Never one to leave a headline unclaimed, Musk has spent the past few years reinventing himself as humanity’s travel agent to Mars. 

His vessel of choice? Starship - the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed. And because a billion-dollar rocket wasn’t quite grand enough, he also reclaimed a slice of Texas for its launchpad: Starbase.

There’s just one catch. 

Starship has spectacularly failed to launch ten times. 

And Starbase? It managed to run out of money in less than 48 hours.

Musk, however, refuses to call any of these events a failure. Every explosion becomes a “lesson”, every collapse a proof point for iteration. He’s wired in the capital to survive it, and he’s the first to spin disaster into momentum.

You can roll your eyes at the theatre, but the funding mechanics are worth paying attention to.

On the radar for this week’s newsletter:

If Elon Musk wasn’t already in your face with Tesla stock swings and his on-again-off-again bromance with Trump, there’s always SpaceX to keep him in your feed. 

Aside from being a rocket firm, the company is a billion-dollar experiment in how far one founder can bend gravity - financially and literally. Say what you like about Musk, but he’s unnervingly good at spinning plates. Rockets, EVs, AI, Twitter, politics - somehow he juggles it all and reframes every wobble as progress. 

He even bought the rights to call himself a Tesla founder, which is less “innovation” than PR sleight of hand. Politically shrewd, commercially ruthless, always playing the bigger game.

Starship is Musk’s flagship: the rocket meant to take humanity to Mars. Ten launch attempts later, it’s still stuck on Earth, but that doesn’t stop the spectacle. In the middle of all of the failed lift-offs, something stranger was unfolding on the ground.

SpaceX employees moved beyond rockets and tried to build a city from scratch: Starbase, Texas. 

Not a bustling metropolis (unless you mean the film - painfully slow and nowhere near as groundbreaking), but a rebranded stretch of Boca Chica Village: a few prefab houses, trailers, shipping containers and construction zones orbiting the launch site.

Incorporated almost overnight, the place was billed as the ground base for Musk’s cosmic ambitions. A shiny new frontier: part company town, part launchpad, part PR machine.

The problem? Cities burn cash faster than rockets burn fuel.

Only Elon could turn a rocket company into a city council. Starbase was incorporated with all the fanfare of a moon landing - except within 48 hours it was already skint. No revenue or tax base, but there were plenty of bills piling up. This is the side of “move fast and break things” nobody likes to talk about. Break a website? Fine. Break a city? Slightly trickier. But in true Musk fashion, the wobble wasn’t framed as disaster. Just another dramatic beat in the script.

In a way I can draw a comparison to what I see founders struggle with every week. Great vision, but, tripped up by the brutal simplicity of cash flow. In my company, FundOnion, we step in at the exact moment, to help businesses bridge the gap so ambition doesn’t get derailed by the numbers.

For any normal founder (if such a thing exists), running out of money two days in is called failure. For Musk, it’s marketable.

Listen to this absolute banger while reading this section.

So who bailed out Starbase? Goldman Sachs? A shiny new sovereign wealth fund? Nope. The money came from… 

SpaceX itself. 

Yes, the city basically borrowed lunch money from its parent company.

That’s the Musk method in action: keep the loop closed. Rockets, cities, foundations - they all feed from the same balance sheet. It looks reckless, but it’s brutally logical. Who’s most motivated to keep Starbase alive? Not investors. Not regulators. It’s the company that needs the city to function in the first place.

You don’t need a Mars mission to see the pattern. The lifeline usually comes from the people already strapped to the rocket with you.

SpaceX isn’t the first to bankroll survival from the inside.

Take Tata Steel. Over a hundred years ago they built Jamshedpur in India - a furnace town with schools, hospitals and homes wired into the business. It wasn’t warm-hearted philanthropy; it was industrial insurance. Educated kids filled future jobs, healthy families kept the shifts covered and a community tied to the factory kept the furnaces lit. The place still carries Tata’s name.

Then there’s Toyota City. Roads, housing, shops and public services were designed in orbit around the company. The city thrived because the company thrived, and vice versa. It blurred the line between employee and citizen - and that alignment made Toyota harder to shake than any quarterly downturn. When capital is structured to support your team and customers, not just your runway, the flywheel spins faster and lasts longer. That’s the thinking I drill into my team at FundOnion - helping small businesses to see financing as not just cashflow but a strategic tool that can be leveraged for all aspects of your business.

Musk might dress it up in rockets and city-building, but the principles aren’t sci-fi. Here’s what I’d recommend:

A) Look inside your network first

Your strongest funders are usually already in range: customers, suppliers, employees. They’ve got skin in the game, and more reason than any VC to keep you alive. Pre-purchase schemes, supplier credit, staff equity - it’s not fancy, but it’s fast.

B) Build patience into your capital stack

Starship isn’t a five-year play, it’s a 20-year grind. Same with any capital-heavy bet: mines, infrastructure, deep tech. Quick money won’t last the distance.

I saw it with a lithium mine in Portugal: four years on licences, more on studies and a decade before cashflow. Fifteen to twenty years from start to profit. Only patient backers survive that wait.

C) Align incentives, not just numbers

Starbase works because the city’s existence = SpaceX’s existence. That’s alignment. When your stakeholders don’t share in the upside - or shoulder some of the downside - the trust craters fast.

D) Reputation is your insurance

Tata and Toyota built trust by building communities. Tesla’s record in Texas? Environmental fines, regulator fights and a side order of political drama. Numbers are important, but reputation is what keeps investors breathing easy. Lose it, and nothing else survives re-entry.

E) Diversify your lifelines 

Starbase lived because SpaceX could loan from its own balance sheet. Smart, but dangerous if that’s your only trick. Don’t hinge your life on one white knight, one investor, one customer. The strongest models fire on multiple engines at once.

Surprisingly, my favourite Netflix show isn’t Succession or Shark Tank. It’s House MD.

A contrarian doctor who thrives on conflict, breaks rules with a straight face and still walks out with the right diagnosis. He doesn’t just fix the obvious problem; he rewires the whole case until it makes sense - usually after diagnosing lupus for the 47th time.

Musk works the same way. He juggles Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, political stunts, PR spin - even bought the rights to call himself Tesla’s founder - and somehow keeps the story intact. Not clean or linear by any means, but effective. Announcing Mars colonisation before fixing Autopilot’s well-documented failures with emergency vehicles? Classic Musk.

What I grudgingly respect in both: they operate in pure chaos without pretending it’s orderly. They bend the system until it gives them what they need.

That’s the takeaway for entrepreneurs. Funding problems rarely announce themselves neatly. Missed payroll, delayed launches, investors going quiet - those are surface symptoms. The real test is whether you can dig deeper, untangle the mess and rebuild the model so it works under pressure.

Early access, bulk discount, exclusive deal - whatever makes sense.

If they bite, you’ve just created cashflow without giving away equity.

If they don’t, you’ve learned something about demand without paying for consultants.

I don’t know anything about building cities, but I do know how to spot hidden capital. That’s basically my day job: helping founders untangle funding, match with lenders and use debt as a lever instead of a liability.

Funny thing is, businesses often overlook the obvious lifelines in front of them. The right network, the right lender, the right terms - they’re what makes the difference between wobbling and taking off. FundOnion puts those lifelines within reach. If you’re ready to reach yours, head to our website to find a funding solution built for you.

Till next time,

James