Monthly Archives: May 2023

Elon Musks Twitter profile on April 25, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Just over a year ago on April 14, 2022 Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter. With Musk now at the helm, here are four facts about how adult Twitter users in the United States are using the site.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to better understand the on-site behaviors of U.S. adults on Twitter since Elon Musk acquired the platform. Data in this report is drawn from the American Trends Panel (ATP) Wave 119 conducted from Dec. 12 to Dec. 18, 2022. The sample is composed of panelists who indicated on the survey that they use Twitter and agreed to share a Twitter handle for research purposes. After the survey was fielded, researchers reviewed each account individually and removed any accounts that were suspended, invalid, or that belonged to institutions, products or international entities.

This final sample of 1,002 U.S. adult Twitter users with valid, active handles was weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, race, years lived in the U.S., education, region, party identification, volunteerism, voter registration, metropolitan area, frequency of internet use and religious affiliation to American Trends Panel December 2022 (Wave 119) survey respondents who indicated in that survey that they use Twitter, using the Wave 119 weight as the base weight. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points. For more details, read the Wave 119 methodology.

The findings in this report that examine users patterns of posting are based on tweets produced by respondents whose accounts were set to public during the period from Jan. 1, 2022, to April 10, 2023. All tweets posted by these public accounts during this timeframe were collected using the Twitter API, resulting in a total of 620,116 original tweets, replies, quote tweets and retweets from 639 users with public accounts who tweeted at least once during that time period. Center researchers also identified any tweets from these users that mentioned the name or Twitter handle of Elon Musk using case-insensitive regular expressions.

Musk himself has become a far more common subject of discussion on Twitter since acquiring the platform. On average, adult Twitter users in the U.S. mentioned Musk in a tweet just once between Jan. 1 and April 13, 2022, before he announced his intention to acquire the platform. Since then, however, references to Musk have become much more common on the site. These users tweeted about him an average of three times between April 14 and Oct. 26, 2022 while Musk was in the process of acquiring the platform and an average of six times in the months after the sale was finalized.

When looking at adult Twitter users individually, roughly four-in-ten have mentioned Musk in a tweet since early 2022. These mentions are especially common among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who use the platform.

As was the case before Musks takeover, tweeting activity continues to be highly concentrated among a relatively small share of the sites users. A minority of adult Twitter users in the U.S. continue to produce the bulk of the content. Since Musks acquisition, 20% of U.S. adults on the site have produced 98% of all tweets by this group.

As in the past, Democrats and Democratic leaners account for a majority 61% of these highly active tweeters.

The majority of highly active Twitter users continue to use the site following Musks takeover but are posting less frequently on average. Six-in-ten U.S. adults who have used Twitter in the past year say they have taken a break from the platform recently. And a quarter of these users say they are not likely to use Twitter a year from now, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

The Centers new analysis of actual behavior on the site finds that the most active users before Musks acquisition defined as the top 20% by tweet volume have seen a noticeable posting decline in the months after. These users average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition.

Despite this, eight-in-ten of the most active adult Twitter users between Jan. 1 and April 14, 2022, have remained among the most active users in the months after Musk formally acquired the site in October 2022. The same general pattern holds when narrowing the focus to the most active 10% of Twitter users before and after the sale. Around three-quarters of these users have remained among at least the top 20% of tweeters since the acquisition.

Retweets are more common among Democratic Twitter users, while replies are more common among Republicans. Since Musks acquisition of Twitter, three-quarters of tweets from all U.S. adults on the site have been either retweets (35%) or replies to other users (40%). The rest are either original tweets (15%) or quote tweets (9%). But certain groups post an especially large share of certain types of tweets.

Notably, there are partisan differences in the types of tweets users post. Retweets are the most common type of tweet from Democrats and Democratic leaners, accounting for half of all tweets from this group. By contrast, replies are the most common type of tweet by Republicans and Republican leaners, accounting for 61% of tweets from this group.

Note: For more details, read the Wave 119 methodology.

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How U.S. adults on Twitter use the site in the Elon Musk era - Pew Research Center

Image Credits: Collage by TechCrunch / Getty Images

Its no secret that Elon Musk has been deeply frustrated with OpenAI since stepping down from its board in February 2018, culminating in an open letter calling for the organization to pause work on more powerful systems.

It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source, and somehow transform itself into a for profit, closed source, Musk said in a CNBC interview Wednesday, following a Tesla shareholders meeting. This would be like, lets say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they became a lumber company, and chopped down the forest and sold it for money.

The power of his criticism hinges on the fact that Musk helped to launch the AI research organization. But exactly how much support he gave, even Musk seems unsure about.

Im still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesnt everyone do it? he tweeted in mid-March. A week later he complained on Twitter again: I donated the first $100M to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but have no ownership or control.

The $100 million figure has been widely reported as fact. But in the same CNBC interview yesterday, Musk abruptly shrank his claim. When asked how much he had donated to OpenAI, he replied: Im not sure the exact number but its some number on the order of $50 million.

So what changed in the last eight weeks?

Following his original tweets in March, TechCrunch began an investigation into the funding behind the original OpenAI non-profit, including Musks contributions. Our analysis of documents filed with the IRS and a state regulator show that Musk could not have given the non-profit the $100 million he originally claimed.

In fact, while the source of much of OpenAIs funding remains unclear, filings contain only around $15 million of donations that can be traced definitively back to Musk.

TechCrunch did not receive a response from Musks lawyer when presented with our analysis and asked for details of his financial support.

The tax filings also reveal previously unreported details about one of the most valuable and well-known technology ventures operating today, including the level of investment by Reid Hoffman, free Teslas for early OpenAI engineers, and the sky-rocketing computing bill that may have prompted it to take a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

The financial side of OpenAI has been murky ever since the organization was announced by AI researchers Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever in December 2015. They wrote that OpenAIs goal was to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. The non-profit would be co-chaired by Musk and Sam Altman.

The blog claimed that Altman, Musk and Brockman would donate to the new 501(c)3, along with Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Amazon, Infosys, Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston and YC Research, another non-profit spun out of the startup accelerator. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, they wrote. The next year, Wired duly reported OpenAI as a billion dollar effort, and that figure was subsequently widely shared.

But committed is not the same as actually donated. According to federal tax filings, at least one of the named donors, YC Research, never gave a single dollar, and the total amount donated to OpenAIs non-profit from its inception through 2021 was only $133.2 million. The vast majority of those funds arrived before the launch of OpenAIs for-profit arm in 2019, and the non-profit itself is now largely defunct. It received just $3,066 of donations in 2021.

So how much of OpenAIs $133 million did Musk donate? A good place to start is with his own 501(c)3 organization, the Musk Foundation.

In 2016, the Musk Foundation made a $10 million donation to yet another non-profit associated with Altman, called YC.org. YC.org, in turn, made a $10 million donation to OpenAI. The reason for this roundabout route, explained an OpenAI spokesperson in 2019, was a delay in establishing OpenAIs tax-exempt status with the IRS.

That $10 million donation remains the only publicly disclosed cash contribution from Musk to OpenAI. However, an audited financial statement filed by YC.org with California charity regulators in 2020 reveals that $15 million of the organizations 2016 revenue came from a single contributor. Given that YCs revenue for the whole year totaled $16.6 million, Musk is very likely to have been that contributor. YC subsequently gave OpenAI another $16 million in 2017, of which at least $5 million was likely Musks.

The only other donation that can be tied to Musk is a previously unreported gift to OpenAI in 2017 of $248,295 worth of Tesla vehicles, and a subsequent donation in 2018 for $14,105 in vehicle upgrades. An audited financial statement notes that the vehicles were provided to employees as compensation.

However, there are also ways to give money to a non-profit anonymously. Rich individuals can cloak their gifts by funneling money through so-called donor advised funds (DAFs). The Musk Foundation donated $12.4 million in 2017, and $6.3 million in 2018, to a DAF called Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. That fund then donated $7.8 million to OpenAI between 2018 and 2020. There is no way to tell whether any of that money was Musks the Fund has many donors and tens of billions of dollars in assets but it is impossible to rule out.

Companies and individuals can donate to non-profits directly without their identities being made public. Musk likely did this with the additional $5 million gift to YC.org in 2016. Perhaps he simply topped up his OpenAI donations to $50 or $100 million the same way?

Several weeks ago, Musks representative was presented with TechCrunchs reporting but did not reply to requests for comment. The only way to put a limit on Musks contributions was to count up the gifts to OpenAI from other donors and see how much was left over.

Sam Altman, now OpenAIs CEO, made a contribution, the organizations 2016 IRS filing shows. He loaned the young organization $3.75 million to get it started and then forgave the full amount, with interest, for a total gift of $3,784,637.

Hoffman used his own foundation, Aphorism, to give $1 million to YC in 2016, which the organization seems to have passed on to OpenAI in 2017. Aphorism then followed up with a $5 million donation direct to OpenAI in 2017 and 2018.

Amazon and Microsoft donated at least $800,000 in cloud computing services, and Infosys confirmed to TechCrunch that it had made a donation. None of the companies would put a dollar amount on their contributions. There were other corporate gifts in-kind, including a $129,000 high performance computer from Nvidia, as well as software and services from over a dozen other companies.

OpenAI would not share details of contributions made by Brockman or Livingston. Likewise, there is no record of Peter Thiel providing any funds to OpenAI, nor did his VC firm reply to a request for information. However, there was a modest $100,000 donation in 2018 from Donors Trust, a DAF favored by conservatives and libertarians, among whom Thiel has been counted.In 2017, Open Philanthropy announced a $30 million donation to OpenAI, which was delivered in three $10 million gifts in 2017, 2018 and 2019, through a non-profit controlled by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Open Philanthropys CEO, Holden Karnofsky, was given a seat on OpenAIs board.

We see some risks, both from unintended consequences of AI use, and from deliberate misuse), and believe that we as a philanthropic organization, separate from academia, industry, and government may be well-placed to support work to reduce those risks, the organization wrote at the time.

As OpenAI scaled, its costs began rising fast. On top of employing super-star AI researchers with multi-million dollar salaries, OpenAIs computing bill had increased exponentially and in-kind computing donations were just a drop in the bucket. According to its tax filings, OpenAI spent $2.3 million on cloud computing in 2016, $7.9 million in 2017, and $30.6 million in 2018.

In February 2018, OpenAI switched cloud providers from Amazon to Google, signing an agreement to spend at least $63 million with the tech giant over the next two years. Musk left OpenAIs board the same month. The events may be unconnected, although Semafor reported recently that Musk thought OpenAI was slipping behind Google, and walked away after the other founders rejected his offer to run the nonprofit.

According to insiders at OpenAI contacted by Semafor, Musk stopped making donations at that point, precipitating the spin-out of a for-profit OpenAI LP that would welcome outside investors. By the summer of 2019, OpenAI had already spent its Google computing money and was looking for another deal.

In July, Microsoft invested around $1 billion in the new for-profit entity with about half the funds in the form of credits for its own Azure cloud computing service.

Musk has publicly decried OpenAIs transition to a for-profit business.

Its other big donor, Moskovitz, also seems to have soured on the effort. In a conversation on a philanthropy forum in March, he posted: My hope is we actually slowed acceleration by participating but Im quite skeptical of the view that we added to it.

Not every founding donor felt the same. Reid Hoffmans Aphorism foundation invested a previously unreported $50 million in OpenAIs for-profit venture in 2018. Aphorism justified the charitable investment by writing that the new business aimed to provide AI technology to the public through open source licensing where appropriate to benefit the public.

None of the recent versions of OpenAIs Chat-GPT chatbot have been open source.

With Musks departure, OpenAI welcomed six new board members, each of whom also became a donor, according to the organization. Neither they nor OpenAI would share how much they gave, but the next year, OpenAI received its last major public gift: $30 million from a DAF called the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. There is no record of Musk or his foundation ever donating to that DAF.

Adding up all the non-Musk contributions to OpenAI (including the Silicon Valley Community Foundation money) gives a total of $75.8 million, out of $133.2 million. That means the most Musk could have donated to OpenAI would likely have been $57.4 million a far cry from the $100 million he originally claimed, but close to the figure he mentioned Wednesday.

However, this number assumes that three founding donors (including Thiel), six newer donors, and multiple corporate supporters like Infosys, gave nothing at all.

In the bigger scheme of Musks finances, a discrepancy of $35 million, $50 million or even $85 million is little more than a rounding error. With Musk recently valuing Twitter at just $20 billion, the worlds second richest person has lost well over $100 million every day since buying the company last fall.

Correction: Sam Altman was president of Y Combinator, not a co-founder.

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Elon Musk used to say he put $100M in OpenAI, but now its $50M: Here are the receipts - TechCrunch

Were starting to get a clearer picture of how Elon Musks takeover of Twitter has changed the platform. According to new data from Pew Research, a majority of US Twitter users have taken a break from the platform over the last year, and many of the sites most active users are tweeting less often than they used to.

Six-in-ten Americans who have used Twitter in the past 12 months say they have taken a break from the platform for a period of several weeks or more during that span, Pew writes in a report based on a survey of 10,701 Twitter users. In a separate report, Pew also studied the actual behavior of 1,002 of Twitters most active users and found a noticeable posting decline in the months after Musks acquisition. These users average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition, Pew noted.

Together, these stats suggest that engagement on Twitter has declined since Musks takeover, at least among formerly active users. Thats particularly notable because, as Pew notes, the vast majority of Twitter users are lurkers, not posters. Twenty percent of Twitter users send 98 percent of all tweets.

At the same time, it seems many of Twitters most active users havent given up on the platform entirely. According to Pew, only 25 percent of highly active users said they are not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.

Pew didnt poll Twitter users on the reasons for their pullback from Twitter, or if Musks actions were directly responsible for the shift. It also doesnt take into account how many new users may have joined Twitter in the last year. But the new numbers offer new insight into the growing ranks of Twitter quitters who may be spending more time on alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky since Musks takeover,

Unsurprisingly, Pew also found that Musk himself has become even more of a main character on Twitter over the last year. On average, adult Twitter users in the U.S. mentioned Musk in a tweet just once between Jan. 1 and April 13, 2022, before he announced his intention to acquire the platform, the report says. Since then, however, references to Musk have become much more common on the site. These users tweeted about him an average of three times between April 14 and Oct. 26, 2022 while Musk was in the process of acquiring the platform and an average of six times in the months after the sale was finalized.

The reports come as Musk has named a new CEO in former NBCU executive Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino, who is slated to start in the coming weeks, is expected to draw on her ad industry experience to try to win back advertisers, many of whom have fled following controversial policy changes by Musk. Whether she'll be able to win back the much sought-after highly active tweeters, though, is unclear. With Musk remaining as CTO and executive chairman, hes likely to continue to be Twitters most influential and controversial user for the foreseeable future.

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US adults are spending less time on Twitter since Elon Musk took over - Engadget

In 2016, Tesla (TSLA 4.41%) CEO Elon Musk first revealed plans to develop a fully autonomous self-driving robotaxi. While it's still not on the road seven years later, he just hinted it's closer than ever -- it might even be ready this year.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC's David Faber yesterday, Musk added a little more color to his vision for the project, and serving as a self-driving ride-hailing platform appears to be a big part of the value proposition.

The undisputed global ride-hailing leader today is Uber Technologies (UBER 1.07%), which is currently working on its own self-driving technology. But with a giant like Tesla entering the space, should Uber be worried?

Image source: Tesla.

To be clear, the robotaxi won't necessarily be a new Tesla model. Instead, Musk's goal is to have as many customer-owned Teslas serving as robotaxis as possible by having them install the company's self-driving software.

In the interview, he talked about how the average passenger car is used for just 10 to 12 hours per week, spending most of its time parked at its owner's home or place of work, which makes the value proposition incredibly inefficient. By installing autonomous software, those vehicles could spend that idle time out on the road as part of a ride-hailing network, earning money for both the owner and for Tesla.

Musk touched on the potential business model, describing a revenue split that could run 50/50 or even 70/30 in favor of the car owner. This could absolutely transform Tesla's financials, because instead of just manufacturing a vehicle and selling it with a gross profit margin of 25%, each car would potentially earn a margin of 70% (or higher) over time.

What could that translate to in dollar terms? Musk referenced the analysis of Cathie Wood and her firm Ark Investment Management, which issued some projections earlier this year suggesting autonomous ride-hailing could generate $4 trillion in revenue by 2027. It could also create $14 trillion in enterprise value in the process.

That's why the robotaxi also underpins Ark's $2,000 price target for Tesla stock in 2027, which is the highest on Wall Street. Ark predicts the autonomous platform will be responsible for 67% of the company's $6.1 trillion in enterprise value by that time -- if that were true today, it would be the single most valuable piece of technology in the world.

Tesla's autonomous driving software is widely considered to be the most advanced in the industry, with 2.7 million cars on the road specifically collecting data, which is 10 times more than its closest competitor.

But Uber has a huge advantage in its digital platform, with over 130 million monthly users, who completed 2.1 billion rides in the first quarter of 2023 alone. Since human drivers are the company's largest expense, an autonomous solution would simply represent the natural progression of its business model.

Uber has a difficult history with autonomous technology, having abandoned its in-house development project in 2020 after one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian a couple of years earlier. However, last year, it signed a 10-year deal with a company called Motional, which is a joint venture between Korean automotive giant Hyundaiand mobility technology company Aptiv.

Motional has developed a driverless platform on top of Hyundai's Ioniq 5 electric vehicle. It has achieved SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Level 4, which means the vehicle is fully autonomous and can handle all driving and navigational tasks without human input. Motional was missing a ride-hailing ecosystem, which is what Uber brings to the table.

Together, the companies could theoretically deploy the largest autonomous ride-sharing network in the world.

Elon Musk hinted that Tesla will adopt a closed-loop ecosystem when it comes to its autonomous platform. In other words, self-driving Teslas can only operate within Tesla's ride-hailing network -- they can't be used to work for Uber, for example.

That effectively ensures the company earns income from its software in perpetuity. If new electric vehicles do completely displace sales of internal combustion vehicles and Tesla remains the most popular electric vehicle brand, this closed-loop strategy could quite literally be worth trillions of dollars.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, Uber has a major head start with users. Will everyday non-Tesla owners download another smartphone application just so they can specifically hail a Tesla? That's the biggest question. Tesla might have an abundance of supply on the road, but if users prefer to stick with Uber, it won't be very successful.

For that reason, it's too early for Uber to fear this impending threat, especially if it delivers a comparably good autonomous solution through its partnership with Motional. If investors want to hedge their bets, this emerging industry is a good-enough reason to buy both Tesla and Uber stock.

See more here:

Elon Musk Just Unveiled His Vision for Tesla's Robotaxi -- Should ... - The Motley Fool

Emily Reed lost her younger sister Jessica more than 10 years ago. For much of the last decade, she's visited Jessica's Twitter page to help keep her memory alive.

Twitter became one of the places where Emily processed her grief and reconnected with a sister she describes as almost like a twin. But Jessica's account is now gone.

Last week, owner Elon Musk announced Twitter would be purging accounts that have had no activity for several years. That decision has been met by an outcry from those who have lost, or who fear losing the thoughts and words of deceased loved ones linked to now-inactive accounts.

Reed immediately returned to Jessica's page as she had done a day or two earlier after learning of the purge. In place of Jessica's page was an "account suspended message that suggested it may be in violation Twitter rules.

Also read: Google to delete accounts that have been inactive for two years

Reed's tweet recounting her shock over the loss of the account has received tens of thousands of responses. Others shared similar experiences of pain upon learning that the account of a deceased loved one had vanished.

Having these digital footprints... is super important to me, Reed, 43, told The Associated Press.

The advent of social media has come with a new way in which people mourn, returning to the place where they connected with friends and family in the past. In addition to memories and physical traces left behind, snippets of lives are have are now being captured in the digital space.

It is something that social media platforms have wrestled with for recent years.

Twitter backed off an attempt to purge inactive accounts in 2019, years before Musk arrived, due to a similar backlash.

Other social media sites have found ways to allow people to mourn those they've lost.

Facebook and Instagram allow users to request an account be deactivated, or a memorialisation of the account. Memorialised accounts show the word Remembering next to the person's name.

In this modern age, we have these electronic reminders of people (including) little snippets of a thought they had on a particular day or pictures that they shared, said Shira Gabriel, professor of psychology at University at Buffalo. Looking through a late loved one's social media can be both a healthy way to process grief and gather as a community in remembrance, Gabriel said.

The prospect of that resource disappearing can bring about a sense of mourning again, Gabriel said. There is a real psychological cost of getting rid of this digital thumbprint that was left behind and this ability for community members to gather in one spot.

It is unknown if Musk will backtrack on the decision to purge. The billionaire CEO of Tesla has launched policies that have rattled users and advertisers alike and shown little interest in amending those policies in response.

Musk named a new CEO last week, Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal advertising executive, who will have her hands full with a platform seemingly now in a perpetual state of chaos.

Also read: Is Twitters new CEO heading toward a glass cliff?

Deleting inactive accounts can be seen as fulfilling a promise Musk made when he bought the company, particularly winnowing down junk accounts and bots, said Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism and Media.

There are good reasons to preserve inactive accounts, and also reasons to delete them, Woolley said, but he is leery of the one-size-fits-all approach.

Advocates of purging accounts cite skewed metrics caused by inactive accounts or bogus on social media platforms. Yet on top of emotional pain for some users mourning late loved ones, deleting inactive accounts could also mean losing tweets that documented historical events, commentary and breaking news on the app over the years.

Twitter operates in many ways like a library of data, Woolley said. Just because someone hasn't been active for 30 days or a few years, doesn't mean their tweets don't still have a great amount of relevance. Musk did say the reasoning behind removing inactive accounts was to free up unused Twitter handles, or user names, and that those inactive accounts would be archived.

Also read: Elon Musk faces backlash imposing content restrictions on Twitter in Turkey

What exactly that means is not known including what inactive accounts will look like when they're archived, and whether they'll be easily accessible. Other details of the plan are also unclear, such as the number of accounts to be removed and whether the policy will be evenly enforced.

While Reed and others saw the inactive accounts of loved ones disappear last week, the account belonging to the late father of controversial internet personality Andrew Tate still appears to be on the site, for example.

On Twitter, Tate said he was fine with Musk's decision, but asked that his father's account remain active as he still (reads) his account daily.

Picking and choosing accounts for deactivation would create precisely the kind of tiered system that Musk says he wants to avoid," Woolley said.

When contacted by The Associated Press for comment, Twitter responded with an automated email. Twitter's trust and safety lead Ella Irwin also did not respond.

According to Twitter policy, the social media platform determines an account's inactivity through log-ins. Twitter says that users should log in at least every 30 days.

Twitter users are able to download an archive of their own data through the app, but not for accounts they don't possess login credentials. Reed, for example, noted that her family wasn't able to get into Jessica's account over the last 10 years. The only traces they have now are some screenshots that Reed's other sister luckily captured before the purge.

Reed talks about the importance of Jessica's Twitter and Facebook pages during her journey with grief from following her sister's difficult journey with cystic fibrosis, a progressive genetic disorder that Reed also has, to cherishing tweets that showed the joy and... the vibrancy that came out of her words.

Over time, the image and memories of someone who has passed away can slowly change in your mind like a fading photograph, Reed said. Having online resources, she added, can help keep a person's memory alive, in a way that just your own personal memory can't.

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Elon Musk says Twitter will purge inactive accounts. What does that mean for now-deceased users? - BusinessLine

On September 28, 2008, Elon Musk and SpaceX altered the history of the cosmos. On that fateful day, the then-struggling company sent the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket Falcon 1 into orbit.

The launch set off a domino effect, sparking the growth of other companies aiming to launch rockets and satellites more quickly and cheaply than the government agencies and contractors that had run the game since Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind.

Thats the argument made by tech journalist and author Ashlee Vance in his new book When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. Vance is intimately familiar with Elon Musk he released a biography on the infamous tech mogul in 2015.

Author Ashlee Vance traveled the globe to learn more about elusive commercial space ventures.

In fact, his in-depth Musk reporting introduced Vance to the colorful cast of characters profiled in his recent work. When the Heavens Went on Sale spends little time on SpaceX, dedicating most of its pages to Musk-inspired space companies that aim to quickly deploy rockets and satellites to low-Earth orbit: California-based Astra, Rocket Lab, and Planet Labs, along with Texas-based Firefly. With more than five years of reporting, Vance followed these teams everywhere, from New Zealand to French Guiana, stepping into secret launch locations and witnessing armed bodyguards, whisky-fueled tiffs on private planes, and even a team of male strippers in the process.

Now, two decades past SpaceXs founding, Vance recounts the trials and tribulations including plenty of expensive rocket explosions faced by these entrepreneurs in their quest to profit off our planets orbit and usher humanity deeper into the Universe.

Inverse spoke with Vance to learn more about his reporting and what he predicts for the coming decades of the rapid-fire commercial space race.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vance profiled Rocket Lab, which has ambitious plans for its reusable Electron rocket shown here.

What inspired you to write this book and specifically focus on Astra, Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, and Firefly?

I guess it was an accident in some ways. I'm not a space junkie by nature. But coming out of doing the Elon Musk biography, my favorite reporting was about the early days of SpaceX and how weird and hard it was for a team of 20-somethings to build a rocket. Right as I was finishing that book, I could see all around the world, there were more groups like this trying to give this a go.

I just got sucked in. The characters turned out to be better and better than I ever could have expected. The story seemed kind of stranger than fiction. I didn't want to be pigeonholed as a space reporter, but I couldn't resist the story.

This was always meant to be an entertaining, fun read this journey around the Earth. The focus is more on the extraordinary and unusual people than on the business itself. It's definitely not a business book.

What were your favorite moments you witnessed while embedded with these eccentric companies?

It's a very secretive world, and a lot of it is controlled by military regulations and things like that. Almost every room I was in was some kind of secret room. These companies like to remain very private.

There are two moments that really jump to mind. I spent many weeks in Kodiak, Alaska, waiting for an Astra rocket to launch. We were in this lodge, kind of trapped there with these people struggling with a rocket and with whales going by outside and bears near the house. It turned a little bit into The Shining as things went wrong.

And I am one of, I think, only two foreign reporters that ever got to go to the old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) factory in Ukraine. I think I'm the only one that's ever been to the secret rocket testing sites in the forests of Ukraine. As a person who grew up during the Cold War, it was amazing to be at this site that was meant to spell my doom and destruction at one point.

Vance visited Astra in Kodiak, Alaska to get a glimpse of a rocket launch.

Right, private space companies are notoriously tight-lipped. So how did you get such a close look at their inner workings?

In the case of Astra, I was there the second the company started, with the first handful of employees in a room trying to test-fire their engines for the first time. I knew all 50 employees by name, and I had my own access to the factory. The CEO, Chris Kemp, to his credit, told everybody just to tell me the good or the bad. I lived with them in Alaska and in this factory.

They built this rocket, which is not dissimilar from an ICBM missile, just about 1,000 yards from a residential neighborhood in Alameda, California. I had this front-row seat to a missile coming to life in a neighborhood that nobody else knew anything about.

Entrepreneurs like Musk and Rocket Labs Peter Beck claim that their rockets and satellites can outperform government operations, but they still receive billions of dollars in federal contracts and subsidies. Would it be more accurate to call this the era of public-private cooperation?

We're in a work-in-progress stage where government and military contracts are keeping some of these companies afloat during tough times, and they're still paying for a lot of missions. There are a couple of data points that I look at, though: By 2020, we had about 2,500 active satellites in low-Earth orbit* the majority of which would have been the result of government or scientific or military funding.

SpaceX now has more satellites in space than any other entity, and its currently working on some lucrative NASA contracts.

In just the last three years, we've more than doubled that number, and almost all of those new satellites are commercial. SpaceX, with its Starlink space internet system, has more satellites than any country, and Planet Labs is second. This flip is happening very quickly, and even though some government funding helped some of these things happen, this is just the tipping point. We're shortly going to go into 100,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit, of which almost all will be commercial.

Elon Musk has said that SpaceXs Starlink helps him raise money for the massive Starship rocket do you think other businesses are using their satellite cash to fund bigger projects, too?

They almost all have to. The dirty secret of aerospace is that everybody wants to build a rocket, and its somehow seen as the sexiest part of all this, but it's the absolute worst business to be in.

All of the money is in the satellites and data communication services, and the vast majority of SpaceXs valuation from its private investors is tied up in Starlink.

Rocket Lab, the rival to SpaceX, is already making around 90 percent of a satellite, so other companies don't have to repeat all of that work every time. These other startups can now just put their special bit of equipment, their sensor, or their scientific experiments, onto the satellite.

I think this is the direction almost all the rocket companies will have to go in. It just builds on my thesis that this industry is starting to look much more like a regular business, where it matures, and everybody is not building everything from scratch every time. Now, there are regular suppliers for different parts of the whole process.

According to Vance, SpaceX is the most successful of Musks many projects.

How do you think Elon Musks Twitter era and the recent technical mishaps at Tesla affect people's hopes for SpaceX?

One of the funniest things about Elons career is that SpaceX should be the riskiest, worst-performing one of his companies. It's the hardest industry, and its taking giant swings and just shouldn't work as well as it does. But it's the clearest winner of the bunch: SpaceX is now the dominant player in space. They send up more rockets than any other country or company, and they have already put up more satellites than anyone has in history.

The company has shown its ability to run extremely well, no matter what Elon does. And, of course, Gwynne Shotwell has been the president this entire time and is this amazing right-hand woman to Elon and has run the company exceptionally well.

What do you think is the long-term goal for moguls like Jeff Bezos and Musk, who have claimed they want to form lasting human settlements in space is it to escape climate disaster on Earth?

The commercial space industry really gets to the heart of what we want to be as a species. Do we want to stay here and try to fix up the planet? Or do we want to give in to this exploratory nature do we think human intelligences goal is to spread out through the Universe? Its so fascinating to see businesses tied to these almost mythological quests.

So far, we've seen that, among the billionaires, each one has their own thing that they're after. But I think this is all coalescing around something that's a little more pragmatic: These businesses will just be built step by step. We're not sure how many of these business cases will actually check out. But what I argue in the book is that we're about to find out.

*The Union of Concerned Scientists reported around 2,666 operational satellites in April 2020, with 1,918 in low-Earth orbit.

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Elon Musk's Biographer on the "Dirty Secret of Aerospace" - Inverse