Is the Space Race For Real?

Summary

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Infamous Podcast (Campside Media / Sony Music Entertainment)

Episode: Is the Space Race For Real?
Date: June 18, 2026
Hosts: Vanessa Grigoriadis, Gabriel Sherman, Natalie Robehmed
Guest: Tim Higgins (Wall Street Journal columnist, author)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the "new space race": the meteoric rise of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, its unprecedented IPO, and the high-stakes competition with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. The co-hosts, joined by journalist Tim Higgins, pick apart the hype and reality of privatized space exploration, corporate ambitions to create a space-based economy, and the entwined futures of AI, data centers, and off-world colonies. The conversation also explores the relationship between private companies and governmental agencies like NASA, and interrogates the very real question: is humanity truly heading for the stars, or is this all branding and spectacle?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The SpaceX IPO: Magnitude & Meaning [00:38–06:03]

• Biggest IPO Ever: SpaceX’s public offering raised over five times more than Facebook’s 2012 IPO, pushing its valuation past $1.7 trillion and making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
• Market & Monopoly:

  “SpaceX right now… is a monopoly. It's a monopoly power that ultimately will be able to charge, at least for some period of time, monopoly rents.”
  – Tim Higgins [01:15]

• Everyday Impact: With SpaceX shares soon to be part of retirement accounts and index funds, "we all, in a way here in the US get a part of it." [Tim Higgins, 03:33]
• Contextualization:

  "This is the biggest IPO ever… It's going to become a big part of the stock market at the valuation that it's currently at and it's going to dominate… the conversation in business for years to come."
  – Tim Higgins [03:33]

2. SpaceX: From Unlikely Bet to Trillion-Dollar Conglomerate [06:03–15:03]

• Technological Evolution: SpaceX’s innovation lies in its reusable rockets ("the big fucking rocket"—Starship) and the Starlink satellite network, now the world’s largest in low Earth orbit.
• From PayPal to Mars:
  The episode recounts Musk’s journey from PayPal to his vision for a multi-planetary civilization, frustrated by the lack of public enthusiasm for space since the Apollo era.

  "What Musk's idea was he was going to take a little bit of his fortune and… send plant seeds to Mars… [to] get people excited for the idea of going to Mars."
  – Tim Higgins [08:40]

• Making the Impossible Reality:

  "They like to turn the impossible into merely late."
  – Natalie Robehmed [05:17]

3. Space Exploration: Spectacle, Celebrity, & Investment [06:10–08:40]

• Public Perception Shift: Co-hosts reflect on space culture moving from Soviet/US rivalry to a playground for billionaires, noting:

  "First they had the yacht, now they're going to space. Oh, so cute. But now… we're going to space and that's going to increase the stock market... your retirement rests on this idea."
  – Co-host [07:33]

4. Musk & Bezos: Rival Philosophies and Business Models [15:03–23:51]

• Bezos’s Blue Origin:
  • Founded before SpaceX but operated slowly, almost as a "think tank" instead of a commercial project.
  • Only recently, especially after Bezos stepped back from Amazon, has Blue Origin accelerated efforts to catch up with SpaceX.
• Contrasting Approaches:

  "Bezos is the tortoise and Musk is the hare… racing ahead at a breakneck speed."
  – Natalie Robehmed [20:13]

• Jabs and Competition:
  Musk’s repeated digs at Bezos, e.g.:

  "The rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, which is really quite mean and sounds like he's waiting for Jeff Bezos to die."
  – Natalie Robehmed [20:13]

• Risk & Iteration:

  "He's okay with a rocket blowing up. Right. We're going to learn from it and do better the next time is kind of the general approach that SpaceX takes."
  – Tim Higgins [20:49]

• Starlink’s Impact:
  SpaceX’s satellite internet business is lucrative and transformative:

  "Even here in the US… people have them on top of their Airstreams… streaming movies from Netflix. This provides the internet anywhere. Essentially."
  – Tim Higgins [18:03]

5. The AI-Space Nexus [23:51–26:09]

• Data Centers in Space:
  There’s growing speculation and early investment in placing energy-intensive AI data centers in orbit for energy efficiency, reduced land use, and limitless solar power.

  "You could put these data centers in space where you have basically unlimited amount of solar energy that you can collect and harvest… It's floating around with the Martians…"
  – Tim Higgins [24:36]

• Skepticism & Potential:

  "I talk to both sides… My email box just filled with people telling me how dumb it is or… this technical problem… But the physics of it… science says it's possible… it's conceivable."
  – Tim Higgins [26:09]

6. NASA, JPL & the Public-Private Relationship [28:36–32:31]

• Government’s Role: NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab continue rigorous science and exploration (e.g., Mars biosignatures discovery), but private ventures now dominate the public imagination (and investment).
• Contracts & Law:
  SpaceX’s growth has been hugely supported by government contracts; laws allow private companies to profit from resources mined in space.
• Policy Shifts:

  "With the Trump administration, there has been a refocus on getting back to the moon… we have seen Musk… suggest that the Moon is now his first priority…"
  – Tim Higgins [31:15]

7. Who Gets to Go? Ethics and the Future [32:31–34:45]

• Space Society:
  Realistically, early off-world living will be "miserable" and limited to a tiny elite:

  "The idea that all of a sudden Mars is going to be… the new hotspot for billionaires… is probably not in our lifetime."
  – Tim Higgins [33:58]

• Earth’s Immediate Needs:

  "There's all these other issues on Earth, our home planet, where… technology can still address… there's still lots of needs here."
  – Tim Higgins [34:26]

8. The Problem of Succession [34:45–37:58]

• Musk Without Musk:
  The sustainability of Musk’s empire depends on succession and management depth. Unlike SpaceX, Tesla lacks a stable “heir apparent”, raising questions about the long-term future of these private space empires.

  "What happens to Musk’s empire after Musk?… At SpaceX he has a strong number two and that's probably why that company has been much more stable over the years… The question is the next generation of leadership."
  – Tim Higgins [35:42, 36:30]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Mars’s Dangers:

  "On the warmest, sunniest day under the most atmosphere that Mars has to offer, you would asphyxiate while your saliva boils off of your tongue because there's no oxygen and the air pressure's just that low."
  – Adam Becker (as quoted by Tim Higgins) [02:42]

• On Musk’s Philosophy:

  "We must expand the scope and scale of consciousness…"
  – Quoting Musk’s mission [02:28]

• On Competing Visions:

  "His approach… is going to be kind of a slow and steady and safe approach. Now, that said, in recent years, Blue Origin has been… trying to do more iterative approaches because it's been successful for SpaceX…"
  – Tim Higgins [21:44]

• On AI Emails:

  "They're sending him emails, you know, crafted by AI and they don't make sense. And he's got to be like, wait a second, you know, you got to read this."
  – Tim Higgins [22:18]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• The SpaceX IPO and what it means – [00:38–05:17]
• Musk’s grand ambitions and rocket innovation – [06:03–08:40]
• How the modern space race began – [08:40–11:36]
• Tesla, branding, and Musk’s shift in perception – [11:36–13:28]
• Introducing Bezos and Blue Origin – [15:03–20:13]
• Starlink and the commercialization of space – [18:01–18:45]
• Bezos vs. Musk: Tactics and personalities – [20:13–22:54]
• AI, data centers, and the case for space-based computation – [23:51–26:09]
• JPL, NASA, and the remaining role of the government – [28:36–31:15]
• Resource mining and the Moon vs. Mars debate – [31:15–32:31]
• Societal implications: Who gets to go, and at what cost? – [32:31–34:45]
• Leadership and succession challenges for Musk’s empire – [34:45–37:58]

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Tone & Style

• Language & Tone: Candid, lively, and sometimes irreverent; the hosts mix skepticism and awe, often poking fun at the wild ambitions of Musk and Bezos.
• Noteworthy Moments: The episode is rich in colorful analogies (the "big fucking rocket,” “rocket measuring contest”), dry humor (debating survival on Mars vs. New Zealand), and reflective pauses about the practicality and ethics of this new age of exploration.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode demystifies the “new space race,” balancing the bombastic dreams of tech billionaires with real questions about science, sustainability, economic impact, and who ultimately benefits. While the IPO of SpaceX marks a financial and cultural milestone, the journey to Mars—or even the Moon—remains fraught with technical, ethical, and existential challenges. The show leaves us wondering whether this era is pioneering humanity’s future among the stars, or building castles in the sky for the privileged few.

Transcript

[Tim Higgins]

This episode is brought to you by Fox 1. Watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month, with three days free. Build your own multiview. Choose up to three streams and follow player spotlights. Stay on top of every moment with live stats, highlights and instant replays. The FIFA World cup streaming live on Fox One. Offers are subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions.

[Co-host]

Campsite Media.

[Natalie Roped]

From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media. This is infamous. I'm Natalie Roped. So if you were reading the news last week, you probably heard that Elon Musk's space company SpaceX went public in the biggest IPO of all time. The the IPO raised more than five times the amount Facebook did when it went public back in 2012, and SpaceX is now valued at more than $1.7 trillion. This all means that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire. So he has at least on paper, a million million dollars. Which is just crazy.

[Tim Higgins]

SpaceX right now in terms of getting things into orbit, getting to space is a monopoly. It's a monopoly power that ultimately will be able to charge, at least for some period of time. Monopoly rents.

[Natalie Roped]

SpaceX is a pretty impressive company. It has its rockets, of course, the major innovation of which has been to make them reusable. And the most notable of those rockets is Starship, which Musk affectionately calls the big fucking rocket. And it is really, really big. Like cargo sized big, with plans to take people to Mars and where they can live. SpaceX also has Starlink Network, which is the largest satellite operator in the entire world, with thousands of satellites operating in low earth orbit, just hanging out there and providing Internet to the ground below. SpaceX also includes Elon's AI company, which isn't the greatest AI ever, but it's in the company too. And SpaceX is building out data centers to both train and operate AI in the future, and also plans to put AI data centers in space. SpaceX is basically this giant conglomerate, sort of scarily big, with its tentacles in every part of our future.

[Tim Higgins]

We must expand the scope and scale

[Natalie Roped]

of consciousness, but there are questions about how all this will actually go down. The idea that we will one day be living on Mars is absolutely crazy. Here's author Adam Becker summing it up

[Tim Higgins]

on the warmest, sunniest day on under the most atmosphere that Mars has to offer, you would asphyxiate while your saliva boils off of your tongue because there's no Oxygen and the air pressure's just that low.

[Natalie Roped]

But it's all part of a wider competition shaping up between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, between America and China. Part of a complicated and fascinating private public partnership in one of the most romantic and alluring arenas of all time.

[Co-host]

Space.

[Natalie Roped]

Here to talk about the new space race is Tim Higgins, a business columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Tim, welcome to the show.

[Tim Higgins]

Well, thanks for having me.

[Natalie Roped]

Let's start with SpaceX and this IPO. Can you put this in context for normal people? I mean, how big is this? And why should the average person care that SpaceX has now gone public?

[Tim Higgins]

Well, it's huge. And it's huge with a capital H, U, G and E. I mean, this is the biggest IPO ever. It raised tens of billions of dollars as part of Elon Musk's vision of sending giant rockets into space, creating AI data centers in orbit, and maybe perhaps just one day setting up a city on Mars with a million people. So that's just the baseline for this, right? As you said, it made him the world's first trillionaire. And we all, in a way here in the US get a part of it. If you have a 401k, a lot of the shares are going to be showing up in index funds in the near term and probably years to come. It's going to become a big part of the stock market at the valuation that it's currently at and it's going to dominate, most likely the conversation in business for years to come.

[Co-host]

What do you mean by that? The conversation in business?

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah, well, Elon Musk has this very unique ability to, to attract attention, good and bad. And SpaceX is the new shiny thing. Without a doubt. He is going to be out there making a lot of noise. It's going to be part of the business narrative and we've seen that for the last decade or so with his companies. Tesla really was the first to capture the imagination of people. The success of Tesla has made the idea of an electric car more mainstream. And I would say SpaceX is doing something very similar, making the idea of space travel something that has the potential of actually occurring in the way that before was just sci fi.

[Natalie Roped]

This is part of Elon Musk's bigger ambitions. Right. SpaceX now isn't just a rocket company and we can get into all the things that it is and isn't in a second. But it really seems to have finally arrived after a little bit of a shaky start. I don't know if people weren't Watching super closely. They may just remember a couple rockets exploding and all that kind of thing. But Elon Musk, as you say, I think has really built a brand around turning science fiction into reality. Whether it's Tesla, whether it's SpaceX, and on getting investors to be willing to bet on something that seems crazy, but that he might just turn into a reality. And you know, he has that often quoted phrase, you know, they like to turn the impossible into merely late.

[Co-host]

But I mean, I have to say that I have paid no attention to space. I don't know who's listening to this, who feels the same way.

[Tim Higgins]

It's not part of your daily thought journaling. You're thinking about where you're gonna. Where do you wanna live, Mars or the moon?

[Co-host]

Totally. I mean, I took astronomy in college cause it was the easy one, right? And I learned about, what is it, the red dwarfs or the white dwarfs? You know, I have like some sense of where the planets are and like they're in. But the last time I paid attention to a space race, it was the Soviet Union versus the US we landed a man on the moon, then everybody, I thought, sort of relaxed maybe around the end of the Cold War, and we sort of agreed there's no need, we don't need to go to space. And every time I saw a story about rockets and some were exploding, some of Elon's were exploding, some of the Bezos is, you know, not coming back or whatever was happening to them, I just thought, these guys are being nuts. I didn't think we've privatized space.

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah, I don't think you're alone there. I don't, I don't think the majority of people are waking up saying, you know what, let's go to Mars. You know, wouldn't that be fun? Let's go live on Mars. It's going to be so exciting. I want to spend months and months in a tin can flying to Mars, right? No, this is not everyone's dream, right? This is a very peculiar dream of very rich men out there, I think.

[Co-host]

But I guess what we should talk about is, is it real or is it just branding? Right? When you see Lawrence Sanchez Bezos, you know, in her cute little blue spacesuit with Katy Perry, you know, you very quickly think this is just branding, right? This is just some thing that rich people are doing. First they had the yacht, now they're going to space. Oh, so cute. But now, I mean, I'm hearing people say things like the US economy is now sitting on, you know, the precepts of AI and SpaceX is very tied in with AI. One of the things they want to do is put these data centers into space so we can run all this AI. They've got these satellites up there that I'm assuming are just going to spy on everybody. That probably has something to do with AI too. So I do feel shocked. I feel like I woke up and one day everybody said, by the way, we're going to space and that's going to increase the stock market. And everybody's 401k and everybody's IRA and your retirement rests on this idea.

[Tim Higgins]

And I would argue that that was probably Elon Musk's original goal when he made his first fortune with PayPal. We're going back roughly 25 years. He's this newly rich guy in California and finally he can pursue his bigger dreams. And he's excited about the idea of making humanity multi planetary, having people on Earth and Mars. And he was very frustrated with the idea that people were not excited about space anymore. To your point, the 1960s, that was a very exciting time with the Apollo program and going to the moon and this space race with the Russians. And by 2000, the space program was not what it was and there was not a lot of excitement. And he's looking at technology, modern technology, whether it's microchips or computers or smartphones, and saying technology keeps getting better and better and better. Why isn't the space program doing cooler and cooler, cooler things? We lost interest in it in part because there is only so much money for guns and butter and spacesuits. There's limited resources out there and space is expensive. And so what Musk's idea was was he was going to take a little bit of his fortune and he was basically doing a publicity stunt to get people excited for the idea of going to Mars. And this put him on a path that would take him to SpaceX. But first we'll take a side trip. What he was going to do was essentially send plant seeds to Mars with the idea that they could grow life there. And he would get this superlative of being able to say, the first new life on Mars, right? And in his mind, people, you know, they would be super excited about this and then their politically money would go to NASA and we would restart the space race. As he went down that path and he thought about trying to buy some rockets from Russia, went to Russia a few times, and this was, you know, he was very invested in this idea. He came away with the conclusion that actually the Issue was these rockets are super expensive because you only use them once. And what he needed to do was create a company to create reusable rockets. Right.

[Co-host]

And this was hard, right?

[Tim Higgins]

That's very hard.

[Co-host]

Okay.

[Tim Higgins]

Very super. There's a reason why this wasn't happening because the industry basically laughed at him, thought this was stupid, impossible. So this was a. Not just an unlikely bet, this was a fool's errand in a lot of people's opinion. And that's where he decided to put his attention to. And he probably would be considered kind of a wacky guy if not for the fact that he also around this time started investing in Tesla. And Tesla, the car company, started getting a lot of attention because it's a lot easier to make a car than a rocket, some would argue. And he could show the proof of that faster.

[Co-host]

So wait, are you saying that was always. That Tesla was always sort of just first step in this larger plan?

[Tim Higgins]

Well, I wouldn't say it was a plan, but what I would say is that Tesla garnered attention and the success of Tesla gave him more credibility, that he was no longer this weird guy just trying to go to Mars. He was an industrialist. He was this visionary guy who was doing rockets and cars. And then all of a sudden he's the basis for how Tony Stark is portrayed in the Iron man movies. And, you know, he's getting cameos in Hollywood blockbusters as the guy who was doing really crazy experiments and industrial endeavors that a lot of people didn't think was possible.

[Co-host]

Also, he's a jerk right from the beginning. People have been clear on that.

[Tim Higgins]

You know, he's an interesting. People want to be black or white with him. I see a lot of gray. He can be incredibly charming. He has that ability. He can be incredibly charming. And he can also be just a world class jerk, without a doubt.

[Co-host]

So he bounces back and forth. But as Natalie has called him, he's a capitalist polymath. He's doing it all.

[Natalie Roped]

Yeah. I mean, and look, in many ways what he has achieved is impressive. You know, despite all the drama, all the debate of him smoking weed on Joe Rogan and reportedly using substances and tweeting ad nauseam and doing stuff that the CEO of a publicly traded company shouldn't be doing. But in some ways, he's maybe created more stock value than any other person in the world. And just from a purely capitalist perspective, that is impressive. I can't believe I'm defending Elon Musk right now.

[Co-host]

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[Tim Higgins]

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[Tim Higgins]

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[Natalie Roped]

I think what interests me about this new space race is that, I mean, there's several things, right? There's the private public collaboration between the government and these private companies. There's this specter of China of like, okay, the US now needs to beat China in this new international space race where it's like, okay, China's not sharing information with us. They're doing stuff. They're catching up. We need to colonize to kind of plant the flag and declare our supremacy once again. But it's really a personality driven race. And that I think is what's fascinating to me is the fight. And I do think it really is a fight between Jeff Bezos and between Elon Musk, these two very different characters. So we've talked a little bit about Elon Musk and some of the parts of SpaceX that have been so exciting, including his starship, the big fucking rocket. The largest rocket ever built. This reusable rocket is AI stuff. But what about Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin?

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah, it's worth noting that Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX. And you go back in time and there was this cadre of Rich men who were interested in space in Mars and the idea of what was possible. A group of men who grew up with sci fi, right? And that was part of the way they looked at the future and they made their money and they were thinking about, well, how can they spark interest in that, right? And so Bezos created Blue Origin, but he was different than Musk when he created Amazon was still an online bookstore, really at that point. That's where his money was coming from, was the creation of Amazon.com but he was the CEO and he was deeply involved in running that company. So he created Blue Origin on the side, but he wasn't the CEO of it. He wasn't in the day to day operation. In fact, people have kind of said it almost in the early days operated more like a think tank or a research project. It was not racing to commercialize space in those early years. And I would say the success of SpaceX started getting more attention and kind of the mission of Blue Origin started to kind of evolve. I think probably one of the big changes that occurs in this kind of soup that we're talking about is for the longest time SpaceX was working on reusable rockets. At a certain point it made a decision to get into the low Earth orbit satellite business, which is another thing where folks were kind of rolling their eyes at this. But what it created was this very interesting starLink business for SpaceX, which created a lot of money and all of a sudden opened up a lot of eyes and Wall street and investors eyes to this idea that, well, wait a second, maybe this isn't just a business of sending rockets up. This is also unlocking a potential space economy.

[Natalie Roped]

Can you explain what Starlink is?

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah, Starlink is a satellite network that SpaceX has created that is providing essentially broadband Internet. So you can get the Internet from space and you get a little dish and you can connect. And this has unlocked great potential around the world. Even here in the US I've been in the remote parts of the US where you don't have Internet and people have them on top of their Airstreams and they're streaming movies from Netflix. Right. I mean, this provides the Internet anywhere. Essentially.

[Natalie Roped]

You can watch movies at Burning man thanks to Starlink. Is that it?

[Tim Higgins]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Co-host]

Where Elon does go, everybody. Yeah.

[Tim Higgins]

So all of a sudden there's this space economy race and Blue Origin is also pursuing that. Amazon is working on its own low Earth orbit satellites. You start to see the contours of how this is more than just a rocket measuring contest. And how this is actually becoming a business race between Musk and Bezos very quickly now. While Blue Origin may have been first, SpaceX is vastly bigger now and is better capitalized and further along. And Blue Origin is trying to catch up. Once Bezos stepped back from the day to day of running Amazon, he did so saying he was going to spend more time with Blue Origin. You've started to see Blue Origin become much more aggressive in trying to catch up with SpaceX. The hope was this was going to be their big year of Blue Origin. They have, they have their own version of starship that they've been working on, a heavy duty rocket that can take stuff into space to help build out that space economy. Then we saw in May one of those rockets blow up. The new Glenn blew up on the launch pad in Florida. And it's unclear how much of a setback that's going to be for Blue Origin. They say they hope to be launching again by the end of the year. Experts in the space industry observers are skeptical that's going to be a big lift, but it's part of the drama of kind of the space race.

[Natalie Roped]

And they seem to have had these two different approaches. Right. I think people have characterized it as the tortoise and hare. You know, Bezos is the tortoise and Musk is the hare, kind of racing ahead at a breakneck speed. Elon Musk, as you've written about, has taken several jabs at Jeff Bezos. I mean, tweeting at him or saying publicly, oh, the rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, which is really quite mean and sounds like he's waiting for Jeff Bezos to die. But what do you make of their differing approaches?

[Tim Higgins]

Well, SpaceX and it gets to kind of Elon Musk's approach to a lot of things, which is a more iterative approach. He's okay with a rocket blowing up. Right. Like we're going to learn from it and do better the next time is kind of the general approach that SpaceX takes, I'll say. You know, they say safety is important, and we have to believe that they say safety is important, but they do a little bit more. They're a little more cowboys, if you will, compared to Blue Origin, which gets at that idea that Bezos talks about of being the tortoise. It's going to be kind of a slow and steady and safe approach. Now, that said, in recent years, Blue Origin has been kind of trying to do more iterative approaches because it's been successful for SpaceX, but that you get to the kind of the difference of the personalities. Musk is very flashy. Bezos traditionally has not been very flashy. He's become a little bit more flashy kind of in the later part of his career, but is still not the same way as Musk.

[Natalie Roped]

Right, right. I mean, he's got the giant $500 million yacht with the bust of his wife Lauren Sanchez apparently carved into it. You know, he's doing the giant wedding. He's everywhere. But ultimately, as you say, like, his approach, at least from a business perspective for his companies has been much more stayed and prepared and rigorous. He loves these memos.

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah, the Google Doc where they all get in and start laying out their thoughts and before the real meeting occurs. Right.

[Co-host]

Are you allowed to use AI for that?

[Tim Higgins]

Well, you know, in this era, they probably encouraged to. I was talking to an Amazon executive recently and we were talking about how they're using AI and I said, well, how you're using it. And one of the issues he's having with his employees is they're sending him emails, you know, crafted by AI and they don't make sense. And he's got to be like, wait a second, you know, you got to read this.

[Natalie Roped]

Yeah. Actually check the AI. But I mean, yeah, I think it comes down to even their company motto. Right. I mean, the official motto of Blue Origin is step by step, ferociously. The sense that we get, as you say, is that whilst Blue origin started first, SpaceX has really pulled way, way ahead.

[Tim Higgins]

Oh, so far ahead. I mean, think about the IPO. The SpaceX IPO raised something larger than $85 billion. Right. That amount of money right there is way more than Blue Origin has. Right. I mean, this is huge amount of money and this is only a fraction probably of what SpaceX is going to need to spend for all the goals that they have out there.

[Co-host]

So Bezos is no longer the CEO

[Tim Higgins]

of Amazon, he's the executive chair of Amazon.

[Co-host]

So he's just into space, he just wants to do space now.

[Tim Higgins]

Well, it's never just, just one thing with these kinds of folks. Right. He is the executive chair at Amazon and he says he still spends some time on that. He has Blue Origin where he's not the CEO and then he has. He's become the co CEO of a startup that's involved in AI and that's a new thing. And it all kind of coalesces around the same idea. Kind of what you're seeing is the future of AI and space seem to be intertwined.

[Natalie Roped]

Can you explain that? Why are AI and space so intertwined?

[Tim Higgins]

Let's first talk about just to kind of break it down. AI gets created and managed and lives in data centers. And data centers, you know, are these giant warehouses full of servers that take a lot of energy to power more AI and better and better AI. And increasingly we're seeing, especially in the us pushback on the demands of these data centers because they suck up a lot of power and people are worried about their power rates affecting their home power costs. And maybe it needs a lot of water. And there's just concerns about where you're going to put these things. Right. There is a thought that perhaps space is a better place for these data centers, these AI data centers. Now, there's still some science and technical stuff that needs to be ironed out to make that happen. But the bigger idea is that you could put these data centers in space where you have basically unlimited amount of solar energy that you can collect and harvest. So power is abundant. You know, you don't have these NIMBYs who are concerned about being close to it. It's floating around with the Martians and that this is the place for.

[Co-host]

But what happens when something like breaks? You have to send a person up

[Tim Higgins]

there and these things break all the time. I mean, there's regular maintenance of these things on Earth. That is just one of the many challenges, but the biggest one is being able to get it all up there into space. And that's why SpaceX is seen as, you know, maybe they could be the first to do this. They have the potential to be getting a lot of tonnage into space. But you get into this next point of like, making it a reality is also more complicated than just getting stuff up there. So it's a hard problem on top of a hard problem on top of a hard problem. Right. And so that's the bigger idea. Musk says it's closer than you think. People like Bezos are saying, well, it's still a little ways out.

[Co-host]

Yeah, that's like crazy to me. Right? I mean, it sounds. Although I, you know, as you said earlier, this is not a guy that you necessarily want to doubt. But what do the scientists say about all this? Do they say, like, sure, totally, it's possible, or do you talk to people who are quite skeptical?

[Tim Higgins]

I talk to both sides on that. I mean, it's interesting. My email box just filled with people telling me how dumb it is or how many here are this technical problem or this technical problem and blah, blah, Blah. I mean, there's some amusing stuff from the prospectus. Like my favorite part of the prospectus is that one of the things that SpaceX wants to do is asteroid mining. I thought that was kind of funny. There's some asteroid mining going on in this sci fi show on Apple called For All Mankind. It's a central theme. But I think the probability of asteroid mining happening anytime soon is pretty low. But then there are other people who do think this is possible that you know, it is not just Musk out there. Alphabet is working on its own idea and their approach is to use basically stuff that's off the shelf. They've got their own chips that they've been the testing them to see if they could operate in space. They think it's possible. So there are, you know, some challenges without a doubt. But the physics of it, which is like classic Elon Musk kind of first principles thinking is that the science says it's possible. You know, you have to figure it out, the math. But it's conceivable,

[Co-host]

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[Tim Higgins]

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[Tim Higgins]

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[Natalie Roped]

One thing we haven't talked about is where the government and NASA and JPL are in all of this. So I actually a couple weeks ago I went and did a tour of jpl, the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is kind of this NASA outpost. The relationship is a little bit more complicated. But right here in California and Pasadena with a friend of mine who actually works there and I, like Vanessa, have not really thought about space all that much except through my friend who happens to have helped drive the Mars rover and the Mars helicopter and all that kind of absolutely crazy stuff. So it was really interesting to go and find out that actually they're still doing science, they're going to Mars, they're drilling things. And, you know, last year they discovered, I mean, I think the exact term are bio signatures. Things that seem to show that there were chemical signatures produced by life have, have occurred on Mars. So they can't quite say that, that there's life on Mars, but there's biosignatures that maybe could be. However, they announced that they discovered that the same day that Charlie Kirk died. So that sort of got buried. But, I mean, we are one step closer, I would say, to life on Mars. And the science that JPL and NASA are doing is really, really exciting. But there doesn't seem to be any juice around that. It seems to all be about these private companies. Am I wrong?

[Tim Higgins]

Well, it probably depends what circles you are. And I think some people are very excited about all the stuff you just talked about. But yes, one of the challenges that NASA and these other kind of programs you're talking about have is just capturing people's imagination, which is why kind of the emergence of a potential space economy is so exciting is because the capitalists get involved and they see a way to make money. And this stuff just costs so much money. Right. And it helps in the debate of are you going to spend money on education, are you going to spend money on food for homeless people and stuff like that. It's like it becomes a different kind of debate. The money's coming from someplace other than just government. Now, don't, don't get me wrong, there's still government money involved in some of this stuff, without a doubt.

[Co-host]

Right.

[Natalie Roped]

And of course, part of SpaceX's growth has been through getting some pretty big government contracts that Blue Origin, at least in the beginning, didn't really vie for. But talking about the opportunity in space, I mean, Congress also passed a bill a little over 10 years ago that private companies could essentially profit from any of the minerals they mine in space. So there's like a huge opportunity there.

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah. And huge, huge risk. Right. I mean, it's, it's funny, we talk about the race to the moon and the idea of unlocking all of this potential, the mind stuff in the moon, it's like, okay, you know, like, you see the dream, you understand it, but it's also like there's, it's going to be hard. There's stuff on Earth still, it's a big gamble, but there's this excitement for it and that is kind of fueling the investment in it. We're almost to the point of talking about how politics affects some of this, because in that race between Musk and Bezos for so very long, Bezos had kind of staked his claim on wanting to go to the Moon and exploring and doing the Moon. And Musk was all about Mars in some ways, was almost critical about, let's not waste our time with the moon. Let's go to Mars. And with the Trump administration, there has been a refocus on getting back to the moon. I know it had been part of NASA's vision, but really, in Trump 2.0, it's been clear that there's this push to get to the Moon. And we have seen Musk in late last year kind of suggest that the Moon is now his first priority. Still all about Mars. Don't get me wrong. Don't get him wrong. But, okay, we got to get to the Moon and put a city on the Moon.

[Co-host]

Right. But I mean, the thing that. Look, it makes sense to me when they say, like, the population of Earth is growing so much. You know, the way to sustain this growth is to use these resources of outer space. Right. And put us in space, even. And then Bezos has talked about, like, we live in floating ships and we come back to Earth, we visit a national park here or something. And at the same time, when you really talk about Mars, it's like, okay, it's going to be a very small population that's going to be allowed to be on Mars at any of these places. It's hard for my brain not to go to. Okay, so it's you and your friends, right? So it's like Katy Perry gets to go. Well, like, who gets chosen to get saved when Earth blows up?

[Tim Higgins]

Yeah. You know, the thing about life on Mars early on is it's going to be miserable.

[Co-host]

I personally am very claustrophobic, so I don't even sleep in a tent.

[Tim Higgins]

You know, it's not the Four Seasons. It's going to be dangerous. It's going to be hard work. And Musk has talked about that, that the early years aren't going to be good. And you don't get the sense that he actually wants to go to Mars. I mean, he talks about how he wants to go to Mars. Somebody just doesn't want to die on impact. Right.

[Co-host]

Is his joke, which one of people will or. So like, the ships will. So it's just like, okay, inevitably there's

[Tim Higgins]

going to be death. Right. I mean, that's part of this kind of adventure of it all. But yeah, it's going to be hard. So the idea that all of a sudden Mars is going to be kind of the new hotspot for billionaires to be hanging out with is probably not in our lifetime. There are much more comfortable places to weather the apocalypse.

[Co-host]

Perhaps New Zealand, right?

[Tim Higgins]

New Zealand, yeah.

[Co-host]

Kauai. Right.

[Tim Higgins]

You are pulling on the thread that this isn't going to be a place for a lot of people to be going. There's going to be a select few at the beginning and in. It's going to be super expensive and it's going to take a lot of time. And this is. There's all these other issues on Earth, our home planet, where we all live, you know, technology can still address and there's still lots of needs here. Right?

[Co-host]

That's for sure. I guess the part of all this is, you know, whenever there's personality cults, right? And these are truly personalities cults that almost the whole country is now buying into this idea that Elon might be the guy to figure this all out. One thing that really messes up a cult is the leader dying. And there is part of me that feels like this stuff is sort of racing ahead. But when you look at the longevity science, sure, we can keep people's bodies alive, like, that seems to be okay. But nobody can figure out how to keep anybody's mind, like, sprightly. You know, you've got all these people, like, totally demented. They're living for 10 extra years. What's the point? So when you look at Elon, you're like, I don't know, dude, you. You live pretty hard. Like, everybody knows about your drug use. You got, you know, 25, maybe 35 years left on this planet. Maybe 45. You know, what is it that will happen?

[Tim Higgins]

That's one of the big questions is what happens to Musk's empire after Musk? And there's been indications that he's hopeful that his children will take up the cause and that they'll be involved. You look at his companies in the last 20 years and family has very much been involved. His brother Kimball was on the board at Tesla and played a very important role over the years and helping his brother, other family members had been sprinkled out through the empire. And Musk, as we've talked about, has a lot of kids. So there is some suggestion that perhaps they will be involved. He isn't one of these billionaires who believes in living forever. He thinks death is actually a good thing for power because it allows new, new ideas and new people to emerge. But the way that he's building and the money that he has created, the empires that he has built, they are clearly going to be around for a while. And the question is leadership beyond Musk, even without death, just when he gets interested in something else or when he gets older. Right. And if you look at Tesla, for example, one of the things that's probably not appreciated about him in the early days was he did a very good job at recruiting very good talent. He's got a lot of smart people that work at these companies. At Tesla though, we have seen a constant churn over leadership there. And he doesn't have a really strong number two. You don't have an heir apparent CEO at Tesla. And I would argue that at SpaceX he has a strong number two and that's probably why that company has been much more stable over the years. But she is getting older as well. Not calling her old if she's listening, but she's not going to live forever. And so the question is the next generation of leadership. And I would argue that if you look at Tesla, Musk has not shown the ability to necessarily kind of groom the backbench to take over control of that company in the way that would make investors feel very comfortable. He's tried to show that he's doing it, but a lot of the people that kind of start to emerge don't last very long. So that's one of the big questions is kind of how these companies carry on beyond him, you know, how they become multi generational powerhouses.

[Co-host]

Yeah, fascinating.

[Natalie Roped]

All right, well thank you so much Tim for joining us and maybe we'll see you on Mars sometime soon.

[Tim Higgins]

Well, thank you. It's either Mars or the moon.

[Co-host]

Yeah, I got my ticket.

[Tim Higgins]

Ryan Reynolds here from IT Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistance. Switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.

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