Limitless Podcast - SpaceX Stock Crashed. Starship Flight 13 Didn't.

Episode Date: July 29, 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:            [e-mail]:    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 Stock Crash2:30 Bear Case Unpacked5:28 Starship Flight Breakthrough10:14 AI And Compute Expansion16:33 Elon’s Unified Ecosystem17:01 Supply Unlock Risks18:43 Ledger Sponsor Break19:35 Manufacturing At Scale22:00 Long-Term Bull Thesis25:09 Closing Thoughts------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.

Since they IPOed six weeks ago, SpaceX stock has absolutely created. It's down more than 50% from its all-time high. And as we're recording this, it reached a new all-time low of $107 per share. So the question on everyone's mind is, is SpaceX done for? Was it massively overpriced? Will this company make it? Well, this might be a hot take, but I think that the market is incredibly wrong about SpaceX, and I think it's an incredibly mispriced asset.

think about it from two simple perspectives. In order to get the best AI model out there, you need the most energy. Where do you get the most energy from the sun? In order to do that, you need access to space, cheap access to space. SpaceX is the only company that has the advantage here, and they recently had Flight 13 for their new spaceship, which was a massive success, and they launched Starlink V3. It was an incredible test. We're going to get into that. The bullcase and the bear case, it's going to be a sobering take on Limitless, which is, you know, unique for us. on why SpaceX is a generational company. The bulkcase is mostly determinant of just the badass technology that they are producing now,

and I think we're going to talk about that a lot. In terms of actual market sentiment, it's tough, right? It's like the stock IPO, and it was incredible. It went up to $225 per share. That's over $2.5 trillion market cap, which, you know, that's unreasonable. That is so much money. The multiples on the returns in terms of how much revenue they're making are just astronomical. It doesn't make sense.

but it's not just the public market that can't figure how to price this. There's a lot of values from these privately held banks that are trying to put price per share estimates on it, and they still can't figure it out either. I think this is the widest distribution of what banks are kind of valuing the company at. We have Morningstar putting it at $63, and then we have Morgan Stanley on their bullcase putting it at $600. And to me, that signals that this company is mostly misunderstood. People don't know how to value it. They don't know how to value a company that is planning to change the world today. Because a lot of the value is promised in the future. So how do you trade that? What multiples does that trade at? And maybe in order to better understand that we could

talk about the real technology that they're building that's going to get them to this spectacular market cap, because I can be empathetic. I mean, if you bought this a couple weeks ago at 225, it's been a tough ride. I think we're here to provide a little bit of reassurance that like, hey, short term, unsure, but long term, there's some really compelling cases to be made for Y-Starship, for why SpaceX in general, there's going to be a lot of star naming. And in this episode is a really spectacular company and it has monopolies across the board and things that other companies just can't really compete on. I think it's important to lay out the bare case for SpaceX because we've been incredibly bullish about Elon Musk and all of his

companies on this show. And in fact, I think both of us bought the IPO when it did an IPO. So we're in it with everyone. If you're an investor that bought that IPO, we're here with you, we fill your pain. So let's walk through the bad case. Well, I'm definitely also on board We'll get to the bull case a little later. But let's look at the bear case. Let's see what the armchair critics are saying online. The I told you so is. Okay.

So there's a few things happening right now. Number one, the fact that SpaceX was probably massively overvalued. We know that Elon Musk, in order to execute on his vision of turning civilization into a carteshev type one civilization, you need a lot of money to do that. Space travel is incredibly expensive. So he tried to raise as much money as he can. That's what he eventually did. The market is now showing us.

that it wants to kind of reprice it to what it's actually valued at. And so it IPOed at $135. It's now sitting at all-time low at $107. I think as we're looking at our screens right now, it's at like $111 at the time of recording. But another big critic is only 4% of the share supply was revealed or made available for everyone. That is out of, I think it's around 16 billion shares. And I think another one billion worth of shares gets unlocked in about, a week's time, August 6th, I believe, which is two days after their first quarterly report. So there's a lot of things going on here. People are like speculating. Is the Q3 report going to be very good or is it going to be bad? Well, if you look at their financial statements from 2025,

it's kind of sobering. They took a net loss of I think $4.5 billion. The GROC models, as we know, hasn't been able to keep up with the frontier until recently with GROC 4.5. We have a lot of information on that going forward as part of our bullcase. But the point is there is a very low float. And if the stock price isn't able to keep up and maintain its high price on a small float, how do we expect it to do it on a large float? For the rest of the year, I think something crazy like 56% of the rest of the stock supply is aiming to be unlocked.

And you need purchases to be able to support that. So we understand the bear take. But there is also a lot of good things that are expected for this company. And as we said on our ballcase episode around the SpaceX IPO, this is a long-term investment. If you believe that space travel harnessing the sun's energy, training air models on infinite energy is incredibly important. If you believe that robotics, if you believe that Tesla and SpaceX are going to have a merger eventually or that they're synonymous companies run by the same CEO, then you believe that SpaceX is going to be a fundamental and once-in-a-generation-type company 10 years out from now. In summary, I mean, SpaceX is trading at about 80 times sales, which is incredibly high. I mean, Palantir is the next highest. Everyone freaks out about that trading at about 60 times.

This is a huge multiple on the future. Here's the future that they're building. And this is where I want to talk about the kind of technical features of SpaceX as a company. And there's four key pillars that we could talk about here. One being Starship. The second being Starlink, the satellite network above our heads, currently flying right now. The third is the AI opportunity. And the fourth is their ability to manufacture physical things better than everyone. else. So maybe we should start with Starship because Starship launch Flight 13 just happened last week and it was glorious. Starship, for those who are not aware, this is the Mars rocket, this is the moon rocket. Now it's mostly known as the lunar rocket because the plan is to get a Martian base,

get a mass driver, a lot of sci-fi stuff, but to bring it back down to what just happened. Basically, 407 foot skyscraper went into space. This was their 16th attempt and it actually worked about as well as it could have been. So there's a few things that they're testing for each one of these launches. The first is the ability to actually get the rocket into space, which clearly it did very well. The second is to land both of the objects back on Earth. Those went well. We'll talk about that in a second. And the third is the ability to actually distribute payload into orbit. And for the first time ever, that went well with real production hardware. So we've seen these starship launches before. We've got the starship into space and it's

distributed. They use this thing called the Pez dispenser, which is a funny way of just kind of distributing these Starlink satellites. One thing is a thing. Not being noteworthy about this is for the first time ever, Starship launched active Starlink version 3 satellites into space. These weren't dummy units. They were actual real pieces of hardware that are now connected to the Starlink network and have all the capabilities of direct-to-sell and much more bandwidth that we're used to traditionally with these Starlink terminals. The other thing that it did really well and that we're watching on this launch video right here is that it actually landed back on the ocean softly for the first time. You'll notice that it landed so

soft that the rocket actually didn't explode. It was incredible. And it's been floating there. I think it was floating there for like over two days, almost three days, just floating around in the ocean, because it landed so softly it didn't blow up. And then the third is the booster, which we've seen them land before a few times on those arms. It didn't do that this time. That wasn't in the test, but it had a pretty decent landing to the point where they'll be able to test that again. So this launch went about as good as it could have been. You'll notice the heat shields on this video that we're seeing. That did well. A big part about re-entry when you're rapidly deploying these rockets is making sure that you can rapidly deploy these rockets. And the big part of that is protecting your rocket ship from the re-entry burn.

The ship is going like at many times the speed of sound through a very dense atmosphere and it causes a lot of heat. You'll notice that from Flight 10 all the left to Flight 13 all the right, that heat shield is doing really well. So all the signs are pointing towards rapid reusability coming up quickly so much so that the next Starship launch flight, they're going to test the landing of the actual ship. So we're going to get a video probably of the ship actually landing back on those chopstick arms. And I think that's going to be spectacular. So everything so far is working fairly well.

My major takeaway from this is the technology is so far advanced at SpaceX for spaceship flight at least versus any other company. I think their nearest competitor is Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. That Elon is just in a field of his own right now. But I think what a lot of the market investors are thinking right now is, I don't see how this materially impacts my life today. So why should I care about this? How do I price in what these rockets are eventually going to bring to me? I don't have that kind of an effect on myself right now in my day-to-day life.

And I think that's probably a fair take, but it's also in that very same sense, a mispriced take. I mean, look at this thing. This thing is larger, we're launching things that are larger than the Statue of Liberty, for reference here, right? And then we're putting like thrusters on these things, 33 Raptors. and we're just sending these things with massive payloads. I think it's like 5,000 tons into space to release these Starlink satellites. I think it released 20 V3 Starlink satellites, which is more broadband connectivity than Starlink has had in its previous generation.

So it's just insane how much power and innovation is in these actual things. That being said, it's an expensive endeavor and there is a high error rate. But if there's one man to pull it off, it's Elon, and he's repeatedly shown this with his other companies. Tesla and he's done this at SpaceX for over 20 years now. So is the market mispricing this asset? Yes, potentially. But also, this is over a long time horizon type of thing. If you're investing in this and you're looking at this for over like, say, like a six week period, this is probably not the right kind of asset to invest in. This is a long time thing and this is something that I

personally have a lot of conviction on. But one thing to mention about this company is it's not just about SpaceX anymore. It's not just about space in any kind of material sense. It is about AI and a number of different other things. So as we know, SpaceX and XAI merged about, I think a couple of months ago, pre-IPO, and they are currently in ownership of all the GROC models. And GROC actually came out with a new model 4.5 recently. And while GROC 4.5 isn't necessarily a frontier model, it is about 80 to 90 percent of a frontier model. And it's incredibly cheap and it's very fast to use. And in this current world where a lot of enterprises are spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on AI every single year, they're looking at ways

to cut down costs. And Grok 4.5 is a really good way to do that. But the second major thing is Elon has built one of the largest compute clusters for GPUs, better than anyone and everyone. He's aggressively expanding it. He announced, I think, Colossus 4 a few weeks ago. Now, the reason why this is important is the scaling laws haven't changed. More compute, equals better AI models. So if you are Mark Zuckerberg or if you are Elon Musk who have the largest data centers right now, you have a good shot of taking on the likes of Anthropic and open air at some point. And this is shown in the model release cater. So we have GROC 4.5 right now, but in two weeks time, as of this recording, you're going to have GROC 4.7. And then two weeks after that, you're going

to have GROC 5. And each of these models are successfully much larger than its predecessor, which means it's more intelligent and more effective and arguably could catch up to the very capable Fable and METUS models that come from Anthropic and GPD 5.6 that comes from OpenAI right now. So that's another major business unit. Then the final thing is the fact that when you have all this compute, what's the best thing to do with it if you're not training your own models? It's selling it to other businesses. And SpaceX has indirectly become one of the largest neoclouds out there to the tune of, I think

it's like they're selling $60 billion worth of compute over the next, I think, nine to 12 months. Atthropwick is one of their largest purchases paying them $1.25 billion per month. So the point is, whilst it might be losing money right now, while space travel might be a very expensive business, it has all these other business units, which are looking to be incredibly profitable in the near future, and I don't think people are pricing that in. Yeah, the iterative nature of SpaceX is, I think, something that only people who observe it on a regular basis witness. And from the people who aren't there on the outside, it just looks like these products don't really change or evolve much. But when you see them on a per product

basis, how quickly they iterate and how strongly they grow, it's really amazing. When you think about the Raptor engines, the engines that power starship from version one to version three, the efficiency has gone two to three X every single time. The cost has gone absolutely ridiculous in terms of the downward direction. This happens with the Starlink terminal satellites. Like you mentioned, every one of these version three is equivalent to 20 times that of a version two. Same thing happened with their Starlink terminal, they're now on version 5. The new version is 60% more efficient. And all of these increases compound in a way that adds a tremendous amount of value to each one of these verticals. In the case of the AI argument, the AI pillar of this company, I mean,

you mentioned that no one's really able to build as fast as they are and iterate again as fast as they do. They built that Colossus data center in what 160 something days, which is like many, many hundreds of days faster than any other company can. Yeah, by a long shot. and the next one's going up even faster. And the iterative nature of their ability to build hard hardware products is, I think, one of the most compelling values. And it gets kind of into that fourth pillar of manufacturing, where a company who's able to move atoms in an organized way, efficiently and effectively,

is so much more valuable than a company that isn't. Because we've gotten good over the last 20 years at building software really well. And when you think about the most valuable companies in the world, a lot of it revolves around their ability to create software. I mean, look at all the AI labs we talk about on a daily basis. not a single one of them has released any compelling pieces of hardware. It's all just been bits on a screen, and it's really difficult to manage supply chains and move these things around. And that's why we see companies like Anthropic, companies like Google, going to SpaceX and asking them, like, hey, could you

give us some of that compute? We don't quite know how to build it as fast as you do, but we'd love to use it. And SpaceX is the company that can do that. And in fact, if SpaceX was just an AI company, it would be the most remarkable AI company in the world because of its ability to manufacture data centers at scale and to do the things required to do so. Remember the episode we filmed a few weeks ago, or even last week, I think it was, where Elon personally purchased a billion dollars worth of power just so he could plug in a Colossus data center and get that online faster. And their ability to do that at scale is something that's really compelling and highly competitive because they can build anything. And when you think about what comes down the line for these companies, you think about,

in the case of Tesla, we have CyberCab and Optimus, and there is certainly a world in which these new companies are going to merge. We see a lot of the crossover happening where now cyber cabs are equipped with Starlink terminals. And Starship is using the cold rolled stainless steel that is used in Cybertruck. And all of this, this hard physical labor is really going into creating a really compelling company, a really compelling manufacturing story, I think more than anything else. And doing so mostly domestically, there's been this battle to move things back here to the United States. And everything that these companies make is right here on U.S. oil. And it's just do an amazing job of doing it. I do think to a certain degree, you have to be sort of crazy or delusional to believe in the vision that SpaceX and any Elon Musk company is pitching out there.

It's crazy. It is crazy. It's quite out there. And like, I don't blame you for critics that I see in the comments for a lot of our videos where we talk about SpaceX in particular. They're like, you know, you know, this guy's crazy. Like, he's not going to be able to pull this off. And, you know, a normal, sensible person would agree with you. But one thing I will say is if you do believe that.

this vision is able to be executed upon, whether it's Elon, but mostly his team that does a lot of the hard work, then you can feasibly put an investment thesis against not just SpaceX, but any Elon company. I think about it like this. If you purchase SpaceX stock, right, you're basically buying, what is it, a space launch company, a telecom company, you are buying a GPU data center, and you're also buying a frontier AI. All of that comes packaged in wants. And if all of it has to work, if all of it, if one thing doesn't work, then kind of like the thesis gets broken.

But then there's also this other company called Tesla, which is now like a frontier robotics company. It's not just a car company, right? And so what do these robots eventually need? They need some form of a brain to guide them, to scale them in a mass production type of wave. Well, you have GROC models, which are trained on a ton of experimental physical data. And, you know, Elon Musk is working on that.

separately. So at some point, you see a lot of synonymous kind of cohesion between these two companies. So you have to be delusional. Now, to kind of like ground ourselves about, there is a lot of bearish events, if you want to categorize it like that, happening over the next six months until the end of this year. The main one, in my opinion, is the supply unlock. If you have 56 to 60% of the entire supply for shares, four SpaceX, getting unlocked by the end of the year, the big question in everyone's mind is, is there enough money to even support the current valuation that there is? Or should I just wait and see for all of these shares to become unlocked, let the price find an actual price that the market thinks is valuable? And that makes sense.

And then buy later on when that price is hit. Now, we don't do investment advice here. We just kind of like talk about what our general thesis will be. But let's look at some other companies that were in a similar position almost a decade ago. If you look at Meta, when the IPOed, I believe, in 2012, their stock price went below IPO price for about a year, and since then it's gone on a meteoric rise. The same thing can be said of Uber over a shorter timeline privately held. So the point is, companies aren't always fairly priced. I think Elon Musk raised a ton of money to be able to execute on this gargantuan vision that he has, and the market is now pricing it more fairly. Keep an eye on the supply unlocks. The first one is going to be,

August 7th, two days after their first ever quarterly earnings. I'm curious in those quarterly earnings whether they actually turned towards profitability in some forms of ways. I'm going to look at the individual business units, perhaps GROC specifically. And yeah, I guess we'll see where we go from there. But right now, I'm a long-term believer in this company. I believe there's only one person that's able to execute and pull this off. And I believe Elon is that moonshot bet. You know what else on Bullish on? It's this company called Ledger. And thank you to Ledger for sponsoring this part of the episode, where if you are building with AI agents, you're worried about security, and an agent with unchecked access is a pretty brilliant but

probabilistic teammate with access to important secrets. So, Ledger agent's stack fixes that with four open source tools. DMK skills and CLIs for Ledger Wallet, Ledger Enterprise, and Ledger Enterprise Multisig that lets your agent work with crypto while you stay in full control. Tell your agent, you can rebalance my wallet, ETH to 40%, fastest swaps, it does the math, drafts the swaps, and then stops. The transaction lands on your ledger signer and nothing moves until you approve it. Agents propose, humans approve, ledgers, signer, and forces. And the coolest thing for me is this works with ClaudeCodecurs, and it's all open source. Ready Today on Developers.com. You can find a link in the description below. Thank you to Ledger for supporting our show. And I want to finish the bullish

case for Starship with the manufacturing story again one more time. Just talking about how quick they're actually going to make this reality happen. Because EJAS, you did kind of humble us a little bit. This is a sci-fi future that seems impossible. This seems like something you would read in a book, more so than witness it with your own eyes. I've seen it happen with Tesla before. I haven't driven a car in a couple of years. Like the model-wise, the best-selling car in the world, they've done Mission Impossible before. This is not anything new to them. And I see a very clear case in which they could do it again. When you look at Starship, for example, do you know how long it takes to build a Starship now? It's two weeks. It's two weeks long to build a Starship. Wow. And they're

simultaneously building seven of them at once. Is that for the new one? Yes, this is Starship version three, dude. That's so impressive. Ships 41 through 48 are in simultaneous productions. They're building seven of these at once. They're building one every 14 days currently. And that pipeline is going to be increasing significantly. So for this year in 26, Gwynchot, the C-O-D, like godsend of SpaceX, basically the effective CEO of SpaceX is saying they're planning to launch one starship every single month. In 27, they're planning to launch one to 400 starships in the year. So the cadence is going to increase significantly. And the way it works is it's unbelievable. It's like these rolls of steel go in and then a 400 foot rocket just rolls out

after a couple of days. And they're going to be doing this over and over. And as they do, the Starlink capabilities are going to multiply 20-fold per launch. And all of these things kind of compound in a way that, again, is that iterative improvement and a compounding on itself, in a way that is so incredibly compelling. And you could see how this is going to happen across the company with data centers. The first one took 160-something days. The second one's going to take 100. The third one's going to take 50. They're just going to continue to iterate their way down. And before you know it, they have this, like, unbelievable ability to manufacture these very complicated things at scale. So that's kind of what I'm looking for. And when I look at these, it's very

difficult to value something on an exponential curve because of how slow that initial exponential is before it kicks up. And then once it does kick up, over the matter of a couple of months, it could change the entire look and feel of a business. And we saw this with Tesla in 2018, where it took a very long time. Tesla, for the people who weren't around, it was the most shorted stock in the market for years. And it had the highest short flow to any company in the world. And then over one year, it went up like 10x. And it very aggressively repriced because people realized, hey, they actually are going to manufacture the most popular car in the world and figure out the self-driving thing. We're probably going to see something like that

happened with SpaceX. It probably takes a long time because, I mean, like you said, there's a lot of bearish signals that they will have to get through first if you are a short-term trader. If you're someone who's interested in the share price this year or next year, this might be a bumpy ride. I mean, because there is a stat that I read that I was like, oh, that sucks. In the case of IPOs in general, the last 15 largest US IPOs since 2006 over the last 20 years have averaged drawing down 50% since the IPO and have averaged finishing the year down 33% where they go public. So there is no precedent for strong IPOs really in this case. It has the valuation problem where it's trading at 80 times trailing sales. Profit is non-existent. There's a long way for it to go. But if

believe in this future, it is an incredibly compelling version in which this company is worth more than many other of the top companies combined. It just takes a long time and it's hard and it's going to be a really difficult battle. But it is possible. And if you're a long-term investor, that's kind of the thing to hold on to. It's a big vision, but Elon has proven time and again that he is an amazing zero-to-one physical infrastructure scale. And that's exactly the opportunity that SpaceX presents, albeit at a very ambitious vision. If you think about it, I think, in the optimistic timeline, the SpaceX shuttle business itself

could pay for the entire company, right? If you think about its vision of putting AI satellites out there to train models on infinite amounts of energy from the sun, Anthropical want that, open air will want that, all the competitors will eventually want that, and there's only kind of like one highway

to get there in the cheapest, most cost-efficient way, and that would be through SpaceX. But again, it's a bet on whether they are able to pull it off. When it comes to the stock, price in general, even if you are skeptical on the stock price, if you're a bullish person about this, there is a silver lining where it's like, okay, well, if the supply unlock comes on later this year,

maybe there's a better way to get access to this, and maybe you just kind of like wait patiently for them to be able to pull this off. But one thing is for sure. Elon is kind of hell-bent on making this a reality, and time will tell whether this is something that is going to pay off. Again, you need a lot of time to figure this stuff out. And AI is probably the most, mispriced asset in general because no one knows what any of this is going to, any of this is going to do. The point of the kind of like misprice valuation that we're seeing right now is there's not enough market to uphold these prices. You've got the Anthropic Open AI IPOs coming on later this year. So we're going to need even more money for that. And I think a big precursor to SpaceX going

up in price in general will be, does AI create enough GDP value across the entire globe? And that is a question mark, albeit a small one, because it's impacting so many sectors at the same time. So we'll get more clarity over time. But again, once clarity is achieved, you're kind of like a little bit late to that eventual trade. So I understand the bear case. I understand the bull case. But one thing is going to be for sure. Josh and I are going to be up 24-7, racking our brains around this thing until we figure it out and we'll be reporting on it live on this show every single week. So I think that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening. This was an incredibly exciting episode to do because, you know, we were kind of going

against some of our bullcases that we had of the previous one that we had around SpaceX. But thank you so much for listening. If you're listening to this on YouTube and you aren't subscribe, what's happening? Please leave us a comment, subscribe, turn on notifications. It helps us out massively. If you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple Music or any way that you're listening to us, please leave us a comment or give us a rating, it helps us out hugely. But I think that's it. Is there anything else, Josh? Yeah, no, it's just, it's exciting. Like, Starsh, this company feels very, very easy to understand if you, if you read sci-fi books and you understand the future and you're like, oh man, this is, this is the only company in the world that kind of makes,

makes me feel a certain way when I go out and watch these launches. And there's like no one trying to capture and build the future like they are. So it's exciting. And I don't know if it's going to work. It's a really ambitious project. So by betting on the company, you're kind of betting on this really uncertain future. But hey, it's a lot more exciting if it does work than if it doesn't. And I think that's what I'm most excited about. So yeah, like you said, thank you all. so much for watching. Don't forget to share it with a friend who might also enjoy. And yeah, we'll see you guys in the next episode.