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- [00:00]
Simon Jack
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:04]
Adam Fleming
Hello. Two stories for you on today's episode of Newscast. We're going to finish off talking about Elon Musk and the fact that he is selling shares in his company, SpaceX, which means anyone with enough money can buy a little piece of it. But first of all, we're going to talk about that attack that happened in Belfast, that stabbing on Monday night that has drawn comment from across the political spectrum and around the world and also raised fears that there might be some disorder in the streets of Belfast on Tuesday night. So that is what's coming up on this episode of Newscast, Newscast, Newscast.
- [00:34]
Simon Jack
From the BBC. Humanity's next great voyage begins.
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Chris Page
We are in the midst of a rupture.
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Simon Jack
Nostalgia will not bring back the old order. Six, seven. Yeah, it's supposed to be me as a doctor. Daddy has has also a special quotation.
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Adam Fleming
Ooh la la.
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Chris Page
Thinking about it like a panto helped.
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Joe Pike
Do we play music now or what do we do?
- [00:53]
Adam Fleming
Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast studio. I just finished recording a chat with Joe pike, political correspondent, and Chris Page, our correspondent in Belfast, about the stabbing attack that happened in that city on Monday night. There is a man in hospital in his 40s with serious injuries. There is a Sudanese man in his 30s in police custody, and the police not looking for anyone else in connection to this case. Just after we'd finished recording with Joe and Chris, we then got a news conference installment from the leaders of Northern Ireland and the head of the police service of Northern Ireland, where we got a few more details. The main one being that the suspect traveled to Ireland from Paris and then traveled from Dublin to Northern Ireland, where he then claimed asylum and was granted leave to remain in the UK in 2023. So that is some extra detail that we didn't have when I got the background to this story from Joe pike and Chris Page. Hi, Joe.
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Joe Pike
Hello, Adam.
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Adam Fleming
Hi, Chris.
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Chris Page
Hi, Adam.
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Adam Fleming
And we're recording this part of newscast at 10 to 4 on Tuesday afternoon. So it represents the situation as we know it now as we're sat here in the stud. Chris, we just had an update from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. You want to give us a summary of what they were saying?
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Chris Page
Yes, the Police Service of Northern Ireland have been bringing us up to date, really, throughout the day, issuing regular updates on this investigation. So firstly, as regards the victim of this attack, they say he's in hospital with serious injuries to his eyes and what they're calling slash wound injuries to his back and face. Now, Police are saying they understand that the suspect who they're questioning on suspicion of attempted murder is Sudanese and they're saying they're not looking for anyone else in connection with the investigation. Also, the police, in the shape of Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson, have said that they have been talking to senior counterterrorism officials throughout the day. But they've said that because of the nature of the attack at this stage, they've no information to suggest that the stabbing was terrorist related. However, they do say they're still at the early stages of the investigation. So really what we've had over the course of the last number of hours is police trying to reassure the community here in North Belfast, other communities across Northern Ireland, that they are taking this very seriously indeed, that the investigation is taking shape. And also, of course, they are saying that they understand that there is a great sense of shock about what has happened and they are appealing for calm. And politicians indeed, from across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland have very much echoed that call.
- [03:46]
Adam Fleming
And Chris, there's a very graphic looking video that's being circulated quite widely on social media. But the police and lots of people have said, please do not share this video.
- [03:56]
Chris Page
That's right, they've said that people shouldn't share this video because they say it could impact the investigation. Also they're saying it could add to the, to the suffering, that the trauma of the victim here and his family. So this appeal has gone out. Police are conscious. At the same time, the video has already been shared very, very widely indeed. And it is really what has been seen in that video that has generated so much attention just on this very quiet residential street in North Belfast, where I am at the moment. The police are maintaining a presence here. The police cordon is still up outside a block of apartments. The attack happened just outside there about a half past ten last night, really in what looks like a cul de sac. The apartment blocks maybe about three or four. So according to eyewitnesses, well, some people began to gather in the street, including children, whenever this attack happened. And then some people intervened. One had a hurling stick. They stopped the attack. Police then arrived, a suspect was arrested. And the police have really stated very clearly that they appreciate what they've described as the incredible bravery of the people who stopped this attack. So really, this has been a very fast moving situation today. Police, I think, have been conscious of the need to try to put as much information from their side as it were into the public domain as possible. They've also been countering misinformation disinformation that they say is online. For example, they say they are aware of inaccurate information online about the victim's condition. They said they can confirm he is in a serious condition in hospital. So that's one example of the online commentary that the police have identified as being untrue, as being inaccurate. And also politicians, for example, the leaders of the five main parties in the devolved assembly at Stormont all put out a joint statement today calling for calm and asking for the police to be given space to allow justice, as they said, to take its course. But also there have been appeals for people not to speculate online and that if they have information about this, if they do genuinely know anything about this attack, well, the police is who they should be speaking to about that. They shouldn't be posting it on the Internet.
- [06:25]
Adam Fleming
And, Joe, in terms of the reaction at Westminster, we've had a few things. Obviously, lots of politicians posting on social media their reactions. There was also an urgent question in the House of Commons answered by the Northern Ireland Secretary, Hilary Ben. And in the meantime, you had Kemi Badenok doing a speech about race and the public sector organizations. Everyone's had an opportunity to talk about this.
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Joe Pike
Yes. And I think, Adam, the most obvious tension we saw, certainly in the House of Commons, was when various MPs, including Reform UK MPs, and those from the Democratic Unionist Party and the TUV, the Traditional Unionist voice, were asking Hillary Benn for clarity on the nationality of the person who has been arrested, but also their immigration status. And Hillary Benn did not want to comment on that. Deferred to the psni, but also the. The Home Office. Now, my understanding from the Home Office, who obviously are in charge of immigration across the uk, is that they will only make any announcement in this sort of case if someone is charged. But we heard, as Chris touched on in that, in that news conference in the last hour or so from the psni, further detail about the immigration status of the person who has been arrested, that they had leave to remain in the UK and that they had come to the UK through Dublin. So even though the Home Office won't give that information, the PS and I have given out the information, but said he'd got to wait for the Home Office too. Maybe a slightly confusing process here in getting information out. And of course, there was a sort of error earlier in the day when we were initially told the person who'd been arrested was Somali before that was changed by the PSNI to Sudanese, and they apologised for that mistake. Both Nigel Farage said pretty early in the morning, sort of 8:30 in the morning, that the authorities must reveal the identity and status of the attacker immediately. The public are entitled to the truth, he said. And then around lunchtime the Tory said something similar across Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, saying the Government must ensure full details about the suspect's nationality and immigration status are released. Total transparency is required.
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Adam Fleming
And Chris, in terms of this suspect's journey through the immigration system, which we still don't have, all the details of the fact that he appeared to enter the island of Ireland in Dublin might suggest that this isn't is less a question about the safety of the UK's borders as about the safety of the Irish borders and then what the UK immigration system does when somebody arrives on, on UK soil.
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Chris Page
Yes, the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is open essentially there are no checkpoints there. So you've had politicians, particularly the likes of the traditional Unionist voice leader. Jim Alister is the MP for North Antrim, other Unionist parties too for pointing to that and saying that they think it is a weak spot, as it were, in the UK's immigration system. So that is something that is a topic of political debate here in Northern Ireland and also as we've been hearing in Westminster as well. So this will be something that will certainly be analysed. I think the more we find out about the suspect's immigration status and the specifics if you like, of the journey into, into the uk, into Northern Ireland, well that is something that will inevitably I think feed into that debate and, and be and be discussed as part of that wider about in immigra around immigration in particular Northern Ireland's place in that and particularly in the case of Northern Ireland. Well it is about that land border. As many as I say, particularly Unionist politicians will see it.
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Adam Fleming
And Chris, a lot of the politicians talking today have been urging people not to go out and well basically riot tonight as a result of this because of the strong feelings and quite often people have been saying we don't want it to be like Ballymena in 2025. Just remind us what actually happened in that town last year.
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Chris Page
Yeah, it is just about a year ago since we had a week really of rioting in Northern Ireland that started in Ballymen in County Antrim but spread to other towns as well. The spark really there in Ballamina last June came after a protest over an alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl. Two 14 year old boys appeared in court charged in over that attack. They spoke in court through a Romanian INTERPRETER and those charges a few months later on were withdrawn. So a protest was held in support of the Grander family. But then crowds came onto the streets and rioting broke out over several nights, firstly in Ballymena and then, as I say, in other towns such as larne and Port O'. Donne. And over that week, more than 60 police officers were injured. So it was really a dreadful week, particularly for the police on the front line of that. It's something that police are very conscious of going into every summer in Northern Ireland. I mean, going back years and years and years. You, of course, have had riots of a completely different nature, if you like, sparked by totally different issues around controversies, for example, over parading. So it's something the police in Northern Ireland are always geared up for every summer. And they're particularly conscious, really, that this incident in North Belfast, that there have been calls for people to come onto the streets and protest, and the police are conscious of that and are trying to manage the situation and working with politicians and indeed to try to appeal
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Adam Fleming
for Cam and Joe. Later on in this episode, we're going to talk about Elon Musk selling shares in SpaceX's company. But Elon Musk has got involved in this today.
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Joe Pike
Yeah, he retweeted the Restore MP, the great Yarmouth MP, Rupert Lowe, who just tweeted at 7:18 this morning, Enough. And I suppose that one promotes Rupert Lowe, but also promotes the idea that there are questions around this over immigration. Of course, towards the end of last week, we had that intervention from the US Vice President, J.D. vance, also on social media, also talking about a crime where race played a part, although in that incident, which was the murder of Henry Novak, actually we spoke to the Crown Prosecution Service, who said that the murder of their victim, Digwa, was UK born. And I suppose one of the challenges with these sorts of stories, and the Southport murders is probably the best example, is that there isn't clear information, even though the police since Southport have been quicker at trying to give information about often the nationalities, immigration, status of people who are suspects. And you had obviously unrest and riots after Southport. And yet Axel Rudy Gabbana was born in Cardiff to random parents and moved to Southport more recently. What you are, though, seeing, if we take a step away from Northern Ireland, what we have seen in a number of different cases is a sort of series of events which echo each other. You obviously have an incident sometimes where there's been a suspect who is non white. You have speculation around that, you have political interventions and then sometimes you have protests which can at points get violent and then calls for calm. We should say that there are certainly people who have raised questions and been involved in protests, who have really heartfelt concerns and problems about both immigration and integration and how immigration affects their communities and what it means for their families. However, you also have this problem that people often jump to conclusions or want to speak out before they know the facts. And that is partly because these sorts of incidents, Adam, some of them at least, prompt such a sort of emotional reaction. People want to voice that emotion and maybe call for change.
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Adam Fleming
And Chris, just the last word from you on this. The thing that I found really striking about the Police Service of Northern Ireland news conference this afternoon was again and again and again they said it's okay for people to have strong feelings about this. What matters is what you do with those strong feelings.
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Chris Page
Yes, that's right. I think what police are certainly very much trying to avoid here is any perception that they are indifferent to this, that they're not doing enough. They are very much making the point again and again, as you say, that they are taking this as seriously as they can, that they understand community feelings, that they understand the strength of those communities feelings, but they're appealing for that not to translate into a big problem on the streets. Particularly, as I've said, when you look back at what was happening around this time last year, everybody knows the dangers of that around incidents like this. And the part of the police strategy, it seems to me, is to try to make the point that they are. They care about what communities think and feel and say even about these sorts of incidents. But. And the trying within that to try to stop people from taking it any further.
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Adam Fleming
Chris in Belfast, thank you very much. Thank you, Adam and Joe here in the studio. Thank you to you too.
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Joe Pike
Thanks, Adam.
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Adam Fleming
Now, let's talk about Elon Musk again, because he is doing an ipo, an initial public offering of a chunk of his company, SpaceX, which, amongst other things, does those rockets that we've seen very dramatically go up and then come back down to Earth. Starlink, his telecoms company, and xai, which you might have seen as grok, the AI tool on X, formerly known as Twitter. And as part of an ipo, you have to publish a prospectus, which means There was a 400 page document full of details and charts and quite bold aspirations that I could read before I spoke to the BBC's business editor, Simon Jack, who's covering the story. Hello, Simon.
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Simon Jack
Hello, Adam.
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Adam Fleming
Have you read the whole SpaceX prospectus?
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Simon Jack
I haven't read the whole, all the annexes at the back. But I've read enough.
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Adam Fleming
It's hundreds and hundreds of pages, isn't it?
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Simon Jack
It's about 280 pages and, you know, plus bits and bobs at the end. Yeah, it's quite a document. An unusual document I think we could call it.
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Adam Fleming
And these prospectuses are just a usual part of the IPO process of a company going public so that people can buy shares. You have to, you have publish kind of your vision.
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Simon Jack
Yeah, here's what we do, here's how we think we're going to do it, here's some of the risks involved in doing it, and here's what we hope to achieve in the fullness of time. It's basically a kind of sales brochure with risks added into it. And you know, I would, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this is the most hotly anticipated stock market event in history. And that is probably the oddest prospectus I've ever read because it makes some very modest claims about raising consciousness to the stars and making, setting up a moon base, setting a moon base, Mars base, making humanity an interplanetary species. We heard this stuff before, but seeing it in black and white in an official document is quite something.
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Adam Fleming
And we can talk about the reality or otherwise of realisticness of those visions in a second. But just in terms of having IPO works, what's actually, what's actually happening here?
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Simon Jack
So up to now, only a few individuals, including Elon Musk and some very deep pocketed institutions have had the ability to own shares in space. SpaceX. There comes a time in a company's life when it decides it wants to have some public currency, if you like, to find out what it's worth in the real world. And so you offer a chunk, a little bit about 5% of the company to the general public, the likes of you and me and people watching saying, would you like to come and own a piece of this? And so they're only selling a bit of the company, but based on the price of that bit of the company, you can get it. You can extrapolate what the whole company is worth. And what we know is that they're trying to get a price of $1.75 trillion. That's the biggest IPO in history. So they're only raising between 75 and 85 billion. But that makes the whole company worth 1.75 trillion, which comfortably puts it in the top 10 most valuable companies of all time anywhere on the planet. And they can then in the future sell more shares to raise more money to do more stuff. And, and, and, and, you know, SpaceX is not the only people are doing it anthropic who are also AI pioneers with their CL OpenAI with ChatGPT. They're also joining this in what, you know, is probably the biggest block, you know, set of blockbuster releases in stock market history.
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Adam Fleming
And let's talk about what people might be buying when it comes to SpaceX, because, okay, the name on the tin is SpaceX, but actually it's a whole load of companies and I was reading in the prospectus there's something like 236 subsidiary companies as well.
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Simon Jack
Yeah. So it's three or four main businesses. There's, there's this, the rocket bit, which is the most visible thing. And you've seen all the, you know, the rocket coming down, I mean, caught and reused and all that kind of stuff. There's the, and they'll launch. Then there's the satellite manufacturer and launch business. They'll launch their own satellites and other people's. And then there's the re. There's the profitable bit, which is the network of their own satellites which comes together to make the Starlink network for communications, which we've seen as being very geopolitically important. You know, we're switching it on and off over Ukraine, for example.
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Adam Fleming
And then you also provides your WI fi on a plane now.
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Simon Jack
Exactly, exactly. And it's become, it's got 10 million customers now, it's making billions of dollars. That it's actually bit of business. But overall SpaceX is not profitable. It lost $5 billion last year. And then you've got, if you like the meat in the sandwich, which is kind of speculative meat, if you like. There we go. There's a sentence I never expected to say.
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Adam Fleming
Hang on, are you doing an IPO for your company too?
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Simon Jack
Anyway, but the point is there's the other bit, and that's Xai, and that is a combination of the social media platform we used to know as Twitter, now known as X, and the AI bit of Elon Musk's empire, which is all bundled in. And the truth is, this is not really, you know, it's not mainly about rockets. It's not, it's not really about rockets at all. In a way, the bulk of the future revenue they're hoping to make comes from the AI bit and, and some deep space stuff as well, like, for example, putting data centers in orbit or on the moon, or manufacturing solar panels and all that. Kind of stu. That's the bit that has to work for this IPO to make sense.
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Adam Fleming
But you're basically buying a share of an AI company that has some very visible rockets.
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Simon Jack
Exactly. It's an AI company with three rockets thrown in.
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Adam Fleming
And then in terms of the concept of ownership, I mean, normally if somebody comes in and buys loads and loads of shares of a company, they then have a say in how that company is run. That's not going to be the case.
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Simon Jack
Oh, no, that is definitely not the way Elon rolls. So basically, he will own, still own, about 40, 42% of the company. But some shares are different than others. They come with extra voting rights. So he will have over 80% say so effectively has total control of the company. Now, some people I've spoken to have said, if I'm buying something and owning something over which I have no control, I'd like a slight discount on, on the face value of that. But in the Elon Musk world, most people are expected to pay a premium for the questionable privilege of owning something they have no control over. Because that, I think, is really the secret sauce in this. It's this maver, naysayer, disproving genius kind of cult figure, some would call him. Some have called him. And that's where it becomes, you know, very difficult to imagine that some of these things are possible. But betting against Elon Musk has proved to be a very unprofitable pastime.
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Adam Fleming
In the past, I've just done a search on the prospectus for how many times the word Musk appears in the 400 pages and it's 440 times.
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Simon Jack
So more than one page.
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Adam Fleming
Yeah, which proves that that's basically what you're buying a bit of him.
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Simon Jack
Ye, you are. And some people I've spoken to saying, you know, there is a cult of Elon Musk and you're buying a little bit of that. And, you know, most people who came to market with a proposition like this, people would say, you've got to be crazy. And people said he was crazy when he tried to take on the combined might of the car market, but totally gave it a kick up the backside, revolutionized that. And what's interesting is that Tesla, for example, everyone thought, tesla's going to go bust, blah, blah, blah, it's going to run out of money. It didn't, and now is worth more than General Motors, Volkswagen, you know, Ford, Toyota, combined. And what his great skill is is that just when the car business was plateauing and everyone was catching up a bit he sort of said, well, Tesla isn't really about cars, it's actually about robots. It's actually about humanoid robots and I'm going to build a billion of them and every household on the, on the planet is going to have. It'll be the most popular consumer product of all time. So he just sort of bait and switch and suddenly he thought it was a car company. Now it's not a car company. And people say he's a great showman. He's more like P.T. barnum than he is like Rockefeller or Warren Buffett.
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Adam Fleming
And we've alluded to this a few times just what his ambitions are. But it's worth just drilling down into some of the examples. I mean, I was then reading this prospectus and thinking, oh, are we actually buying shares in the future energy of the world? Because one of his visions is these solar panels in space where you can collect loads of solar power without any atmosphere in the way and you've basically got a limitless free source of energy. So actually, are people going to be buying shares in the, the, the energy grid of in 200 years time?
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Simon Jack
Well, he's saying, I mean, remember the data centers that go power AI have got some physical constraints. They require enormous amounts of energy and they require enormous amount of water usually to cool them. His answer is if you put them in space or on the moon, you've got limitless supply of solar energy and it's, and it kept cool by the chill of deep space. So you solve both problems in one go. And actually if you look at some of the pushback that you've some parts of the US and elsewhere about data centers going to certain neighborhoods are saying actually, you know what, don't take all our energy, don't take all our water. Maybe, you know, he does have the advantage of saying, well, I can make mine in space, no one else can. So he will have a competitive advantage in AI. But at the moment, and we've talked a little bit about Anthropic, which makes Claude and OpenAI, which makes chat GPT, they're also lining up blockbuster share offerings. And I would say, you know, at the moment XAI is not in the lead in the AI race and a lot, a lot depends on that. And the other thing that people are thinking about is that, you know, when you sell a little bit of the company, you can then begin to sell off chunks more. If they, SpaceX does that, an anthropic and OpenAI do that, then you're actually looking at sort of several trillion dollars worth of shares coming onto the market. And people say, is there a point of people saying they actually, you know, that's a glut. Yeah.
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Adam Fleming
And also there's not enough spare money in the world lying around to buy those.
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Simon Jack
Well, exactly. And some people are already saying that some portfolio managers will start selling some stuff to raise the cash they need to include these new names in their portfolio.
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Adam Fleming
Currently successful companies with high share prices might suffer as people go, oh, let's take a bit out of them to put into space.
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Simon Jack
Yeah, we need to raise a bit of money so we can buy some of the new shiny objects which are available on the stock market. So maybe we'll get rid of a few shares in that one. So, you know, there are some distorting potential. Potential distorting factors. That is what happened in the dot com bust, which is that all these companies IPO'd and then they kept selling all the shares and eventually people just gagged on how much there was and they were being asked to take. You know, these companies weren't making profit and they were selling shares. Sounds a bit familiar to right now. And you know, that's that the, the issue. The difference now though is that there's been explosion in something called index tracking funds, which rather than try and pick out which company's going to do better than the other, you just buy the whole index. And there are trillions of dollars in these funds. And so when these companies, as they surely will join those indices, indexes, those, those, those index funds will have to buy them. So they will soak up some of that supply. So that's. And that will be some kind of, you know, give some support.
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Adam Fleming
And also most people who have a private pension and actually lots of other workplace pensions as well, will be buying these stocks.
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Simon Jack
Well, exactly. Whether you like it or not. And you can apply directly to your local stockbroker or investment platform to try
- [27:34]
Adam Fleming
the phone after you've is exactly.
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Simon Jack
And there has. And by the way, you know, people who, you know, deal with, you know, normal people's investments have says there's been a surge in interest in this. But even if you don't directly apply for them, you will almost certainly end up owning some of these companies because as I say, anyone who's got a share, you know, a pension with shares in it will have some allocation to US shares and in that will be indexes in which this will be included. So whether you like it or not, you're on the Elon Musk train.
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Adam Fleming
And of course, Elon Musk isn't just an entrepreneur and an engineer and a soon to be trillionaire. He's a bit of a politician as well. I mean, we saw today he was retweeting messages about what happened in Belfast last night.
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Simon Jack
Yeah, I mean he's had a front row seat. Not even a front row seat. He's been on the court, hasn't he? In this game of politics in the US very substantial contributor to Donald Trump's reelection. Trump 2.0 if you like. $280 million, something of that order actually turned out to be pretty good investment because SpaceX has had billions and billions of dollars in federal government contracts to launch government stuff into space. Obviously, you know, you're only, even if you're an investor, one of his companies, you're only a tweet away from some things controversial. And he's involved himself, as you say, in the internal politics of many countries, including the U.K. you know, been involved with Tommy Robinson, et cetera. And on his comments last night. So he's not an uncontroversial.
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Adam Fleming
But as we were discussing a few minutes ago, even though he's now going to take part of his company public, that doesn't mean he has to shut up because of shareholders saying, can you shut up please? Because the shareholders don't have that power over him because the ownership structure we've
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Simon Jack
been discussing, they don't have that power of him. Even so he has in the past managed to get himself in trouble, not necessarily with his shareholders who generally take, you know, whatever, but with the securities and Exchange Commission. Because sometimes if you've got publicly traded companies and you start firing off saying this is happening, that's happening, you can. They get, they get tetchy about that. Like is it market manipulation? Is, is everyone getting the same information at the same time?
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Adam Fleming
So he's slightly less free.
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Simon Jack
Yeah.
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Adam Fleming
When this goes public.
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Simon Jack
Yeah, potentially. Because your public markets and people have, you know, like mom and pop have got shares in it that you can, you're, you're held to a higher standard.
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Adam Fleming
And just in terms of how this is being sold to the public. Look at it this way. I'm a Star wars fan fan and I'm a fan of markets as well. And all this stuff. I think I've probably had more pop up adverts for SpaceX than I did for the Mandalorian film, really, which tells you about just the world we're in. It's a sort of, they call it meme stocks, don't they? Where people who are not professional investors just sort of get advertised stuff and get excited about stuff that they've read on Reddit. They're like, oh, I'll buy that.
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Simon Jack
Well you've got bear in mind that Elon Musk is basically a 15 year old Isaac Asimov fan who's got billions of dollars and is achieving the dream that Isaac Asimov set out in his foundation series. Do you know what I mean? He's a massive sci fi nut. So it doesn't surprise me that the algorithm is putting you in that stream.
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Adam Fleming
Interesting. Also one other thing from this prospectus, his idea that he'll be able to use these SpaceX rockets like planes and one day you'll be able to get on a SpaceX rocket, I don't know, in London and then end up in Sydney in 25 minutes because you've gone through space rather than around the world.
- [30:54]
Simon Jack
Yeah, I mean I, that look, you know, maybe it's possible, maybe it is. They did try that hotel. It was going to be that high altitude thing which could get to London, to Sydney in a few hours. That didn't work. But listen, like I say, you write off Elon Musk at your peril. He's proved a lot of people wrong and you know how he and it just listen, making one multi billion dollar company is pretty impressive. He's got about eight or nine and you know he's, he's got some of the biggest companies in the world. So you know he's got, he's got some claim to be the most remarkable person.
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Adam Fleming
I wonder how many people who are going to buy shares in a few days time will end up on one of his Martian bases in their lifetime. I think it's going to be a tiny number, maybe even less than one.
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Simon Jack
Yeah. If you think that you're basically by buying shares you might get a discount on the, on the, on, on the day trip to Mars.
- [31:48]
Adam Fleming
I think especially when you go through the documents and you guys actually as we said at the, what you're buying at the moment is a software company as an AI company.
- [31:55]
Simon Jack
Yeah, you're buying an A company with the three rockets thrown in. But he knows how to capture people's imagination and he's surely done that.
- [32:02]
Adam Fleming
Simon, thank you.
- [32:03]
Simon Jack
Thank you Evan.
- [32:09]
Adam Fleming
And thank you if you've already messaged in with your suggestions for our poster for our Edinburgh Fringe shows. So you know when you get a poster and you've got like the pull out reviews from the critics saying five stars, I loved it. We decided this year why don't we put you in that slot and you tell us how and when you listen to Newscast and you could have a chance of being on our poster. We've had some suggestions already. Andrew says I listen during long meetings. That could have been emails. And Nadine, who has already got her ticket to the show in Edinburgh, says Newscast is our breakfast soundtrack alongside me saying, get a move on and you're going to be late to my kids. Very good. Early contenders for the Newscast Edinburgh poster. Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Nadine. And thank you in advance if you send us one to newscastbc.co.uk or you can send them to us on WhatsApp on 033-01-239480 and we'll be back with another episode of Newscast from here in the Newscast studio very soon.
- [33:10]
Joe Pike
Bye bye.
- [33:11]
Adam Fleming
Newscast.
- [33:11]
Simon Jack
Newscast from the BBC.
- [33:13]
BBC Newscast Outro Voice
Well, thank you for making it to the end of another newscast. You clearly ooze stamina. Can I gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds? And then, without having to do anything else, our meandering chat will miraculously make its way to your phone.
- [33:41]
Lowe's Advertisement Voice
Now it Lowes Faster Quotes started. The Lowes Pro Desk got a materialist handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo.
- [33:49]
Adam Fleming
Perfect.
- [33:50]
Lowe's Advertisement Voice
Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in store or on lowe's.com right from the Lowe's Pro Desk, build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's.