Limitless Podcast - Elon Joins SpaceX and xAI in the Biggest Merger Ever. Is Tesla Next?

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Musk Industries has done it again. This time, a monumental merger of SpaceX and XAI , threatening a valuation of $1.5 trillion. We discuss Elon Musk's vision for space as an AI development hub, the cost-saving innovations from the Starship program, and potential impacts for Tesla shareholders. Plus, we explore the competitive landscape and what this merger means for the future of technology and investment.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------TIMESTAMPS0:00 SpaceX and xAI Merger2:02 Elon's Vision for AI in Space6:18 Synergies Between SpaceX and XAI9:39 XAI's Financial Challenges12:15 Understanding the Kardashev Scale14:16 Steps to Harness Energy in Space22:51 Potential Tesla Merger24:11 How to Participate in the Upside25:57 Competing with XAI and SpaceX28:48 Advantages of Space-Based AI32:42 The Future of Musk Industries------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

SpaceX has acquired slash merged with XAI. They are now one company. Musk Industries has condensed once again. And if you are a shareholder in Twitter, you have now owned Twitter X, XAI, and now you are owned by a space exploration company. This is the largest merger and acquisition in history. No one's ever done anything at this scale before. And the downstream implications of this are fairly huge. The amount of value that's going to be unlocked for public markets once this goes public in the middle of this year, is going to be a really big deal. So throughout this episode, we're going to talk about why this matters and how you can actually make a buck from this. How do you participate in the upside of this merger as it relates to Musk Industries with SpaceX and Tesla and all of the companies that are underneath the umbrella? So EJAS, maybe we'll start with the actual announcement from

Elon himself talking about the merger and why specifically they decide this was the right time to do it. Yeah. So this merger officially makes this company the most valuable private company in the world. $1.25 trillion. It valued XAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion. And if you've been watching the show, you know that there's a rumored IPO of SpaceX. So now that rumored IPO has just got a lot, lot bigger, probably going to be the biggest one that we've ever seen. And on the back of this, the idea here is that XAI investors will get roughly around 0.15

SpaceX shares per share that they invested or got from XAI. So a pretty good deal for a company that is currently already losing money. That's X-AI and SpaceX is kind of like profitable on their way towards profitability. But what isn't quite clear to, at least from face value, Josh, is like, why did this even happen? And how does a SpaceX company and Frontier AI Lab makes sense to merge? And Elon does a really good job of explaining his core thesis in this post, which is simply he's going all in on space AI data centers. Now, you and I have gone back and forth a lot on this thesis. And what we've ultimately landed is that space is the most cost-efficient and performant place to train AI models.

Now, does it exist today? No. In fact, prototypes so far are very minimal with a couple of GPUs being out there. Elon is leaning all in on this. And his idea is compute is going to be the most scarce and valuable resource in the future. Why? Because you need it to train frontier AI models. It's been proven with the amount that is investing in Colossus 2 and Colossus 3 is data centers on Earth. And if you kind of like scale this out towards like say a decade or decades long timeline, it kind of makes sense that the winning AI models are going to be ones that have the cheapest tokens per cost. And so his bet is it's going to be in space. Why space? Because you can harness the entire energy of the sun. It is natural cooling. And ironically, you have so much space in

space. Yeah, it's like how many megatons of mass can you get into orbit? And that's what SpaceX is doing. So the idea is that SpaceX has the launch capability to send AI data centers into space. In addition to the Starlink constellation, in addition to the moon and the Mars missions that they're planning, they have basically the highway to get AI into space. The problem is that building AI on Earth isn't that horrific. It's challenging, but like people are able to do it. And the cost of getting AI into orbit is far more expensive than it would be on Earth, so people don't do it. With the Starship program, as they're able to launch the Starship in a reusable way, the cost per kilogram to orbit will decrease to an amount that it will be economically unviable to build AI data

centers anywhere else, but outer space. And that's the bet that SpaceX is taking, that they will be able to work with XAI to build these data centers and get them into outer space and build the AI in space plan. And I loved Elon's ambitious mission that he outlined in the acquisition post, talking about, like, ascending the Kardefs scale, which we'll get into a little bit later. And it feels like a sci-fi futuristic mission where actually in this post, he describes what it looks like to build a small base on the moon and to send satellites from the moon in order to get to 100 terawatts of energy per year. This unbelievable scale that he's planning to build this thing at, and it's hard to read it and not feel like you're reading a sci-fi novel

because of how futuristic this sounds. But he's very serious. And I think the market is reflecting that and how high this is being priced already before it's even gone public. Do you want to know how much it will cost currently to send us into space roughly? Oh, please tell me.

Because SpaceX, they have a ride share program, right? Okay, listen, I would never ask a woman this, but I'm going to ask you this. How much do you weigh in kilograms, specifically, please? In kilograms. So I just did the math and it's about 86.2 kilograms. Okay, so I'm around 85. So let's call it one.

We call it 170. Let's call it 170. All right. That's 170. For those of you who aren't watching this, there is a right share program, but a very different right share program that you're used to on SpaceX's website that allows you to calculate how much it is to send a particular weight into space right now.

And right now to send Josh and I to host Limitless to be the first podcast in outer space, lower orbit space. It is $1.2 million. Now, that sounds like a lot of money. Of course it is. We don't have that money to splurge right now. But back in the day, a decade ago, how much did that cost? How much would this have cost, Josh? Probably billions. It would have been billions of dollars. And this is cheating because this doesn't include life support systems, which are probably going to quadruple that cost, maybe even more. But if you just pushed our bodies into a box and put it on a starship, that's what it would cost. And that is several orders of magnitude more. Like that would have been billions of dollars. And now a single individual can actually pay for that. And as Starship becomes economically viable or reusable, that price is going to go down significantly. So it's not only for AI and space. There's so many other things that you'll be able to send, like the Starlink direct to sell terminals that will actually replace companies like Verizon and T-Mobile, AT&T, because it will work

directly with the cell phones. And it's rumored that this year, the iPhone 18 Pro is going to have compatibility with the Starlink direct-to-sell network. Yeah, so actually, I have this post from Brett Winton at Ock Invest here where I think he really beautifully describes the synergies between the two companies. And he makes two big points. One, which we've already made, which is they're placing the big bet on compute. And Elon thinks that the number one way to get the most compute per dollar spent is going to be in space. And by merging SpaceX, the cheapest way to get mass into space, plus Starlink that you mentioned earlier with his satellite constellations to train AI, GROC will eventually end up becoming the best model because of scaling laws with compute. So that

that's the compute argument. But then if you look at it from the XAI perspective, you know, what does the model got to benefit from this? Rather than thinking about it as being the frontier AI model, think about what comes downstream from that. If you think, if you put yourself in the shoes of like a major enterprise on Earth that is making billions and billions of dollars a year, you are only going to want to spend money on the best AI model. Why? Because it's going to be the smartest AI model, which is going to help you end up making the most money. It's kind of like a vector towards projecting how much money you make as a company, no matter what industry that you're in. Now, he predicts, Brett specifically, that this is a $20 trillion enterprise opportunity for

XAI that they cannot lose. And the reason why he makes this point is if XAI ends up having the best model because they're training on tons of compute from space via SpaceX, then enterprises are most likely going to lock in Grok as their number one model, feed it off of all of the data that they kind of produce back into Grok and it becomes this kind of recursive loop. And I think that that's something that people can't quite piece together, including myself, because it's such an ambitious goal to say, hey, we're going to launch AI data centers in space when we don't even have a single one here.

But Elon predicts that this is going to be explicitly the case, not just in a decade, but in two to three years, which is just an insane prediction. Yeah. Yeah, and it seems outrageous, but then you look at the track history of a company like XAI, and you start to realize, like, what they say they actually mean. And XAI, oh yeah, here we have the timelines of this, October 2022. Elon acquired Twitter for $44 billion.

In March 2020, less than three years ago, XAI was founded. This company did not exist while companies like Anthropic and Open AI have existed for far longer than that. XAI raised a bunch of money in 2024. then by July it has completed its super cluster, which took it 122 days. And Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, is on record saying, generally this takes 18 months to do, and they did it in 122 days.

So this unbelievable rate of progress. And you see from July 2024 to January, 26, they went from zero to a $230 billion valuation, a quarter of a trillion dollars. And this is a result of their ability to engineer things faster and more efficiently than everyone else. And in this game that we're playing, in this race to superintelligence,

the company and the entities that can deploy the resources fastest and most efficiently are going to win. And SpaceX and XAI have this unique advantage that they're able to build actual hardware in the real world that is done at a rate that other companies just can't compete with. Dude, I'm just thinking of Larry Ellison's investment in XAI.

Do you remember that email exchange that due to some court case, was made public. Yeah, he was like a billion, maybe two, whatever you think. Yeah, yeah. It was actually a text message. Elon messages Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, and he goes, hey man, would love to have you as an investor in this.

And Larry goes, sure, I'm in for $2 billion, question mark, thumbs up. And Elon says, honestly, I think you should throw in like double this. It's a great opportunity. And Larry just responds with, sure. And now like two years later, that's a 2.2x return already on his investment. So that's like probably one of the greatest individual trades so far. But yeah, like the rate of speed that this has happened, Josh is just pretty honestly insane. And I kind of like puts into perspective, like I remember when he took over X and then X became acquired by XAI.

Back then it seemed like a shocking thing. And now we have like that being, those two entities being completely consumed by this one entity, which is just kind of like crazy to think about. I kind of, okay, I'm really bulled up right now. I just want to take literally 60 seconds to kind of ground myself. XAI isn't making enough money to pay for itself, right? So there are the camp of people, Josh, that are kind of arguing that this is just kind of like a way for Elon to save his investors' money. To give you guys an insight into the numbers,

XAI is currently burning about a billion dollars a month. Now, there's a lot of reason for that because it's capex spend or training or creating data centers and also training their models, etc. and they're only making around $500 million per year. So they're losing quite a lot of money. That ratio is much larger than, let's say, what Anthropic is losing a year or Open AI is losing a year. But the idea is, once they have enough compute,

they will end up having the best model. And I think that's what this entire merger is about. It's a big bet, but if it pays off, it's going to pay off massively. Yeah, I was going to say, no other AI lab is making money yet. In fact, no one's losing more money than Open AI. So X-A-I really isn't in a bad position. In a way, this gives X-AI the advantage that Google has to some extent where they have access to a larger balance sheet now. And they can afford to make bolder bets because they can not only raise more money, but deploy it more efficiently.

And not every decision is existential. We're seeing a lot of issues, particularly with Open AI, because it's just difficult to fulfill their debt obligations on time. And giving yourself a larger war chest and more resources in order to, to handle the profit-generating aspect of these companies is going to be hugely beneficial. And I mean, here we have a post. I would love for you to kind of walk through because what it actually looks like if the optimists win, if they're right. And I guess to preface this post, maybe I'll just explain the Cardishev scale, which is interesting and what this reference is. The Cardishap scale is basically three types of civilizations. Type one is a civilization that

could harness the amount of energy on its own planet. So that's if Earth can harness all the energy within us. If we have nuclear reactors that can convert all this nuclear material to energy, that is type 1. Type 2 is harnessing the amount of energy from the star in your galaxy. And then type 3 is to harness the energy of the entire solar system. Elon has a plan to reach type 2, which is funny because we are less than 1% of the way to type 1. So what is the plan to reach type 2? Please walk us through what that looks like. Without sounding too much like a sci-fi novel. Less than 1% for type 1 sounds crazy, but I don't know if I want to ever reach or live in a world where it is 100% for type 1. Are we all just going to be fighting for scraps at that point?

Like, I don't know. I kind of have maybe like a dystopian. Do you know? Type 1 would be amazing abundance. Like imagine a world in which we had essentially infinite energy because we could harness the amount. But is that coming directly from Earth, Josh, in a way that like doesn't like other people don't suffer? Or am I misunderstanding that? Yeah. So like imagine that we had nuclear reaction. at scale that can turn the small trace uranium in your backyard rocks into energy to power your entire house to heat all the roads in New York City so we don't have to stretch through the snow for the last month. So it's economically efficient. It's Cotashev type 1. Okay. Exactly. Yes. And

that would be a downstream effect of unlocking abundant energy because abundant energy solves so many the societal problems that we face. So this is a good thing. Right. Right. So yeah. Okay. So it sounds like Elon is kind of like given up on him personally accelerating type 1 and is moving straightforward to capitalize on type 2 because he has the means to do so and the only space company that can put out mass there for a cheap enough cost. So I call this a product roadmap, which Elon retweeted and confirmed. This tweet goes, step one is to move AI off Earth and into space. Step 2 is to use Starship specifically to build AI orbital data centers. Step 3 is, to make space the cheapest place to run AI, which is, again, the thesis for this entire merger.

Step four, expand manufacturing to the moon. Josh and I have spoken about this before on a previous episode. We're talking about crazy sci-fi things, like mass drivers to propel satellites even further into space so that we can get close to the sun and harvest more energy per mass that's being pushed out. And then finally, step five, a very easy one. Harness the entire sun at civilizational scale, which of course is the end goal for Karashev, type 2. Now, this sounds like theory right now, and some people might point out that, like, hey, it's just a merger, but we're still going to wait two to three years until this thing is actually real. Yeah, chill, bro, we're not harvesting stars. It's just two companies merged today. And I agree. Like, I agree. That is true to an extent. But it's not like Elon and SpaceX hasn't already started taking steps towards fulfilling this. As you know, there are new Starship launches that are coming out. We've got an upgraded booster system.

to launch this rocket into space and we have the new Starlink satellites that are going to be sent out soon, which I believe are like 2.5X the performance structure. You definitely have a better stat than me about that. Per launch, Starlink V2 versus Starlink V3, Starship compared to a Falcon rocket. Each Starship launch will be 20 times the output

of a current Falcon 9 launch. So it's about 20 times multiple on the amount of internet that will be provided per launch. Wow, that is huge. Huge. And in addition to that, those V3 satellites have much more powerful direct-to-cell connectivity. So it enables a world in which people who have a Verizon cell plan may not need it because you can just get service anywhere from the Starlink satellites. And they're going to need a tremendous amount of bandwidth to do that. But the, I forget how many terabits for launch it is with Starship is going to be enough where if they can do that at scale and they can launch as they're projecting, then the network becomes incredibly powerful very quickly. That's insane. That's insane. So I remember reading somewhere yesterday where Elon, if he's able to deliver on the millions of satellites that he wants to create the constellation that will basically act as the AI data center in space, that will result in about 100 gigawatts per year to train. That's only in like the nearest time schedule, so like three to five years. But after that, he's planning to multiply that by a 10 or 100, 2 terabytes. So about 4.5. 50 to 100 terabytes, which is just a gargantuan, terawatts, sorry, terawatts, which is just an insane amount of energy. But to go back on my point, also, just quick point for reference. The United States

currently generates 1.3 terawatts of energy annually. All right. So he's going to 10x that. Of the entire United States is the plan, correct? That's, yeah. And I guess his argument there then is like, we can't do this on earth because it's going to come at the cost of other people's daily livings and requirements for energy. So his idea is just kind of offload that interspace so that it doesn't affect any of the water resources, minerals and all that kind of stuff that would be required to reproduce the same type of effects on Earth. So he filed a request, or rather a proposal, I don't know what the difference is, with the FCC to spin up the first million satellite constellation. I don't know how soon he's going to spin that up, but if he's

projecting two to three years where this is going to become the norm, then I'm guessing he's aiming to do this within the next year and a half. Or is this an Elon prediction, Josh? What do you think? It's an Elon prediction, but the way that these scales work is it can happen, it happens very quickly. Like when you look at an exponential chart, the rate at which goes vertical is very quick. So if you miss a window by a year of your prediction, you could be off by a significant amount, but it will catch up very quickly. So if it's not 2028 and it doesn't look like it's going to be even close, there's a world in which 2029, it actually happens because the way that these things scale. So I think it will happen.

And in order for them to achieve this AI data center thing at scale, the current trajectory needs to be about 10,000 launches per year. And a major airline, they fly about 100,000 airplanes per year. So if you think in terms of that, if you can get to one-tenth the output of an airline, then at that scale, you can get the cost per kilogram to orbit low enough that it becomes economically inefficient to train AI anywhere else but outer space. And like you mentioned, it offloads a lot of the burden that humans face. If we don't go to space, the impact that AI training will have on society will continue to grow.

The amount of grid strain it will have is going to continue to grow, the amount of footprint that it's going to consume in terms of resources, in terms of instability, in terms of just dealing with legislature to get it built will grow at a crazy rate. And this offsets all of those problems and removes the burden and places it into outer space. And I think for that alone, it's a huge win for everybody. Yeah. Wow. That's insane. So I'm going to lay out the stack that is created by the merging of these two companies, Josh, and let me know what I miss.

But the way I have it in my head is SpaceX is basically going to be the literal physical launch pad to get these satellites and data centers out into space. And then the satellite specifically, so Star Lake in this case, will be the connectivity layer. So you're going to have satellites basically beaming data to train AI models, GROC presumably, and maybe whoever else wants to pay for the service, but GROC primarily out there. And then you have compute back on Earth

provided by Colossus 2, Colossus 3, and presumably Colossus 4, 5, and 6, which kind of like handles the Earth's resources to train GROC 5 there. And then you have the model GROC 5, and then you have the distribution through X the social media platform. Am I missing anything?

There's a lot going on there. I think this might be a good time to introduce the third company of Musk industry. trees, which is Tesla. And we see here in this post from Beth Jayzos about the like convergence of the three and particularly how they're going to relate to one another. And I think if I could summarize this even more so than what we're seeing here is that XAI is the intelligence. XAI turns the sand to thought. And then Tesla powers that and embodies that through Optimus robots through cybercabs. It gives it a physical body in which it can live in. While XAI exists as the orchestration layer,

So once you embody this AI, XAI can also orchestrate millions of these humanoid robots to do something valuable and productive. And then SpaceX is the expansionary layer that takes all of these resources that have been generated here on Earth and sends it into outer space, which has a few benefits. The first is that it's much more economically viable to improve the intelligence of these models out in space. And then it's also an unlock in terms of exploratory value. We can send humanoid robots to the moon at scale. you have access to low Earth orbit networks, you get all of the benefits that come from having all of this untapped real estate and untapped energy source, which is just being closer to the sun and being able to deploy solar at scale to reach the energy requirements to actually train

these models at scale. So it's this unbelievable convergence that's happening between these two companies. I'm sure Tesla will play a huge role. And it's going to be so hard to compete with this at scale. My God. I have a question for you, Josh. Yeah. Do you think Okay, what are the odds that Tesla merges with this new SpaceX XAI entity? I would like for them to be high, and I think they're probably somewhere around 50%. But I don't think that it's likely now, given that SpaceX has chosen to merge with XAI. This benefits investors, generally speaking, because when companies are spun out of each other, the net is generally worth more than if they exist as a conglomerate.

We see this at Google, where Google's. assets are actually worth a lot of money. And if you spun out Waymo, it would probably trade at a pretty large premium. But because they're all compressed under one roof, they do get this discount. I think if I had to bet, I would say by the end of this year, SpaceX is public and it trades separate from Tesla. Okay. I'm going to take the opposite side of that. I think that Tesla and SpaceX might merge, will merge this year, and it might actually happen pre-SpaceX IPO. And I hope you're right, because that would be so awesome. Yeah, it's going to be one equity instrument that you can basically invest in to get exposure

to all of Elon's efforts. Well, nearly all. It doesn't include NeuroLink until that it inevitably gets acquired by friggin' X or something. But until then, this tweet actually lays it out pretty well, or the hypothesis, he goes, The real genius is this. Elon is effectively running what's called a dual track. A dual track is when a merger and an IPO are prepared simultaneously, creating maximum competitive pressure. He's referring to a merger between SpaceX and now Tesla. Tesla shareholders who would ultimately have to sign off on any deal are then faced with a stark choice. Disapprove the deal

and suffer a catastrophic outflow of Tesla holders because they're going to be selling to get into SpaceX XAI or approve, some regardingly, a merger with epic dilution. I don't know why it would be, dilusive actually, and avoid the Tesla Exodus to SpaceX XAI. This maximizes shareholder buy-in. Brilliant. Now, I think some of this is tinfoil hat, but if I think back to a tweet that I saw Chamath post mid last year where he predicted that this merger between SpaceX XAI would happen and everyone laughed at him, including myself, now I'm kind of like maybe this will happen and he believes that there's a strong chance that it will.

I certainly hope so. So maybe we can answer the question now of how do you actually participate in all the subside that we're describing? Because clearly, I mean, XAI is private, SpaceX is private. They will go public, but it's difficult to acquire shares. So what are the ways you can get involved?

I think the first one is through Tesla stock. What we have on screen is a post from Elon who says, I've mentioned something like this before, but if any of my companies go as public, we will prioritize other long-time shareholders of my other companies, including Tesla. Loyalty deserves loyalty. So I think that's stating it at about as clearly as you can get. If you want access to the upside, the only public instrument you can really own right now is Tesla stock.

And the hope is that there will be some preference for the shareholders in addition to just owning shares of an amazing company. The other interesting way that you can get involved is through another company who just so happens to own quite a bit of share. shares of SpaceX stock, which is actually Google, believe it or not, Google owns seven and a half percent of SpaceX. It's one of the largest shareholders on the balance sheet. And that's in addition to owning about 15 percent or 14 percent maybe of anthropic stock. So Google has kind of become this holding company for major AI labs in that if you want access in public markets, then your best bet is either by SpaceX or by Google. And those seem to be the, ironically, the two companies that I am most bullish on. I just, we released an episode on bankless earlier

this week talking about why we're so bullish on those companies. And those are probably the ways that I would suggest if interested, getting some level of exposure to this prior to IPO. Yeah, Google is one of the greatest investment entities of our time, if they weren't considered one of the top technology companies. It actually brings up a question that I want to, kind of proposed to us, Josh, which is, how would other frontier AI labs theoretically compete with this new entity? They're going to have all the compute in the world that they could desire. They're going to have first rights of access to this compute because SpaceX is the only one

launching satellites into space for cheap enough cost. And then they're going to use the scaling laws to make GROC into the biggest beast ever. Now, granted, all of this is theory right now because we haven't seen a new GROC model in kind of a while. Rumen to be a new model released this month, actually. But assuming the scaling laws prove effective, which is what Google's Gemini actually proved, then, you know, how did they get beat? Open AI doesn't have access to their own space company that could get access to this. They're either going to have to pay SpaceX a huge premium or go with someone like Blue Origin, Amazon,

maybe bullish Amazon as well there. And even in the absence of space-based data centers, the XAI team currently has the largest coherent training cluster. They've been deploying these GPUs faster than any other company. And it feels that on a raw compute, raw intelligence level, XAI has already won. And kind of similar to Google, where they have these TPUs, and they have this accelerated compute, and they have the cap table to weather the storm in a way that other companies cannot. We see XAI already subsidizing everything. They're offering ads and they're trying to claim percentage points of innovations that's made on the platform. And Google has the balance sheet to subsidize this. So it's going to be really difficult to

compete in the absence of space with space data centers and with the Tesla free ride to outer space. That's going to make things incredibly difficult. And it seems like the only real solution that they have is to, one, move faster, but to just create unbelievably great products that can compete with XAI, like to build a moat as strong and as tough as possible, as fast as you can, so that users and customers, they don't want to leave.

But those incentives to leave are going to grow very, very strong as a company like XAI kind of realizes his final form, deploys these at scale, and just continues to build superintelligence at a rate that I'm not sure any company is able to match. Yeah, intelligence just becomes a function of compute, I guess. So it all comes down to compute. Yeah, it's an energy problem.

The more energy you can throw at these chips, the greater the intelligence is. And there is seemingly no limit to where that ends. The person who collects the most amount of energy and the most amount of chips wins. Tesla is building their own chip fab. Tesla has the battery infrastructure. They have the solar panels. And now they have a company that can actually take that into outer space and leverage the benefits that come with space, things like eight times more efficiency on solar panels

and sun synchronous orbit where you can actually sync up your satellites to never go out of the sun's rays and to stay in the light side of orbit for like perpetually. So there's a lot of huge advantages that come from this run by the best operator in history. And it's like you're really fighting an uphill battle here. Josh, I have a question for you before we run up the episode. Let's give it till 2030.

and we assume that SpaceX IPOs, and this may be with or without a Tesla merger, what's the valuation of that entity? Without a Tesla merger, there's probably a clear path to $5 trillion. With a Tesla merger, there's probably a clear path to $10 trillion. The reasoning behind that would be by 2030, they should have starship working at scale. The cost per kilogram to orbit should be low enough where, it becomes economically inefficient to build AI anywhere else but space, and SpaceX owns a total monopoly. They'll also have the value of the Starlink network mostly realized by then, where they'll

have deployed enough Starlink V3, probably be four V5 satellites into space, that they will be able to network the entire globe at a level that competes with Verizon and all of the other cell providers. And then Tesla by that time, we'll have Optimus at scale. We'll have cybercabs at scale. We'll have displaced a lot of the physical labor in the country, or at least to some extent by then. And Optimus should be ramping up production by then to a point where the cost per optimist is $20,000, $30,000. And the cost per task in the workforce goes down significantly. And these companies are really going to move the GDP of the world higher.

And as that GDP rises, so does the market cap of these companies. And there really is no limit at the last. limit of what these companies can scale to. It's going to be unbelievable. Yeah, I don't know if I could prescribe a number to the market cap, but I think it will be the most valuable company in the world. Certainly. Who's the most valuable company in the world right now? It's Nvidia. Why? Because they produce the role bones to train AI models, GPUs. If GPUs end up getting replaced by orbital satellites produced by SpaceX themselves, then I don't really see how like Nvidia maintains its position is number one. And in addition to this, they'll own the number one distribution network

through X specifically, number one model with XAI. And if the merger goes ahead with Tesla, physical embodied AI as well, the raw components and bear those, the batteries, like you said, that is needed to power this entire infrastructure, kind of probably the most ambitious thing ever. This is literally sci-fi in the making that is materializing right now. The fictional character that kind of springs to mind immediately is Tony Stark. This is Musk Industries live and well and actually materializing. This is the craziest timeline and it's only the start of the second month of the year. I'm exhausted. I haven't slept. It's really exciting because the world actually is materially changing for the first time in a very long time. Like we haven't had progress

like we're on the verge of since the late 1800s, early 1900s. and these companies have a very clear path to get in there. And I think there is this mispricing happening where a lot of the expectations and valuations are based on the past 20 to 30 years of progress. That's why Tesla is trading at 1.3 trillion relative to a company like Google at 4 plus trillion or Nvidia at 4.5 trillion. And it seems like there's a lot of catching up and repricing that needs to happen as we move forward.

And I suspect the SpaceX IPO will be one of the first versions of kind of like a slap in the face. Like, oh, wait a second, this world that we're going to isn't like the world that we're coming from. And as a result, things need to change. Things need to be repriced. And we're probably going to see that significantly happen as SpaceX and XAI go public. So that's going to be incredibly exciting, along with all the other amazing stuff that's happening this year. It's just this week, even this week, every week feels like a month. The progress is happening so fast. It's tough for us to keep up with. So thank you for listening and keeping up with it with us. It's been really fun to just continue to cover all this crazy news as it has.

happens. And there's more coming this week, too. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot more coming. So before we started recording this episode, there are strong rumors that Anthropics are going to be dropping a new model that is going to be even better than Opus 4.5 at coding. And then yesterday, we got a new coding interface from OpenAI. So we're going to have an episode that's probably going to compare the two with some really awesome demos so you guys can actually figure out how to use these things. Really stoked for this. We had the merger news that we covered today, obviously, and we just put out an episode on MaltBook, which is the air-only social media platform. It's a banging episode. We had so much fun creating it. So please go check it out. We also broke 30,000 subscribers,

but we gained another 200 over the last like day and a half. So the episodes have really been paying. It tells me that you guys are really enjoying it, but still 80% of you aren't subscribed to us. So if you enjoy this content, and if you want us to keep producing this content, and if you want to get access to this type of content, please give us a subscribe. Turn on notifications. If you're not watching YouTube or wherever you listen, listen to this, give us a rating. Anything helps out so much. We also have a banging newsletter.

We have a killer essay that egotistically I wrote this week. It's great. I read it. It's great. I can vouch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So super fun piece. We're trying to be anywhere and everywhere and deliver you the best content that we can with our thoughts and insights each and every week, three to four episodes a week. Stick with us. And we're going to go into the biggest AI show. show ever. Thank you guys for listening. And we'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.