SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offered a brief and terse response when asked on Twitter about the company’s bankruptcy conerns surrounding its Raptor engine.<\/b>
\nIt\u2019s rare to find SpaceX CEO Elon Musk not in the mood to crack a joke on Twitter \u2014 but it turns out one of the few things he won\u2019t wisecrack about is his company\u2019s money issues. Yesterday, an internal email Musk sent to his SpaceX employees leaked and revealed that the company is, in Musk\u2019s telling, on the brink of bankruptcy. Th e key issue seems to be lack of progress in the development of its Raptor engines, which are needed to get Starship operational, which in turn is expected to play an enormous role in deploying the next-gen Starlink satellites on which the company is banking its financial success. So when a user asked about the Raptor\u2019s progress on Twitter, the Tesla Technoking offered a terse reply. \u201cIt\u2019s getting fixed,\u201d he wrote. The situation is dire, if Musk\u2019s email is to be believed. He said that SpaceX needs to churn out one Starship launch every two weeks in order to fend off bankruptcy. However, a substantial bump in the road to that ambitious goal is the Raptor engine that will power Starship. It sounds like the engine\u2019s development has fallen badly behind schedule. It\u2019s gotten so serious that SpaceX\u2019s former VP of propulsion and head of the Raptor development team Will Heltsley left the company in November \u2014 likely ousted for his lagging leadership. Musk underscored the grim situation in the email by asking his employees to come back to work during Thanksgiving weekend to help fix what he called \u201c quite frankly, a disaster.\u201d The email revealed a number of damning insights about the company, which typically projects itself as a success. The truth, it turns out, may be anything but. More on Musk money matters: In Leaked Email, Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Facing Bankruptcy Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.<\/p>\n