Limitless Podcast - Making Sense of SpaceX's First Earnings Report
Episode Date: August 6, 2026🔒 Check Out Our Sponsor: LEDGER AGENT STACK 🔒https://developers.ledger.com/?utm_source=Audio&utm_medium=Podcasts&utm_campaign=Limitless------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️EMAIL US: ... info@limitless.fmNEWSLETTER: 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/------Space just dropped it's first earnings report, showing strong Starlink growth and the company’s expanding role in AI compute and infrastructure.In the context of heavy capital spending, the NVIDIA partnership, and share unlocks, short-term volatility is anything but an absolute guarantee. Our main concern though: what does the real, long-term future look like?------TIMESTAMPS0:00 SpaceX Earnings4:48 Unlocks and Pressure6:00 Data Center Economics7:57 GPU Demand Explodes12:13 Gigawatts14:42 Training the Next Generation17:09 Starlink22:33 We Try to be Bears23:36 Cautious Bulls28:44 Repricing Risk29:56 Closing------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosuresJosh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Last week on this show, we said August 4th was the day that SpaceX had to prove themselves.
The first earnings report, every analyst on Wall Street basically was bearish.
They said that Elon Musk could not pull this off, that this thing is a money vacuum.
Turns out the opposite was the case.
SpaceX absolutely smashed it.
The revenue is up to $7.81 billion, which is 92% year-on-year, which is crazy for the size that they're at.
and Starlink numbers doubled to 12 million subscribers. That being said, the stock is still down
this morning. People are worried about the major unlocks that are happening tomorrow, where
$100 billion worth of SpaceX stocks goes live. But Josh and I are here to tell you why that may not
be the case and why the market could be wrong. Yeah, well, I understand why people are bearish.
Like, he was on the earnings call yesterday, which I sat in and listened to. And he's claiming,
he's like, all right, we're going to build robots with mash drivers on the moon. And we're going to
thousand next to our economy on earth because of it. And it sounds ridiculous. And I was looking
through the numbers. And as I was reading this, I was like slowly starting to inform myself on what
large companies look like. And I just, I want to start with a question too, actually. Do you know
what company had the most annual revenue ever? Like what company is making the most money every year?
This was really surprising to me. Like currently? Like right now? Yeah. Like total revenue per year.
Like who's making the most? I would have to say it is either like an invidia or an Amazon.
not even a tech company. It's it's Walmart. Walmart topped out at $680 billion of revenue,
which seems outrageous. And I mean, it gets into the pricing thing. We're like, Walmart's not the
biggest company in the world. Why is that? Well, because their profit margins are low, their multiples
are lower. But SpaceX and Elon went on this conference call and he said, hey, we actually ran
the numbers. And instead of 2031, by the year 2030, they expect to have a trillion dollars in
revenue. That is 40% or 32% more than the largest company on Earth today.
I think we kind of have to unpack what that looks like because, I mean, that is a tremendous
amount of value given the fact that they actually just reported a net loss of half a billion
dollars, which is an improvement, but still a net loss. You could kind of break down the
company's earnings report into these three pillars. First, it is connectivity, which is like Starlink
and all of their satellite situations. Then they have AI, which was up 250% year over year.
And then they had space, which was up 30% year over year. And I mean, the important thing that
you noted, you guys is the 32% growth year over year is,
sorry, 92% growth is huge because for companies with $30 billion of annualized revenue,
typical growth is like 5, 10%. So clearly they're doing something right.
I was keeping an eye on his social media yesterday. And one of the things that he said is
we are on track for $100 billion ARR by the end of this year, 2026. Now, the only other company
that I've heard that projection being made for is Anthropic. Now, when I look at SpaceX and look at
Anthropic, I'm saying, okay, they may be competing in the same sort of field, but I don't think
SpaceX is quite caught up on the AI side, but that's what most people miss.
SpaceX isn't just an AI company. They are a computation company. They're the largest
arsenal, largest GPU footprint of Nvidia GPUs, might I add. And he signed a major
partnership of Jensen, which we'll get to in a second. But he's the only person that's
launching these things into orbital space. You know, he has the largest data center cluster
on Earth. And he's also doing the Starlink connectivity thing. So all of these are different
revenue drivers. And what I like about this report is he's proved a lot of the bears wrong simply
by the numbers. Let's actually like walk through some of these numbers, right? So revenue. The estimate
was $6.93 billion. He smashed it by earning almost a billion dollars more than that, right? And then
when you look at earnings per share, people were like, okay, they're going to be like at a net loss of
26 cents per share. Nope. Came in at 0.09. Is it profitable yet? No, but it is still much better than people
expected. Then the net income, as you mentioned earlier, people were expecting a $2 billion loss.
He shaved that down by 3x to half a billion dollars. Now, again, is this the best earnings report
that they could have come up with? Probably not, but these things take time for a Kappex heavy
company, such as SpaceX. I'm really impressed with what they've been able to pull off. And I think
like it just kind of like shows that Elon has pretty crazy statements. I remember when he pitched
like the Starlink robots,
GPUs in Space Vision about,
what was this, like 12 months ago
for the GPUs in space.
And everyone thought he was absolutely insane.
But every step he takes,
every earnings report he takes,
we're starting to see a different picture start to form.
And I'm not saying he's there yet.
I just want to be very clear.
Like I don't think we're anywhere near there,
but this is a step in the right direction.
And I think that, you know,
after listening to the call yesterday
and after seeing a lot of the reporting,
I think he might be there.
But of course,
something that people are worried about
is the unlock that is happening tomorrow. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, Josh,
but like, $100 billion is flooding the market. Yeah, well, I mean, there's going to need to be
a lot of shares that are moving because SpaceX is also among the most shorted companies in the
marketplace right now. So there's a lot of short positions on it. There's a lot of people that are
bearish. There is a lot of unlocks happening. Whether or not those unlocks become Polish or
bearish is TPD. But my expectation is like, I don't really care. Like, as an investor over a long
period of time. Like, okay, maybe it sells off for the next couple days. Maybe it sells off for the
next week, maybe the next month. But I mean, the numbers are pretty amazing. And you could see what
people are getting scared. You mentioned the Cappex. CapEx was 39% higher than what people thought.
It came in at just under $18.5 billion, which NASA's like annual budget is $25 billion. So they
spend almost the entirety of NASA's budget in a single quarter. That also means that they spend
$2.35 for every dollar that they made in revenue. And you have to ask the question. Like,
where is that going? Why are they spending so much? Because this sounds like lunacy. It's like,
If you imagine a restaurant, you're investing in a restaurant, and they come and they spend $23,000
a night, even though they're only making $10,000 a night.
You say, what on earth is going on here?
This makes no sense.
But then they tell you, wait a second, we're building out new restaurants.
We're building higher profit margin menu items.
And that's kind of what SpaceX is doing on the data center front.
So one of the smaller things that I think a lot of people overlooked is the fact that they
already have a backlog of about $50 billion of revenue that's already signed.
Like, no one even has to pick up a phone and they're collecting $50.
billion just because of their ability to build these data centers. This is where we kind of talk
about data centers for a second, which is their very much an unfair advantage. On the earnings call,
I was listening to their CFO, Brett Johnson, I think his name is. He said that all CAPEX isn't the same.
Sun CAPX is much more lucrative than others. In the case of SpaceX, it's about as lucrative as we've
heard. A lot of companies, let's say you invest in an apartment building and you build this huge piece
of real estate. It takes about 15 to 20 years to pay itself back. SpaceX's data centers paid
themselves back in a single calendar year. So in terms of return on invested capital, it's like
this unbelievable arbitrage opportunity, where it feels like they have this unfair advantage
being that they're the only ones that could build these data centers quickly and efficiently,
and then go off and sell these huge, unbelievably large contracts to companies that can't do the
same. And my favorite quote from the earnings call, my favorite one by far is what Elon was asked
about terrestrial data centers. This is after he concluded about the space data centers, which we'll
get up to in the minute. But the terrestrial data centers, he's like, this is like the New York
Yankees playing in a little league. It feels like they're just night and day difference in terms
their ability to execute on these things. And their return on the invested capital is huge.
You can't buy a Blackwell GPU, period. So that's why people are paying premiums. In fact,
if you are currently signed to a Blackwell contract, you are trying to extend the length of that
as much as you can because if it renews, it's going to renew at double the cost because the cost of
this compute is so expensive. The only people that have
are able to build it at scale as quick as they do is SpaceX. And I mean, return on invested capital
on an investment this large being 12 months, you can very quickly see why their revenue models are
guiding towards something closer to a trillion than where we currently are over the next four years or
so. It's unbelievable. Just to focus on the GPU point for a second, right? Like I think a lot of
people are worried. The Duma's for the AI bubble say that the bubble is primarily formed in GPU
CapEx specifically. So all these trillions of dollars that is being committed and spent on
Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, whatever that might be, is where the bubble is inflating because
these machines will eventually, you know, depreciate. They won't actually be in demand once the
cost of tokens go down, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What we've seen from every single quarterly
earnings report from all of the major hyperscalators, which are the ones that are investing the most,
including or aside to SpaceX. So if you look at Amazon, Google, they're all reporting
record revenue numbers. In fact, all their cloud service provider platforms like Azure, like Google Cloud,
like AWS, not only is their revenue increasing by like, I think it's like 40 to 45 percent
compounded every single quarter, by the way. That's every three months. I really think people
understand how absolutely insane that is. Not only is it compounding their revenue specifically,
but their margins are expanding even more. So they're making more money on the money
that they're earning, which is just like an insanely good business. So Elon saw this and was like,
well, I have more GPUs than any of you, and I'm building these data centers faster than any
of you, it would make sense for us to become like a neocloud service. And that's why he's selling
upwards of $50 billion of AI compute to the likes of Anthropae, Google and whoever that might be
going forward. So he's seen that it's a hugely profitable business. And what I love about one of the
major announcers that he made yesterday is he came out and said, we are going to be exclusive
to Jensen. We're going to be exclusive to Nvidia. And verbatim, he quotes, going forward,
we've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think that the Vera Rubin architecture
is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer and so we're going to be exclusive
to Nvidia. Now, the craziest part about this is what he committed to buying. He is basically
going to double his existing or SpaceX's existing GPU fleet by the end of next year.
I cannot emphasize enough how crazy of an attempt that's going to be.
That is going to be in Nvidia's pocket.
Let's say he pulls this off, right?
Let's say he gets to the 10 gigawatts cumulative worth of GPUs by the end of next year.
That is $200 billion from SpaceX alone in Nvidia's pocket by the end of next year.
Now, let's be realistic.
Let's say like, you know, he's at two and a half gig.
you'll get to three by the end of this year. Let's say he gets to like six gigawatts by the end of next year.
That is an extra $100 billion in invidious pocket. He's going to be his number one customer and he's
taking a massive commitment with Jensen. And this is interesting because a few days earlier,
Anthropics signed this major deal with AMD. They're signing major deals with other cloud service
providers. Elon has basically said, Jensen, if you can guarantee me the allocation, we will take the
compute, and that is my commitment to you going forwards, even when we launched them into space,
right? So I'm just massively bullish on the cloud business, on the compute business that he's
built. I think even if everything falls to the wayside, Elon still has a very profitable
business, and people are discounting that massively right now. This deal is pretty interesting to me, too.
It's because we're seeing a lot of these accelerator chips. We're seeing, like, the training chips
and the TPU chips from Google. And everyone's kind of focused, even Open AI is building their own
vertically integrated chip set. And it's interesting to see SpaceX going the other direction.
They're saying, well, we are going to build their own chips to some extent, but we're also going to work with Nvidia to use their new architecture.
And we've talked a lot about how this new Blackwell era of models is unbelievable.
The Vera Rubin era of models is going to probably be like remarkable.
And SpaceX will be using that exclusively, which is very bullish because then I assume it works both ways, right?
It's like, Nvidia gets this amazing showcase to share with the world.
Like, hey, look what our GPUs can do.
Look how fast they can be deployed.
and the SpaceX team gets a much more tighter feedback loop with the team when it comes to
development of the software architecture, the hardware architecture, and I assume that's going to turn
into like a pretty nice partnership from both of these companies. I mean, both founders love
each other. Both are at the top of their game. It's very exciting to see this happen. And the
tendency to plan eat as you were talking about how many gigawatts they were planning to deploy.
On the conference call, Elon initially said 10 by the end of 2027. And then when people
pressed him by the end of the decade, around 2030, he is guiding towards roughly 20,
gigawatts of power with a floor of 15 gigawatts. So he's like, all right, well, even if everything
goes wrong, we can at least get to 15 gigawatts. For reference, we've talked about this a lot,
but like a singular gigawatts of power is equivalent to roughly 800,000 homes. It's like
cities worth of power. And they're planning to do 15 of these in the next four years. Like,
that's really fast. The other thing is, I mean, Jensen has his own kind of rule of thumb when it
comes to deploying gigawatts of energy, he says you can guide for around $40 to $50 billion of
annual revenue per gigawatt. So if SpaceX does get 15 gigawatts of solar capacity by the end of the
decade, that alone is worth $600 to $750 billion of revenue. And that doesn't include the other
pillars of this company, which are space and connectivity. So there's this like unbelievable bullcase,
even if you disregard all of the other pillars of the business. But in addition to this, there are
these pillars, like AI data centers in space, which again, they are being built with Jensen Huang and
Nvidia. And the idea, I found this really interesting for their AI-1 satellites is they're basically
going to build the same thing on Earth as they are going to be in space. The only difference is they're
going to put some solar panels on this bad boy and send it off into space. So this vertical integration
of the hardware stack as it relates to terrestrial, as it relates to space, it's just remarkable. And then
if they actually figure out how to get payload into space at scale, oh my God. Like you start to put
the numbers together, you're like, wait a second, they actually could do this thing. And like,
what is the stock going to be trading at if they get terrestrial data centers, 15 gigawatts online
in four years? And also, they start putting mass into space at scale. Like, this is it going to be
a pretty huge opportunity? The biggest critique that I hear from a lot of you listeners and that watch
this show is that this vision, this plan is just too insane to pull off. And honestly, like, I agree
with you. But you also have to look at the evidence of things that can actually make the company
money that will help fuel Elon and SpaceX getting to some of the more crazier visions, right?
And one of the main ones is this compute revenue business that he's kind of showcasing and
saying, hey, this thing makes money and we're going to be the biggest bettors on this, right?
We're going to be able to pull this off.
And if he's able to secure that capacity with the likes of Jensen and NVIDIA, and Jetson loves Elon
Musk so much, he will be able to pull this off.
Now, just to kind of translate kind of like what this compute means for Elon, it's not just a way to
kind of like earn money by selling compute to competitors. He's also very much using this to train
some of the best AI models in the world. And of course, like, you might listen to that and like laugh,
but if you kind of like span out the timeline over the next kind of six to 12 months, the only thing
that is consistent across every single model, different model architecture, whatever, like, you know,
different weights that you use, it is compute. You need more compute to pre-train. You need so much more
compute to post-rain, and then you need compute to serve this to people at like perfect speeds
and quality of service. You just need more compute. And in order to do that, there's two things
you need to look at. You need enough capital to buy the GPUs, but you also need enough capital
to buy the best GPUs. Tuakash had an amazing blog post. I don't know if you read it, Josh.
He basically said, the better the GPUs get, the better AI models these GPUs can unlock,
which means that InVidio will basically sell these GPUs to the highest bidder.
Who are the highest bidder is going to be?
I like this example.
There's two companies, okay?
Company A wants to use 100,000 GPUs to cut down a bunch of, let's say, administrative workload at their company by 30%.
That is a really meaningful impact, right?
And they'll save a ton of money and they'll be able to generate millions of dollars.
Great.
But there's a problem.
Company B wants those same GPUs to...
train and cure cancer, right, over a month.
And they know that if they can do a one training run with their data,
they'll be able to cure cancer.
Who's going to bid more?
It's going to be company B.
So these GPUs are like very, very scarce.
And at the end of the day, the people that have the most capital will buy those GPUs
and train the best models.
They'll train the best features, product, services, whatever that might be.
And Elon is at the front of all of this.
It's not even Anthropic or Open Eye.
He has secured the most allocation.
He has the largest arsenal of GPUs, right?
right now. So it goes to say that he could potentially create the best air model. GROC 4.6,
GROC 4.7, and GROC 5 is going to be coming out by the end of this year. And he said it's
going to be trained on all of SpaceX's data, which would technically make it like the best
engineering air model. So there's a lot of these things that are kind of like in the oven.
They're cooking and we don't quite see them right yet, but it's good to be just generally aware of.
I don't know. I'm just very optimistic about like where this could be in six to 12 months.
Yeah, there's a lot of really high quality shots on gold that they're taking.
even if one completely and catastrophically fails,
there's still many others that are doing well.
And it's funny hearing a space company talk about terrestrial data centers.
They're talking about,
like,
they're actively trying to send these things into space
that are actually trying to blow themselves apart.
And it's just like,
how easy is it that you could just drop these things on Earth,
and it's easy,
and the atmosphere is easy to handle.
And it just seems like,
going back to the baseball analogy,
it's like when you go up to bat with, like, a weighted bat,
and then you use, like, a normal bat.
And a normal bat is the data centers that are terrestrial.
And those will probably be used for,
training. When we think about training, where latency matters, those are probably used for training,
the satellite layer where there is like downlink latency happening. That's probably more for
inference where latency matters a little bit less. But we're going to start to see this
star-mind constellation launch as soon as next year with Starlink version 3 being launched as soon
as the next starship. So the plan for the next starship launch is to follow up what they did with
the previous launch, which was get the Starlink B3 satellites into orbit. Now they're actually going to deploy them
put them in orbit, turn them on, make them work. And that takes us to the Starlink part of the
engine, which is pretty unbelievable as well. The growth curve of this service is the about as
pure of an exponential curve as you can get. They double their subscribers year over year. They are now
at 12 million. They just added 1.7 of those 12 million this quarter alone. So it is just a
vertical hockey stick. And I think this is one of the more underrated parts of the earnings report.
Gwen Shawwell, she had a lot or a little bit to say on this as it relates to the
ability to deploy a network similar to a Verizon or AT&T. I mean, currently there's on Earth,
there's about 5.5 billion users of the internet. So they are talking about being the pipeline for
a large majority of that and totally removing dead zones and making it direct to sell.
And the Starlink mobile play, I think, is really interesting. I remember last year we recorded
an episode where they bought a fixed amount of spectrum to start deploying once they have.
Their plan seems to be that they are going to continue to buy these dedicated
pieces of spectrum until they own enough bandwidth to truly compete. And then they have these
ground base stations, which are able to kind of handle a lot of the bandwidth and work in higher
density areas. And Winchotwell, all she said on the call is that they have a foundational
competitive advantage and won't really go into the secrets and strategies that they're going to go
with. But what I expect is that this time next year, on our iPhones, we will have like pretty high
bandwidth internet connectivity. And for that,
to happen that quickly seems like a very bullish thing to me. And it's just like, who wouldn't sign up
for a service that has good internet anywhere in the world with no dead zones? I just went to National
Park the last two weeks. I had no service at all. The only thing connected me was Starlink terminals
here and there, but direct to sell would be such an awesome thing. And the business is growing so quickly.
For context here, I couldn't reach Josh for like six to 12 hours at a time. It was absolutely insane.
Like he wouldn't respond to any of my text. He was surrounded by Sequoias and Redwoods.
I thought he'd, you know, suffer some kind of fatal injury or something like that.
I was, what was that movie, the 100 hours or whatever, where what was it?
Oh, you get lost out there?
Yeah.
I was like, damn, is Josh okay?
Listen, on the, on the Starling side of things, I think the thesis put very simply is in a world
where you have these AI models, these AI agents running 24-7 on GPUs, getting work done,
you need reliability.
And reliability sits in the modern day world on the internet.
internet. Now, you can't have lines going down. You can't have connectivity issues. You can't have
T-Mobile messing up some of their lines. What is some of the most consistent ways of beaming
internet down? Well, you can do it via satellites, right? And I would love to have consistency
with my provider as well. Like, to be honest, like, if I could have an affordable Starlink
connection right now on my phone mobile package, I would move to that because then I could just
use it on the plane or whatever that might be. So I don't think that this is just a temporary
trend. I think this is something similar to AI where everyone's just going to want consistent,
strong, fast access to the internet. And Starlink is a very obvious win. And it goes back to my
earlier point, which is Elon has his hands in a lot of different things. And they're actually
working. They're working well individually, but they're working well together as well. And we're
going to see that in future quarterly earnings report. Right, EJS, you mentioned agents. And speaking of
agents, we have to talk about a sponsor of the show Ledger, because if you are building with
AI agents and you're worried about security, which a lot of people should be. I mean, we've had
a lot of AI models recently that have broken out of their sandboxes. It's a little scary.
An agent with untreked access is very scary. So Ledger has this three-step process to solve
this in which an agent proposes, a human approves, and then a ledger signer enforces.
This technology works with Claude CodeC, Cursor, all of the things that we are used to using.
And it's also open source to be fully audited. Basically, they use this thing called a ledger
agent stack, which has a series of four open source tools.
There's a wallet, there's an enterprise solution, there's a multi-sig, so that you don't get compromised for any of your transactions.
And you could basically just talk to it normally.
You could say, rebalance my wallet, and it'll do all the math and do the transactions on your side while letting you approve and be in the loop the entire time.
So just want to shout out Ledger for a responsible way of building with AI agents.
Thank you so much.
You can find the link to the description down below.
So before we wrap up this episode, Josh, we need to talk about the bear case of all.
of this going on. Now, we've mentioned this on a previous episode. There is a very constricted supply
of SpaceX stock that is available for people to currently trade. And the number one bit of critique is
it's going to flood the gates tomorrow. Actually, as you're listening to this episode, it should be
today on the sixth, $100 billion worth of SpaceX shares goes live. And the big question in everyone's
mind is, where's the buying power coming for this? Because to keep the price at its current level,
you need someone that is buying all of those shares, right?
And what we've seen, and maybe this is reflected in the stock action today,
is people don't believe that that will be the case.
Now, whether they're thinking over a short-term period of time,
whether they're thinking of a long-term period of time, is another question.
If you're common listeners of this show,
you will know that Josh and I think on pretty mid-to-long-term time horizons.
So we're kind of bullish in SpaceX over the long-term.
Over the short-term, we kind of like don't care too much.
We want to kind of like see it as an opportunity to access it.
But nevertheless, it is a concern or worry.
Yeah, no, I understand why people are concerned and worried.
And in fact, I remember viscerally feeling this with the Tesla story.
Because Tesla, a lot of people don't know, was the most shorted company in the stock exchange for two or three years.
Like, everyone was just pounding on.
It was just the most diabolical company ever.
Like, no one was going to.
It was never going to work.
And now I haven't driven a car in like a couple years.
and these seemingly sci-fi impossible things that are sold,
a lot of people are uncertain of their ability to happen.
And that's like totally fair.
There's the key man risk in the sense that like there is a singular person at the helm
who is in charge of driving all this value.
That is a serious risk.
There is the risk on timelines.
Oftentimes these timelines are very optimistic.
Is there actually going to be 15 gigawatts of compute deployed by 2030?
If there's not, what does the revenue look like?
But even if these things are fractionally wrong,
The trajectory of this company is one way. And when I think about other companies, it's like, as a person who has like cash, if you have any cash sitting in a bank account, you have a problem because that cash needs to earn money, otherwise you're going to get outpaced by inflation. And when you think of the places to deploy that cash where the upside is the greatest and most exciting and most aligned with like an optimistic vision of the future, it's hard to find something more interesting and exciting and mispriced than something like SpaceX is. And it's not like things aren't.
working. We are seeing progress. The starship launches you can go and watch. You can literally go to
Texas and sit on the highway and watch them in person, and they get better every time. And the heat shield,
which is the biggest part of rapid reusability, finally works for the first time ever with the last
starship launch. And soon they're going to land both parts of the rocket. And then at the very least,
that means they'll be able to deploy Starlink version three satellites at scale. These things are
already built. It's just a matter of a few more iterations to getting there. The data centers thing,
We saw that they have a tremendous amount of data center capability to build these things quickly.
So they can do it. Can they build 15 gigawatts worth? We don't know. But currently, I mean, I'm looking at the stock right now. It looks like it is trading down at the time of recording right now, about 9% down to $115 as the unlocks are happening today. And that seems to me just fine. It's like, okay, $1.5 trillion. That is about, I don't know, a little more than one-tenth of their expected revenue in four years. It is very highly risky. In the case that they can figure out how to actually convert that into revenue and actually deliver on these times.
timelines. There's no way this doesn't go absolutely nuclear. So it's mostly a matter of if,
not when, or perhaps if and when. It's just, like, I understand. I could understand the case for both
people, um, for the bulls and for the bears. I think just as someone who has a very low time preference,
uh, seeing the progress that's being made and just very clearly mapping that out, it seems very
obvious to me that barring any catastrophic problems, uh, this is just going to be a one way
trajectory up. And sure, there will be bumps along the way. Sure, maybe there are unlocks and it
sells off another 10% for a couple more times. But the reality is that a company, five years from now,
who is just continuing on this trajectory without any of these optimistic outlooks, is worth
more than the company that they are today. And that's just kind of what I'm basing all this off.
There's a keyman risk with all of this, which is, can Elon focus all of his attention to actually
be able to pull this off? Does he have the chops to basically execute on the vision?
that he's kind of laid out on his earnings call,
that's pretty much the main thing
that you have to kind of believe in.
The other thing is, on the point of, like,
below time horizon,
I think that you can equally be very bullish
SpaceX over the long term
and be bearish over the short term.
And that could be an opportunity for you.
It just depends on, like, how you want to frame it, right?
Like, for example, you might want to wait
and see how the share-out unlocks happen
over the next couple of months.
I think something like 25 to 30,
6% of the entire share supply gets unlocked in that period of time. Maybe you'll expect to see a lot
of volatility during that time. And maybe that's like the time for you to kind of like load up to
your point earlier, Josh. Like Tesla was one of the most shorted stocks ever. And it was that case for
two to three years. And maybe we'll see a similar profile for SpaceX. You know, these valuations are
huge. Society is very unaware or uncomfortable with these large numbers. And, you know, we saw the same
transition when we saw the first $100 billion company, right? So, uh, meta,
through this. Uber privately went through this as well. And so we're probably going to see the same
on SpaceX in particular. But I agree with the trajectory in general. I think these companies are
going to do very well. SpaceX has a very bright future ahead of it. And to be honest, in terms of
where the risk curve is, it is on the furthest end out there. Like, Elon could be doing this
with just one company, but he's doing this with like four or five combined into one. And now there's
like rumors that like they might merge with Tesla might become a whole kind of like megacorp type
situation. So if that plays out, there's going to be even more scrutiny that's going to be placed on him.
But overall, I think I am very bullish long term. But maybe over the short term, I'm going to say
that I'm tentative. I'm sitting there with my cash and seeing whether there is a better time to deploy
and we'll see over the next couple of weeks. Yeah, you just maybe don't want to miss the repricing.
I'm looking at that Tesla chart between 2020 and 2021 and how the stock 13xed over the course
for a year as it ripped in like the largest short squeeze ever. If you go to the all-time chart,
that 2020 to 2021 is a pretty violent repricing. And that's just the world coming to grips with
the fact that the technology and the thesis actually played out. In the case that that does happen again,
that's the expectation. But there's lots of reasons to be bearish. I mean, just today, for reference,
there's 911 million shares unlocking. That's $100 billion of potential cell site pressure.
They guided for 39% higher CAPEX this year with no guidance given,
for next year, which is interesting. They didn't guide to where KAPEX is. So that's a huge unknown.
There's the average revenue per user compression on the Starlink side, where Starlink revenue per user
fell 22% as they doubled year over year because they're trying to move into cheaper international
markets. So even though the subscribers are doubling, their revenue per user is decreasing.
So there's a lot of these definitely things to look out for. But on the upside, I think of like
moats and competition, Peter Thiel's the big monopoly guy. They have a monopoly on so many different
industries, even if one of them works. This is a remarkable outcome for a one and a half trillion
company. So that's, I think it. That's the, uh, this SpaceX update. That's the earnings report.
I don't know, trying to be a little sober about how we view this, but like, God damn, there's no
company in the world that's more exciting than this one. It's so sick. Like, okay, sure, the mass
driver's on the moon, like, that's a long shot. That's going to be like, I'll be excited to live through
that and hopefully see that one day. But today, today, Starlink, incredible,
Starship, incredible. Their ability to deploy data centers at scale and
break even after just 12 months. Incredible. There's no one else that can manufacture at the scale.
So just in terms of manufacturing monopolies, it seems to me like there's China and then there is
Tesla and SpaceX. And that's kind of the people who are most able to move the amount of atoms
in a coherent way that generates value. And that is worth a lot. So yeah, I think that's everything.
That's the SpaceX update. This went pretty long. If you listen to this, I, if you made it this far,
like, please let us know how crazy this sounds to you. Like, is this a little too far over indexed on one
inside or is this.
Sober us.
Yeah.
Let's hear it either way.
What's the strategy around SpaceX?
How are we thinking about this $1.5 trillion company?
Because listen, we're going to come back here a couple years on the show and we're going
to reference this episode and be like, told you so.
Or maybe not.
Maybe we'll be poor and maybe Starship will have blown up and everything.
The show wouldn't exist.
But you know what?
We just wouldn't have a camera in front of us.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd have to point off my camera.
So that might be worst case scenario.
But yeah, that's the episode.
Thank you so much for watching.
You does any final part in thoughts before we let everyone go?
Yeah, no.
If you are listening to us in a little bit,
you aren't subscribed to us. Please, please do. It helps us out massively, whether you're on Apple
Music or Spotify. We're on our way to 100K. We're like about to get 70, I think,
subscribers on YouTube, which is exciting. We have a bunch of subscribers on all the other
platforms. So, like, awesome. Thank you for the support. So cool. Welcome to all of you. I think
we added like 2,000 subscribers over the last 28 days. Hello, it's lovely to meet you.
We are putting out shows and episodes about four times a week, but we also have a newsletter that
goes out to over 100,000 people we post twice. One is a long-form essay and the other is
kind of like the weekly recap. But as I was saying earlier, wherever you listened to us,
leave us a comment, give us feedback. We're also on X, DM us. If you have thoughts, if you disagree
with us, we'd love to hear from you even more. Give us a like, thumbs up. It helps us out
massively. And yeah, I guess that's it. We'll see you on the next one.
