the rise of ultraright parties in Europe and organize his squads of disrupters in Washington. That produced a public revulsion for which Tesla became a sitting target, something vulnerable to attack in a way that the other parts of his empire were not — he has received billions in business with the government, including an array of work that is classified, the Starlink satellite constellation that is indispensable and the Starshield satellites that serve the highest level of American intelligence gathering.
Turning buyer remorse into a political movement is unusual. Henry Ford was a rabid antisemite, as were other titans of industry in the 1920s and ’30s, but he was not, like Mr. Musk, a man with much political agency. Mr. Musk has chosen to be a different kind of mogul — an avatar of what could be called the new magic born in Silicon Valley. As his record in rockets and cars suffers reverses, we can only hope that the same comes true for his predatory assault on the guts of our government.