For all anyone actually knows, Elon is willing to lose a ton per launch just to gain mindshare, kill the competition, and become the only game in town. You know, the Amazon playbook.
For all anyone knows, the Boeing quotes are reasonable and SpaceX's are unsustainable. Nobody actually knows... yet so many are willing to confidently assert SpaceX is obviously cheaper.
> What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development
This is a space race. The day when SpaceX no longer needs to spend "crazy amounts of money on development" may never actually come.
1. Being a viable sustainable business is a requirement for some of SpaceX's NASA and the Space Force's contracts. NASA & the Space Force have access to SpaceX's books and SpaceX has passed these audits.
2. SpaceX has very obviously been spending many billions to build Starlink and Starship and to pay >14,000 employess. SpaceX has not raised significant money for over 18 months, nor have previous raises been enough to cover their fairly obvious expenditures. That money is coming from somewhere, and process of elimination says "profits".
Now, that may just have been the case for IT infra, but, their impression was that at very least their facility had a blank check and costs didn't really matter.
Ironically, they left after getting a promotion while stiffing them on a raise. That, understandably, didn't sit well with them in the light of the rest of the situation.
You can do some napkin math and guess that their flights for NASA are profitable, along with all the other commercial work they do. We don't know if SpaceX as a whole is profitable, but, I'd assume it's not given how heavily they're into R&D at this point. What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development if their cost per kg is actually realized.