SpaceX will attempt the 13th test flight of its Starship rocket Friday evening—the largest rocket ever built—while the financial press tallies stock dips and political hit pieces, the machine that will return Americans to the Moon sits on the pad ready to fly.
The launch window opens at 6:45PM ET from Starbase, Texas, carrying 20 V3 Starlink satellites into orbit. This is the first flight of the upgraded Starship V3 since the company went public, and it matters because Starship is the vehicle designed to make SpaceX's satellite network vastly larger and eventually carry U.S. astronauts back to the lunar surface and on to Mars. That is what private enterprise built by individual vision accomplishes—while NASA has spent decades orbiting the same planet on government timelines.
Thursday's attempt was postponed "due to weather," according to SpaceX, but Friday's visibility is forecast to be "ideal." Last week's attempt scrubbed when the booster triggered a hold that "shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite," a SpaceX employee said during a livestream. Test flights are called tests because they find problems. That is how engineering works.
CNBC framed the story as a "rough week" for Elon Musk, opening with stock declines rather than the rocket on the launchpad. Tesla shares plunged 18% to $313.03—their worst weekly slump since 2022—after weaker-than-expected earnings and cash flow turned negative due to spending on robotaxis, humanoid robots, and a chip fab. SpaceX dropped 7.2% over five days to $115.07, its lowest since the record IPO last month, and is now 43% off its peak close on June 16. The combined declines wiped about $130 billion from Musk's wealth, prompting him to post on X: "(Former) trillionaire." The Verge noted the same stock figures but kept its focus on the launch itself.
Argus Research, which holds a hold rating on Tesla, wrote Friday that spending on futuristic projects will "pressure free cash flow and delay earnings growth, without providing any near-term shareholder return" and called consistent profit growth "nearly impossible" in the near term. Wall Street wants quarterly returns. Musk is building interplanetary transport. The tension between those timelines is the real story.
CNBC also highlighted Musk's "contentious interview" with The Economist, where editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes pressed him on supporting "not just the populist right, but the far right, in fact very fringe parties in some countries"—specifically Germany's AfD and the UK's Restore Britain, founded by Rupert Lowe, who calls to "reverse mass migration." Musk responded: "It's just normal people!" He berated Beddoes and "the traditional media" for an "absurd characterization of the far right." The establishment press calls concerns about mass migration "far right" and "fringe." Millions of normal people call them common sense.
The institutional media counts Musk's losses in billions and labels his political views extremist. They do not count the rocket standing 400 feet tall on the Texas coast, or the satellites that will connect rural Americans to the internet, or the path back to the Moon that no government program delivered on schedule. Free enterprise does not wait for favorable coverage. It builds.
