Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Facing the ‘Genuine Risk of Bankruptcy’ in Leaked Emails

 In recently leaked company-wide emails, Elon Musk warned that his space exploration firm SpaceX is facing a “genuine risk of bankruptcy.”

CNBC reports that in a recently leaked company-wide email, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned that the lack of recent progress in the development of the company’s Raptor engines has put the firm at “genuine risk of bankruptcy.”

Elon Musk strikes a SpaceX pose (pool/Getty)

(Pool/Getty)

Musk said in the email that SpaceX will need to achieve a Starship launch rate of one flight every two weeks over the next year in order to prevent the company from going under.

In an email sent over Thanksgiving weekend, Musk stated:

“Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.” He added: “We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”

The “exiting of prior senior management” Musk mentions refers to spaceX’s former VP of Propulsion Will Heltsley who left the company in November due to a lack of development around the Raptor. Musk continued to stress the severity of the situation in the email, even demanding employees return to work as soon as possible despite it being a holiday weekend.

“Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster,” he wrote. Musk added that although he planned on taking the weekend off, he would  “be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.”