Elon Musk faces doubts about whether he can still deliver. Starship stuck the landing.

• SpaceX made history as it returned its Super Heavy booster to its launch site in Texas.
• For Elon Musk, it was a chance to prove the doubters wrong — and he did.
• Missed deadlines and issues across his companies have raised concerns about his ability to deliver.

It was a moment for the history books. As launches.

Commissioner Gretchen Newsom expressed concerns over Musk’s political posts, including about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s recent hurricane responses and working conditions at SpaceX.

‘Never bet against Elon’

Musk’s latest feat at SpaceX shows he still has the ability to accomplish things that would have once seemed impossible.

On a 2021 episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Musk described the difficulty of the task he had set himself. “We’re talking about catching the largest flying object ever made on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It’s like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger,” he said, referencing a scene from the 1984 film in which the main character uses a pair of chopsticks to catch a moving fly.

“Bananas stuff,” as he put it then.

The billionaire will have the opportunity to prove that he can pull off more extraordinary feats soon enough.

Next year, SpaceX will aim to complete a crewed orbit of the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis II mission. In 2026, it is slated to be involved in the Artemis III mission, which aims to land humans on the Moon.

Can he help achieve something that hasn’t been done since 1972, the last time humans landed on the Moon? As his old pal Peter Thiel once said, “Never bet against Elon.”