A SpaceX equity investor just took over NASA. The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman yesterday, 67-30, showing bipartisan complicity in structural corruption.
Sometimes if it looks like corruption, sounds like corruption, and smells like corruption, it’s just plain corruption.
Isaacman made his fortune processing payments for SpaceX among others, then spent hundreds of millions he made (including from SpaceX) to buy flights from SpaceX. An obviously circular system of wealth generation.
And now? He has been injected as head of the government agency to award SpaceX contracts.
Markey tried to force SpaceX to release Isaacman from his NDAs covering the exact financial arrangements that made him unfit for the role. SpaceX of course refused because… corruption. The Senate confirmed him anyway because… corruption.
This corruption is some of the worst in American history? SpaceX has severe failures and delays on the Artemis lunar lander, the exact program Isaacman will now oversee as their NASA Administrator while personally profiting from all the failures and delays.
A buried lede in the Artemis II news from NASA (2026 moon flyby) is that SpaceX has been a disasterous and wasteful drag.
Remember how Musk told the world he would deliver Mars landings far faster than NASA could, landing ships continuously by 2018?
Isaacman can pour billions into failed projects to line his pockets until the auditors show up, and he jumps into a cartoonish villain’s spacecraft to escape.
SpaceX mission objectives – deploying satellites, completing orbital maneuvers, demonstrating reentry – ALL REPEATEDLY FAILED AT HUGE COST.
- Satellite deployment: FAIL (door wouldn’t open)
- Orbital maneuvers: FAIL (spacecraft started spinning)
- Controlled reentry: FAIL (lost contact, uncontrolled landing)
- Mission completion: FAIL (lost vehicle)
Repeatedly calling big failures a success makes accountability impossible…
When Jacksonian levels of “regulatory corruption” are complete, you see someone appointed whose personal wealth increases when he directs public contracts to the FAILING company he’s invested in, fleecing taxpayers.
The corruption is structural and designed into the position like making America the 1830s again.
Trump gives government agencies to financial stakeholders. Same spoils system as Jackson, higher stakes.
The immorality of the appointment is the model.
- He’s paid SpaceX over $50 million for Polaris program missions
- SpaceX refused to release him from NDAs to disclose exact amounts
- He processes payments for SpaceX’s Starlink through Shift4
- Shift4 invested $27.5 million in SpaceX in 2021
- Isaacman is keeping his ~25% stake in Shift4 as NASA Administrator
- He benefits from BOTH his personal SpaceX equity AND Shift4’s SpaceX position
- Isaacman reported “more than $5 million in capital gains from an investment in SpaceX”
- That’s just the appreciation – the actual investment value is undisclosed and likely much higher
- He did NOT divest this equity – Senate Ethics Committee said it wasn’t required
Mission success or completion ends the revenue stream, while delays and cost overruns extend it. As an equity holder in SpaceX, Isaacman’s stake increases in value the more money NASA pours into SpaceX failures, inverse to results. Successful completion on schedule actually REDUCES his benefit by ending the contracts.
That’s the perversity of Trump “success is not an option” mission culture.
A SpaceX equity investor just took over NASA to run it into the ground.