← The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP830: SpaceX (SPCX): Is It Really Worth $2 Trillion Dollars? w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O'Malley
01:13:21
Kyle and Shawn analyze SpaceX's blockbuster 2026 IPO, dissecting the company's three segments: Space, Connectivity, and AI.
Loading summary
Transcript102 lines
- [00:01]
Sean O'Malley
You're listening to Tip.
- [00:03]
Kyle Grieve
All right. So I genuinely never thought we'd be discussing Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it on the show these days. And then at the same time you're telling me that we're going to get to talk about Mars colonies in today's episode. This is going to be a fun one.
- [00:17]
Yeah, me neither. But believe it or not, Twitter is now part of SpaceX's AI segment.
- [00:23]
But come on, Mars colonies, objectively super, super cool that this is something we're talking about as investors in 2026, right?
- [00:31]
And with that Mars colonization, Elon has to populate it with a million inhabitants just to unlock its incentives.
- [00:40]
Sean O'Malley
Since 2014, with more than 200 million downloads, we have interviewed the world's best investors, studied deeply the principles of value investing, and uncovered many compelling investment opportunities. We focus on understanding businesses and intrinsic value, investing accordingly, and sharing everything we learn with you. This show is not. Investment advice is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own, and they may have investments in the securities discussed. Now for your hosts, Sean o' Malley and Kyle Grieve.
- [01:27]
Kyle Grieve
Hey, folks. I'd say that we own a few splashy names that are well known and attract a lot of attention in markets. You know, from Amazon to Alphabet to Uber. You know, there's definitely some blue chip businesses that we hold in our portfolio, but today we are going to discuss one of the most popular and also polarizing companies to go public in recent memory. And that's none other than its Space exploration technologies or SpaceX. And part of what makes SpaceX so popular is simply all the investors who have, you know, made an absolute fortune by following Elon Musk into past investments. And we know that Elon is a pretty polarizing figure in himself. He tends to be somebody that you either love or hate, with very few people in between. I found.
- [02:11]
Exactly. And part of the reason that I chose SpaceX was that it's simply just a fascinating business. You know, I'm no Elon Musk fanboy, but I think the business case of what SpaceX is trying to do really speaks to that, you know, eight year old kid inside me who loved rockets, Star Trek, and just the unknown. So, you know, SpaceX is really just dealing directly in all of those areas, but instead of it being a daydream or a fantasy, it's now reality. And when you look at it just as an investment, I also see the appeal there. You know, at least at a shallow layer. Tesla has been a 260 bagger since it IPO back in 2010. And I've spoken to more than one person who's literally bought their entire home with proceeds from their Tesla investment windfalls. And I'm sure you have similar stories, Sean.
- [02:52]
Yeah, definitely, with Tesla and Nvidia, for sure. I mean, those are the two where it seems like a lot of everyday investors really struck it rich in the past, and yet I think we both personally missed out on those bets. So, as much as I've argued at times that Tesla is just obscenely overvalued, it has objectively created an unbelievable amount of wealth. So I do think the intellectually honest thing to do is to try and look at a business like this, whether It's Tesla or SpaceX, with sober eyes, and try to at least understand how the market is able to justify valuations like 100 times sales for SpaceX or 400 times earnings for Tesla, when with Tesla the business has not grown for three years now. But I. I digress.
- [03:41]
Yeah, and another great reason I think SpaceX is interesting to cover is just simply because of my affinity for understanding market psychology. You know, I think one of the best authority figures on understanding bubbles was John Kenneth Galbraith, and one of his best points about understanding bubbles was that they tend to exhibit quite consistent psychological characteristics. Now, while I wouldn't say SpaceX is in a bubble by any means, it definitely does share many characteristics with past bubbles. And when I see these characteristics, it's a pretty strong signal to me to really dial in on what I'm looking at to determine whether the price makes any sense. So one of Galbraith's factors contributing to speculative euphoria is the specious association between money and intelligence. Galbraith clearly didn't care much about hurting people's feelings, but his point here is very important because there are a ton of very rich people taking part in the SpaceX deal. Either they already own shares from previous private rounds of fundraising, or they're just part of these institutions that are taking part. So you can see how there may be an inkling of truth, that investors are following the wealthy, hoping to tap into their intelligence and just kind of sidecar alongside them as SpaceX hopefully rips up well.
- [04:44]
So that's what I'm really excited to see today, because I actually privately passed on a chance to invest in SpaceX last year because I thought the valuation was absurd, even though would've already 5x'd for me already. And when you experience something like that, you realize why investing With a long term mindset like Buffett going off the fundamentals, everything we'd always talk about every week can be so challenging because that sting of regret and FOMO can really be painful. And what you don't want to do on the flip side of that is to then pile into SpaceX at some IPO related price peak during market hype cycles and then actually lose money. But at the same time, if there is any merit to the vision for SpaceX that the market is painting, you
- [05:31]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
want to make sure you at least
- [05:32]
Kyle Grieve
fully understand why you disagree with it. Because I certainly don't want to be somebody who just lets pride and kind of being the the old man yelling get off my lawn of this is how investing should be. And you shouldn't invest in companies that have a hundred times sales. You want to understand how the market is justifying it and sort of make an informed conclusion of okay, this is truly overrated or not. And so a lot of people felt they had already missed out on owning businesses like Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple a decade ago, for example. And yet those have been some of the best performing stocks during that period. With the point being, even after reaching what seemed like considerable valuations at the time, and people believing that they were wildly overvalued, those stocks have continued to do very, very well because the underlying businesses are just so good in any ways. My hope for today is to better understand whether we're likely making the same mistake by continuing to sit on the sidelines with SpaceX. And to be clear, I do have my biases here against SpaceX, but I want to be as open minded as possible, at least during today's episode. So before we get off on too much of a tangent, let's get to the actual business of SpaceX.
- [06:57]
Yeah, let's do it. So I want to go back and start back in 2001. So at this time, Elon Musk had been ousted as a CEO of PayPal. So he ended up attending this Mars Society convention where he donated just about $100,000. But more importantly, he learned that NASA had no concrete plans for human missions to Mars. And that insight is what basically sparked something in Elon to build something that would provide a solution to that exact problem, rather than just accepting that space exploration was stuck in place. Now, A year later, PayPal had been bought out by ebay, and that netted Musk about $180 million to reinvest into new ventures. In that same year, Musk met with some aerospace engineers to discuss creating a space launch company And Musk ended up investing half of his PayPal winnings into this new business. But at that time, success was very, very far from certain. Looking back at this time, Elon Musk said, I didn't even let friends invest. I was convinced they'd lose everything. I'd rather go broke myself. But by 2006, Space Launch had actually launched its first rocket, which was the Falcon 1, which actually failed on its first three launches. For SpaceX, you know, the third time wasn't a charm, it was actually the fourth. But even this launch ended prematurely due to a fuel leak and a fire. Now at this time, the business was still bleeding cash, but they made it work. And by 2008, SpaceX became the first privately owned company to send a liquid fueled rocket into space, even securing a $1 billion contract with NASA.
- [08:19]
You hear these stories of devoted entrepreneurs literally sleeping on the factory floor. And say what you want about Musk, but it does seem like he's had a pretty fanatic devotion to working on his companies over the years. So just to take us to the present though, what does SpaceX look like today? Because I'm sure a lot has changed.
- [08:37]
That's right. So today SpaceX has three segments to its business. Now let's start with the Space segment. The space segment is SpaceX's arm that's responsible for pretty simply going to space. They built rockets that are cheaper and they're reusable. These characteristics are very, very important simply because they're making space travel economically viable when it just never was before. They also have a very strong track record with over 650 successful space launches. Now SpaceX is vertically integrated on these rockets. They handle the design, the manufacturing, the launch and the refurbishment of the reusable rockets. Now of those 650 successful launches, they've had about a 99 success rate and they delivered somewhere around 7,400 tons of payload to orbit. Regarding revenue generation, Space Segment has two revenue streams. The first one is launch services. So this is a service offered for commercial, civil, international and government customers to the reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. This part can deliver things like satellites, cargo and crew members. SpaceX is the only non NASA rocket that delivers their astronauts to the International Space Station. So these are on fixed kind of one to five year contracts. The second is in launch and development. This service helps develop spacecraft using SpaceX's rockets. So a few recent examples of this are NASA's contracts with SpaceX to resupply research supplies and vital equipment to the International Space Station. SpaceX has even launched a few autonomous missions to help deliver this equipment. Now, these tend to be on even longer contracts, which range up to 14 years in length.
- [10:08]
It's pretty incredible, inspiring to see what SpaceX has been able to accomplish. And my dad worked in satellites for most of his career, and we have a member of our mastermind community who is actually a rocket scientist. And so by all accounts, SpaceX has really just reinvented the entire industry from what I've heard. But the logical next question for me is, does this space segment include revenue from launching its own SpaceX satellites or what actually goes into this?
- [10:37]
Yeah, so the short answer there, no. So the satellite portion of SpaceX actually is its own segment, so they don't count revenue there, which would be kind of a double accounting. No, no. I'd also add that the revenue split between launch services and launch and development. So as of Q1, 2026, 53% of space revenue comes from launch services, while 47 comes from launch and development. But probably the most important aspect of the space segment, I think, is SpaceX lead in launch costs. So in 2026, the average Falcon 9 launch cost about $74 million. But this hides much of the cost reduction that comes from building these reusable rockets. For instance, I've seen that the average launch cost for NASA is $2.5 billion. So there's simply just no price competition in this example, which is why NASA is using SpaceX so much. And SpaceX continues to spend billions of dollars in R and D to improve its rockets. Going forward, they're getting bigger, they're getting cheaper at delivering payloads. For instance, their first reusable rocket was that Falcon 9, which I mentioned, and that had a payload capacity of about 23 tons. Next up was the Falcon Heavy, which could deliver 64 tons. And their newest rocket is called Starship, which can deliver 100 tons. They play so much importance on this that they have their own KPI, which is mass to orbit, which they track. But as the space segment, you know, scales, they're going to be able to take advantage of economies of scale. The average cost per kilogram for SpaceX is simply just dropping, with estimates for the Falcon 9 around 2000 per kilogram, versus only 100 per kilogram for Starship. So as the mass to orbit increases, this segment will see significant expansion in margins.
- [12:06]
Well, before we get carried away with mass to orbit conversations, just to translate that to plain English, as SpaceX is able to deliver more cargo to space while bringing down the launch costs, the economics of the business can improve dramatically, and we're already basically seeing evidence of that. But now I want to turn our attention to the AI segment of the business. I know you're not as bullish on.
- [12:32]
Yeah, that's entirely correct, Sean. But first, let's do another little history lesson here. So, Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and the price tag was around $44 billion. Once that sale was complete, it was then taken private. It was later rebranded as X and added an AI component to the business via Grock. It's AI Chatbot, which maybe you have used, Sean, or many of our listeners have used. So In February of 2026, Xai and SpaceX ended up merging. Now, the reason that I'm not crazy about the AI segment of SpaceX is simply that it just doesn't have anywhere close to the same economics as either the space or the connectivity segment, nor does it offer anywhere close to the competitive advantage of these segments. Yes, you can make the argument, as Elon has, that there's a lot of great synergy between them. For instance, Elon sees AI data centers being in space in the future, and in that case all three segments would have synergies as the equipment, you know, obviously has to be transferred to space via the SpaceX rockets and then the signal would need to be transferred back to Earth via SpaceX's connectivity segment. But as of now, you know, that just simply doesn't exist. AI has two revenue streams. First, you have advertising. You know, obviously if you've scrolled through X and you see ads, that's one way that the segment is monetized. And then you have the AI solutions and infrastructure. This covers X's premium subscriptions as well as higher tier GROK offerings.
- [13:48]
So this is where my biases are going to come out, I think. But XAI is not exactly leading the LLM race compared to Anthropic and OpenAI. And in fact, pretty sure they're not even fully utilizing their data center investment. So they're actually licensing out this compute to others, which is sort of telling to me. And then with X or Twitter, it's pretty shocking that this business is in the public markets once again after being private for four years. And can you imagine telling someone four years ago that Twitter would return to public equity markets after Elon Musk had purchased it for $44 billion or whatever it was. And, and now it's returning attached to a $2 trillion enterprise. It's just, it's just unbelievable. And so, you know, it sounds like an incredible comeback story, but I actually don't think the implied value of Twitter has really grown at all. And if anything, a lot of value has arguably been destroyed. And you've seen that with the decline in users on the platform and also the quality of the advertisers. I mean, gosh, some of the ads I've seen on Twitter just makes you question what happened to the more legitimate corporate ad budgets that used to allocate dollars there. And I'm guessing a lot of that money has moved to Facebook and TikTok and Reddit and so on. But that's enough ranting for now. I should mention that I know the AI segment is also working on an initiative called terrafab, which is a mixture of developing semiconductors and sort of this superintelligence factory. And the end goal is to achieve a terawatt or a trillion watts of AI computing capacity to help meet the growing demand of AI compute from autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, which is something Tesla has talked about. And AI satellites and all. Just sounds like very science fictiony to say out loud.
- [15:41]
Yeah, it's an insanely ambitious project, and it's not just an XAI initiative, as they have backing from Tesla and Intel as well. So, just to give you an idea, global AI data center capacity is somewhere around 30 billion watts, which is just 3% of the goals of the tariff app. Now, I'm not going to pretend like I have any special insights into this, but, you know, it sounds like it's a net positive for the companies that are involved in AI. And XAI is obviously going to be able to monetize that AI compute capabilities and generate recurring revenue once it's done, assuming that it works as originally planned. But before we move to the connectivity part, I just want to say that the AI segment is in heavy reinvestment mode right now. It's investing far more money than it's even generating in revenue. So in 2025, the segment had revenues of 3.2 billion, with losses from operations of $6.3 billion. And the segment spent 12.7 billion in CapEx for future growth.
- [16:31]
Elon has never shied away from ambitious projects, to be fair. But man, spending four times your annual revenue on capex is pretty insane. And SpaceX is certainly not alone in making those massive data center investments, though. How about now we discuss the final se segment of SpaceX, which I think is the most attractive one from an investment perspective, and that's the connectivity business. And so you actually recently pitched American Tower to me, and we covered that Business on the podcast a few weeks ago. And so SpaceX's connectivity segment seems like it would be an emerging competitor for American Tower. And yet you mentioned that American Tower sees satellite Internet as a complement to what is already available via terrestrial connectivity, not as a direct competitor. But my assumption is that Elon thinks he'll be able to capture a pretty big chunk of what is now AMT's market share. Right?
- [17:27]
And here's the thing. So if satellite Internet scales well and the product can be offered at an even lower prices with no difference in services, then that would clearly pose a very, very big risk to a business like amt. But I won't get into that too much right now as I want to focus on arguably SpaceX's crown jewel, which is the connectivity segment. So I think connectivity is the crown jewel because as of now, it's the part of the business that is really subsidizing the money losing AI business. Connectivity currently has about 40% operating margins and 63% adjusted EBITDA margins. So comparing this to AMT, the margins are still a touch below AMT. 67% connectivity and Starlink are essentially the same thing. So if I refer to it as Starlink, I'm talking about the connectivity segment. Now Starlink currently has about 9,600 satellites orbiting around the Earth, which is quite an interestingly high number. And these satellites serve just 10.3 million subscribers in 164 countries. Starlink satellites make up about 75% or so of all active satellites in orbit. Now, Starlink has four segments. The first one is consumer broadband. This is basically hardware revenue from selling things like Starlink kits, which maybe you've seen before, Sean, as well as monthly recurring subscription revenue that they get once those kits are sold. This segment has already doubled its customers in the last 12 months. Second is Enterprise. This segment does the same for consumers, just on a much larger scale. Customers would include enterprises in, you know, more remote locations, such as remote work sites, drilling rigs, cruise ships and trains. Third, you have government. So starshield is their secure satellite network built specifically for national security applications. Customers are international and on multi year contracts. And then lastly you have Starlink Mobile. So this is their satellite to mobile offering. Starlink has partnered with about 30 different mobile networks on six continents just to help cover more regions and cover areas that are underserved.
- [19:17]
I remember reading about this segment and there was something crucial that caught my attention and it's related to their KPIs which they use as subscriber counts and then average revenue per user, or arpu. And so they're actually moving in opposite directions, with subscribers rapidly growing. But then ARPU is falling, so as they get more customers, they're making less money per customer. And so ARPU has recently decreased year over year from $88 per user to 66.
- [19:51]
Now, this is normally not a good thing, but similar to a business like Wise, which is making fees cheaper for its customers over time, I think it's actually great for customers. So if we go back to the AMT comparison for a moment, it looks like since satellite connectivity is in its infancy, Starlink isn't really concerned about flexing its pricing power at this point. And since Starlink will at some point help with creating AI compute power, they just kind of want to improve their capabilities in that area. So I would assume once Starlink has a larger share of the world's satellite connectivity and cannot grow as much, they may follow in AMT's footsteps of having these fee escalators. But as of now, they didn't mention anything about escalating fees in their prospectus. And as a matter of fact, SpaceX actually expects ARPU to continue to decline over the next few years, and this is due to the addition of more lower price plans. But because of the scale of the business, it probably is going to continue to be a cash generator for this business into the future. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [20:47]
Curious about online trading, but haven't taken
- [20:49]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
the first step yet? You're not alone and plus 500 futures is a great place to start. The futures markets are moving Fast and with Plus500 you can explore popular assets like oil, gold, S&P 500, Bitcoin and more. From crypto to commodities, there's always something happening. The platform is super easy to use, so you can trade on the go right from your phone. You can get started with just $100 and jump into the action. See something interesting? Once your account is open, you can trade it in just a couple of clicks. And if you're not quite ready yet, you can practice with a free demo account. No risk, no pressure. With 20 years of experience, plus 500 makes trading more accessible than ever. Check it out at +500.com. Trading and futures involves risks of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500. It's trading with a plus. Let's say every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. The competition is only moving faster. So how do you keep up? Fortunately, there's NetSuite next. You probably know NetSuite, the AI powered business management suite that securely connects all
- [21:58]
Kyle Grieve
of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR
- [22:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
and CRM in a single source of truth. Trusted by over 43,000 customers, NetSuite NEXT is the next huge leap in how business gets done. Because AI is built into everything you do, it surfaces custom insights throughout your day. AI agents work alongside you to handle the routine work. And anytime you have a question about anything, just ask like you're talking to a colleague. I use this and you should too. For the first time ever, you can try netsuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to NetSuite AI Tip built for every industry, ready for every boardroom, NetSuite AI Tip as investors, we spend all day studying great businesses, but some of the best returns come from building one yourself. If you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to actually make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. Take the moment your first customer is ready to pay. Shopify Checkout helps more of them finish
- [23:09]
Kyle Grieve
the purchase, and when they come back,
- [23:10]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. And because Shopify handles the setup and the checkout, you get more time to
- [23:19]
Kyle Grieve
focus on what actually grows the business,
- [23:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
plus the tools to do it. If I were starting a business, I would absolutely use Shopify myself. It powers millions of businesses worldwide, from names like Mattel and Gymshark to founders just Getting started@shopify.com Tip with Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com tip Start your free trial at shopify dot com tip
- [23:57]
Kyle Grieve
all right, back to the show.
- [23:59]
And so what's this chatter I've seen about Starlink's V3 satellite? I assume the performance is continuing to improve on the satellites as new ones are continually being sent into space.
- [24:12]
Exactly. So Starlink's first generation satellites were the V1. The current generation is the V2 mini, and the V2 minis reduce the satellite's manufacturing costs by 3x per gigabyte of capacity compared to the V1. And in the last half of 2026, Starlink is actually going to be releasing the V3. Now, the V3 is by far the most powerful satellite that they've created yet, with 20 times the throughput capacity of the V2. So the economics of the V3 are also really, really good. They expect a 9 times cost reduction per gigabyte between the V3 and the V1, which is further going to increase the efficiency of these satellites.
- [24:45]
So that was a great breakdown of what exactly SpaceX does at a high level. And from my viewpoint, it looks like SpaceX has some really interesting assets and one less interesting one. But I want to hear more from you about how you think of SpaceX's moat. You know, it seems pretty robust to me when you're citing NASA as a competitor, and yet NASA needs to use SpaceX because SpaceX can service the International Space Station at a fraction of the cost. It seems like a pretty good setup for the business.
- [25:18]
Yeah, I think SpaceX definitely has some sort of moat. But my issue with SpaceX is that it actually brings back some kind of bad memories that I've had from my investment into Alibaba. So Alibaba had this China E Commerce segment, which was exceptional, but it was really just subsidizing all the other segments, none of which at the time were turning a profit. And I remember after selling it, I made a new item on my investing checklist and it was, if the business has multiple segments, does it have at least two profitable ones that are likely to be cash cows for many years? Or is one segment just carrying the entire business where the business would be better off just getting rid of the rest of the business? So when I ran SpaceX through my checklist, I was very sensitive to this very specific question, because as of now, the connectivity segment is essentially subsidizing the entire business. And I'm just not crazy about the AI segment, as I think both of us have made clear today. But, you know, the space segment also looks quite promising.
- [26:11]
Yeah, it's a mixed bag, and sometimes leadership really knows what they're doing and bets on reinvesting into businesses that build their flywheel at the expense of GAAP net income, which Amazon, as we know, did for a long time. And then other times, the market rightly sniffs out that billions of dollars of capital are being wasted, like it did with Mark Zuckerberg's spending on the Metaverse, which we're still waiting to pan out. But SpaceX, at least for now, is certainly getting the benefit of the doubt that these other units aren't holding back the company, even if they're being subsidized, as they're building an ecosystem that will create lots of value for shareholders. Or that's a thought. And so maybe we start to analyze this ourselves by going over what you don't like about the AI segment, because this is really where the big bets are being made and the big subsidies are being made.
- [27:05]
Yeah, I think my main issue with the AI segment is that I think it just has the weakest moat out of the entire business, if you can say it even has one. So you can argue that X has network economies. X has 1.3 billion accounts, meaning they can continue showing their users ads. But like you said, the quality of those ads has gone downhill, and I've noticed that as well and continue to make money that way. But other than that, I kind of find it hard to find any real competitive advantages. GROK is basically an LLM, and I've used many different LLMs, and unfortunately there just isn't that much difference between them. The perspective says that SpaceX has an advantage because it can train its own LLM, operate its own compute infrastructure, and that is vertically integrated. But this seems to be, you know, exactly what the other tech titans are doing today. So I find it pretty hard to believe it's that much of a competitive advantage. But I will say, you know, this segment is in its early stage, so perhaps Elon has exactly what it takes to get a decent return on these AI investments. And I think that there's a chance that this segment is helpful for SpaceX in terms of connectivity in space in a more holistic way. As you know, AI data centers in space, like I mentioned earlier, would require the use of all three of SpaceX's segments. But I think it's going to continue to be kind of this capital incinerator for many years to come before it actually turns a profit or before we can actually assess whether it's a good investment or not.
- [28:24]
When you look at Alphabet spending on data centers, there's a much clearer argument for me as to how that spending will create value. AI is already being used at scale to optimize advertising and to make these algorithms even better at connecting sponsors with the right potential customers at exactly the right moment. And then you have all the research that Alphabet does and the medical world, for example. So looking at genetics and reversing aging and curing diseases. And so, yeah, I don't have to be an expert on LLMs to recognize how these technologies can help them progress on these challenges. And point being, you already have several incredibly profitable businesses at scale, from YouTube to Google search that almost certainly benefit from having access to cutting edge LLMs. And Google's LLM Gemini benefits from having access to all this unique training data that Alphabet has. And then even in more speculative areas like biotech that I was Mentioning it seems so much more plausible to me how they're going to be able to leverage spending on data centers to support that research. And so with SpaceX, I guess I just can't connect all the pieces together or it's not as obvious to me how these investments will pay off and complement each other. So I want to now dig in, though, to what you like about the business. When I was talking to you before we hit the record button, you said you actually do like parts of this business. So I assume there are some competitive advantages that you think it can keep compounding.
- [29:56]
Yeah, that's right, Sean. So obviously we've been harping here a lot on the XAI segment, which I don't really like, but the connectivity in space segments I kind of do like. They're very, very interesting. So I think that they both have some pretty strong moats that are probably likely to continue to widen over time. So let's start with space here. So the idea of reusing rockets was really just a dream until SpaceX actually made it happen. There are other companies that are popping up around the world attempting to make reusable rockets. So it's definitely not a monopoly by any means, But I think SpaceX is just really, really far ahead on that curve. Musk is definitely part of the advantage here because simply put, he's just one of the best minds in manufacturing that has ever lived. The Falcon Heavy cut the cost of orbit to about $1,400 per kilogram, which was 92% below the historical averages. And just to give you an idea of how much of the market that SpaceX owns, they alone delivered about 2,213 tons to orbit in 2025, more than the entire world combined. So with their ability to deliver payloads for a cheaper price, and the fact that this is only going to get cheaper and cheaper, I think it's going to be really, really hard for new businesses to develop the technology and manufacturing capabilities to compete on price. Now, SpaceX, you know, they've been around since 2002. This isn't a brand new company, even though it just IPO'd. So replicating what they've done over the last 24 years is no small task. It would require billions of dollars in investments. It would require an entrepreneur with the drive and intelligence of an Elon Musk and just simply put, a lot of time. And once they built something that was even close to what SpaceX has built, I think there's a good chance that SpaceX will have already significantly improved on what they currently offer.
- [31:32]
Well, so it's maybe safe to say that this space segment specifically has some sort of low cost provider type of advantage.
- [31:40]
Yeah, I, I think that's completely accurate. As the rockets have improved the tonnage they can drag to space, they've dropped that price. So it started with the Falcon 9 which cost somewhere around 2, 900 per kilogram, and the Falcon Heavy dropped that price to about 1400 per kilogram. And the goal for Starship is to bring that cost down to just a hundred dollars per kilogram. The SpaceX prospectus say that they want rocket launches and landings to be as routine and commonplace as airline flights. So, you know, that's why they have to improve this process, make it safe and make it economically feasible. With starship, they are set to reduce the average cost of reaching orbit by 99% compared to historical launch costs. And then in the communication segment you can see that they continue to drop their ARPU. As you went over. It's a little harder to compare the segment versus a common competitor that it is brought up to in asts. ASTS has a fundamentally different business model from Starlink. I'm not going to get into too much detail here, but you can think of ASTS as an expansion of ground networks that simply expands a customer's reach. If a cellular provider has a customer who goes to an area where cellular towers won't provide a signal, the user can then opt into using ASTS space based Internet, allowing them to continue using their mobile device in areas that would otherwise be completely unserviceable. With Starlink, you're relying more on their hardware and paying a monthly fee. So ASTS can cost something like maybe $15 a day. Starlink might cost you something like $100 a month. So depending on how often you're outside of a standard cell tower range, both products can make sense. If you're out of range for more than a week per month, then Starlink makes, I think, a lot more sense than ASDs would.
- [33:14]
We've mentioned a few times how SpaceX has been able to bring down costs over time, especially compared to NASA for example. So it does seem like the business has demonstrated maybe some economies of scale. Do you think that's right?
- [33:31]
Yeah. This is an area that I thought they would have had more of a competitive advantage in, but the numbers didn't really support it. I think this is a trade that's most obvious in the connectivity segment. So in this segment, operating income improved by 15% while revenue grew about 32% from this quarter to the last quarter now, everything from cost of revenue to R and D to SG and A grew faster than revenue in percentage terms. I was actually quite surprised by this. But as it looks now, this segment is in full growth mode as well. So if you zoom out a little bit and look at the numbers from 2025 versus 2024, they look a lot better. Operating margins in 2025 improved to about 39% versus just 26% in 2024, which is quite impressive. And the connectivity saw operating leverage across all segments of its business. So I would say it's a little tougher to decide which direction this segment is really going. I tend to trust the numbers over longer periods, so I'd like to believe they have some operating margins here that are going to continue to improve. But since they're just investing so much money into the business here, it's really hard to have that much conviction into which direction it's going to be headed.
- [34:33]
Well, since you just brought up that this business is investing a lot into itself, I think it's probably a good idea to talk a little bit more about that. And my guess is it will be pretty tough to assess their capital allocation so far, given that the business is still losing money. But I think what you're doing by going into each segment is really the best way to do it, at least to see which segments are allocating capital best and which are not doing as well.
- [34:59]
Yeah, and that's sort of the best possible way to do this, in my view. We can, of course, look at the figures from the consolidated statements, but given that SpaceX is still losing money and has a negative. No, Pat ROIC just isn't that useful at this point. Net income is also negative, so we can't look at consolidated ROE figures either. But I think we can at least flag a few things for future considerations. So the first thing we can model is the amount of money that's been invested into the company so far. The first simple number to note is shareholders equity. Now, as of the latest quarter, that number is about $34 billion. I generally look for businesses with an ROE in the high teens to 20%. So going forward, whenever SpaceX does become profitable, which is a big if, I don't know when that's going to happen, I would want to see them producing profits somewhere around the $7 billion range. And when that happens, obviously anyone's guess. Now, invested capital for the ROIC use case requires a little more work, so I use Michael Maubouson's operating approach to calculate the invested capital for 2025 and 2024. The latest invested capital is around $44.3 billion, and that's up from 29 billion in 2024. So in 2025 alone, SpaceX spent $19.7 billion just in capex.
- [36:09]
And SpaceX originally planned on raising $75 billion from its IPO, but given all the interest that there's been in the business and the really sharp price action, they actually ended up being able to raise $85.7 billion in what was really, truly a record breaking IPO. And so I think, interestingly, one of our portfolio holdings, Alphabet, also recently raised capital and was oversubscribed, which meant that there was more demand than really they expected and brought in about $85 billion. So right now you have this interesting phenomenon in markets where a lot of equity is being issued after many, many years of the big tech companies being on net stock repurchasers. And now you have basically we'll see how this affects equity markets where you have companies raising a ton of money at IPO and tech giants instead of buying back their stocks, issuing equity to raise tens and tens of billions of dollars.
- [37:12]
That's right, Sean. And I would say just fair warning to investors, when IPOs tend to pop up at a very, very fast rate, tends to be somewhat associated with bubbles. So if you're looking at the market right now, as I am, and you are, Sean, and Daniel is, you know, you have to just kind of be careful because with a lot of recently new issued companies coming out, or companies, like you said, diluting themselves by issuing equity to raise money, it just brings a lot of interest to the market. You know, you can't kind of go on to go and look at your news app and not see something about some new company IPOing or some sort of new AI initiative going on. And it just creates a lot of upwards pressure and interest in the market. And I'm just saying you should just be careful. So getting kind of back to your Google point there. Google's obviously basically planning on putting a lot of those funds that it raised to work specifically in AI, whereas SpaceX is going to be spreading it upon multiple areas. So this includes the expansion of their AI compute infrastructure, enhancements to their launch infrastructure for the space segment, improvements on those rockets, and then increasing the scale and capacity of their satellites. So in my opinion, they worded it pretty vaguely. They basically just said they're going to reinvest it back into the business in general. But needless to say, the proceeds will go across the entire business. Now, how long will it take to spend all this? I really can't say, but it's a very, very large cash infusion. So large that if you net it out from the invested capital number, it's actually going to be negative until they spend that cash, which they probably won't have much of an issue doing. Now, after the IPO, SpaceX announced another acquisition in the AI segment, which was Cursor. Cursor is an autonomous AI agent that can help in coding. This is an all stock deal valued at about $60 billion that will close in the third quarter of 2026. It's worth noting that Cursor has an annualized revenue about $4 billion. So the price tag on this was 15 times revenue. The deal was announced on June 16 when SpaceX's share price had already climbed to an all time high.
- [39:04]
It certainly helps when you can issue shares at an all time high to fund acquisitions. That's actually ends up being a pretty good use of capital allocation. But actually, how about we look at capital allocation more through the lens of shareholder distributions, which we were just sort of talking about a moment ago. But what you would normally expect for a rapidly growing tech company, especially one pouring so much into capex, is that there is of course no buyback or dividend policy in place. And I'm pretty sure that's the case here with SpaceX.
- [39:34]
Yeah, that's completely correct, Sean. I mean, that's exactly what you'd expect for a business like SpaceX, which is clearly an investment mode. There's just no reason to distribute any money back to shareholders in the foreseeable future. So when I was going through SpaceX's prospectus, I had to admit that while the financial statement looks pretty ugly, it also reminded me of one of Adam Cecil's case studies from his excellent book where the Money Is. I know we've had Adam on the Mastermind community do a Q and A, and he's been a great guest on Tip as well. But his main point was that many tech businesses hide valuable assets on the income statement, which clearly provide a lot of value, which also end up depressing gap profits. So in SpaceX's case, you can certainly make an argument that part of their R and D spend, which is 100% expensed, should actually be placed on their balance sheet as an intangible asset. In 2025, they spent about 8.6 billion in R and D, and the Space segment was about $3 billion of that. And so that's kind of where I wanted to focus on.
- [40:27]
So before you get into that, I'm assuming you don't think the AI segment should be capitalized at all, which just means to recognize them as having any residual value on the balance sheet going forward. Given what you've said about this segment, and not only the fact that the spending may not pay off, but also the useful life of a lot of the cutting edge AI chips that are used is really only three to five years. So the depreciation piles up very, very quickly.
- [40:54]
Yeah, I definitely would not be comfortable with capitalizing those at this point. So AI is an asset, but it's just has this much shorter history of success. And of note, Anthropic and Google are still paying Xai about $26 billion per year in compute capacity. So at least they're making something. But in terms of the viable lifespan of that hardware, really hard to say. And I think you're right, it's probably closer to three to five years. But getting back to the space segment, I think that's where SpaceX really has a good history of success. This segment spent about $3 billion of R&D in 2025. And if you capitalize a portion of that, maybe say 50%, you're instantly adding about $1.5 billion to operating earnings. I just wanted to mention that because if you make that adjustment, then SpaceX gets a little closer to being GAAP positive in operating income. But getting back to capital allocation, I just think it's too early to say. We are really diving into uncharted territory here. So it's really hard to say how these investments will end up working out into the future. They've clearly worked out well for the connectivity segment. But until we see what kind of scale benefits SpaceX can get in space in the AI segments, it's really hard to properly assess their capital allocation skills so far.
- [42:02]
So while we can't really judge SpaceX on the capital that they've allocated so far, or how we assume they'll spend that, call it $86 billion in IPO proceeds, we can still observe how SpaceX is being financed through the obligations that they have to their lenders.
- [42:20]
Yeah. So in terms of debt, they're actually looking quite good on a pro forma basis. So current cash on the balance sheet is about 15.8 billion. We're going to end up adding 85.7 billion, bringing total cash to about $101.5 billion. Now on the debt side, they have about $30 billion in total debt. I prefer to See businesses with net debt to cash flow of less than three times. And since SpaceX has negative cash flow, they don't pass a test on this end. But if we add back the cash on pro forma numbers, they have negative net debt of $71.3 billion. So that's definitely a bonus that gives a much greater safety here going forward.
- [42:54]
It is good to see how the IPO helped them get into what I would say is objectively a much stronger financial position. But even on that debt number, they will have to continue paying interest expenses.
- [43:06]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
So do you see them having any
- [43:08]
Kyle Grieve
issues with servicing the debt while they have this negative cash flow?
- [43:13]
No, not really. So in their fiscal 2025, they generated about six and a half billion in adjusted EBITDA. Their interest expense was $1.9 billion. So the leverage ratio on that end is about 3.4 times. But I think the question here is are they going to let the number continue to rise or do they have a limit imposed to them from their lenders? And given the covenants on their loans, it looks like they can't really let these numbers rise too much from where they are today. The consolidated leverage for their bridge loan and credit facility is set at about 3.75 times. And if they want to make an acquisition, they can step that up to about 4.25 times. So they technically breached the covenant by acquiring Xai, but they amended the agreement, so it seems like they have quite a bit of leverage on their debtors to go out there and breach their covenants if the right opportunity arises.
- [43:58]
So you did mention something about this debt to me that you came across during the research process, and that is that they actually have a big portion of debt that's maturing soon.
- [44:09]
Exactly. So they have this $20 billion bridge loan that they entered into in about March of 2026, and the loan is unsecured, which is just great for SpaceX. But the maturity date is only in September of 2026, meaning it was just a six month loan. SpaceX can extend it for another half year if they're in a good financial position and are willing to pay a fee of about 0.25% on the outstanding principal. Now, this loan is very interesting because it depended largely on the IPO being successful. And given the short period until maturity, the lenders clearly believe that there was a very high probability that they would be repaid. And it's written into the detail that it's going to be paid off specifically with the proceeds from the IPO. And since the SpaceX IPO has been incredibly successful so far. I think it's a loan that clearly worked out very, very well for SpaceX.
- [44:55]
Makes sense for them to use a bridge loan ahead of the IPO. But you do have to deduct that, let's say $20 billion to repay the bridge loan from their IPO proceeds. So it's still a massive amount, but they basically tapped some of that IPO money before actually IPOing by taking on this loan. And to the extent they use this bridge loan at a lower rate due to the short term and relatively high certainty of payoff to pay down higher yielding debt, well, then that is a pretty savvy approach to capital allocation. And we've discussed debt here in some detail. And while it's clear to me that SpaceX needs debt to continue chasing its goals because of that negative cash flow we talked about, since they're also not profitable, it's important that management has some skin in the game, which is a topic we always want to dive into a bit when we are considering companies for our portfolio. And so we want to avoid businesses where it feels like the management is playing with money that is not theirs in a highly risky way. So that's something that's come up quite a lot with a company we follow closely in Adobe, where the stock looks very cheap fundamentally, but the conviction we can have in it is sort of capped because insiders aren't putting their own money where their mouth is.
- [46:18]
Yeah, great point, Sean, there. And while I don't require that businesses have managers who own, say, you know, a 10% stake in the business, it certainly doesn't hurt, you know, when they have that larger stake. So, looking at the cap table, we can see that Musk owns about 12.3% of the stock. Generally, for a business worth billions of dollars, you don't see an insider with this big of a stake. But SpaceX, as of the time that I was writing this, is worth two and a half trillion dollars. But there's clearly some very, very good insider ownership, even outside of Elon, with Antonio Gracias owning 7.3%. Gracias was an early investor and a friend of Musk and resides in the company's board of directors. So altogether, Insiders own about 20.2% of the shares, which I think is a very, very good number. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [47:01]
Curious about online trading, but haven't taken
- [47:03]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
the first step yet. You're not alone, and plus 500 futures is a great Place to start the futures markets are moving fast and with Plus500 you can explore popular assets like oil, Gold, S&P 500, Bitcoin and more. From crypto to commodities, there's always something happening. The platform is super easy to use, so you can trade on the go right from your phone. You can get started with just $100 and jump into the action. See something interesting. Once your account is open, you can trade it in just a couple of clicks. And if you're not quite ready yet, you can practice with a free demo account. No risk, no pressure. With 20 years of experience, plus 500 makes trading more accessible than ever. Check it out at +500com trading and futures involves risks of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500 it's trading with a plus. Let's say every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. The competition is only moving faster. So how do you keep up? Fortunately, there's NetSuite next. You probably know NetSuite, the AI powered business management suite that securely connects all
- [48:12]
Kyle Grieve
of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR
- [48:15]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
and CRM in a single source of truth. Trusted by over 43,000 customers, NetSuite NEXT is the next huge leap in how business gets done. Because AI is built into everything you do, it surfaces custom insights throughout your day. AI agents work alongside you to handle the routine work. And anytime you have a question about anything, just ask like you're talking to a colleague. I use this and you should too. For the first time ever, you can try netsuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to NetSuite AI tip built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. NetSuite AI tip what's the one thing in business spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that flips on AI features, every fresh integration, each one is another opening for something to go wrong. And most security problems simply weren't built
- [49:19]
Kyle Grieve
for the pace AI is moving.
- [49:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Moving Enter Vanta. Vanta is the number one agentic trust platform trusted by over 16,000 fast moving companies including Ramp, Cursor and Harvey to stay audit ready. And now Vanta is helping companies like yours catch the risks that show up between audits across your vendors, your AI tools and your whole environment. How the Vanta agent works like a 24.7grc engineer running in the background, finding issues, drafting fixes for you and cutting vendor assessment time by up to 50%. Whether you're a Fast growing startup or a global enterprise. Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn improve trust. Get started today@vanta.com tip that's V A N T A dot com tip.
- [50:15]
Kyle Grieve
All right, back to the show.
- [50:17]
It just goes to show you how magnetic Elon's personality is in some ways and the type of very wealthy investors he's attracted over the years, as well
- [50:27]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
as people who are willing to hold
- [50:28]
Kyle Grieve
onto their shares for the long term with a lot of belief in his vision. For a company with a $2.5 trillion valuation, to have insider ownership north of 20% is not something you see every day. And just to give some context, the biggest portfolio holding in our intrinsic value portfolio is Alphabet and their ins ownership as a multi trillion dollar company is only 3%. And so it's great to see high insider ownership. I'll definitely give SpaceX that. But I would like to see how executives are being paid inside of SpaceX and whether you think it aligns well with creating shareholder value. Because too much insider ownership can also be a sign of egregious stock based compensation.
- [51:12]
That's right, it most definitely can. And another yellow flag here is that elon holds out 85% of the voting power. So he doesn't require shareholder approval really for anything, which isn't necessarily a bad thing given the direction I think he's taking the business. But just realize that if you are a shareholder, you may as well just make Elon your proxy because whatever he votes for is going to be passed. But let's get to the base salaries of the executives here. So they all seem pretty cheap, to be honest, for a business of this size. Musk makes a laughable $54,000 in base salary. The COO and CFO are making about a million and $800,000. So from that standpoint, everything seems very, very good. But we have to remember, even though SpaceX is a multi trillion dollar company, it's still a rapidly growing tech company. And so options tend to be a very popular form of compensation. So let's just see how that adds up. So the business has no short term incentive program, which I know you, Sean, are a fan of. So at least we know that SpaceX is thinking long term when it comes to incentives.
- [52:08]
That's a good thing. That's good to hear. I'm a little nervous though to hear about the long term incentives though.
- [52:13]
Yeah. So there are three forms of equity comp. So you got restricted stock units or RSUs. You got stock options and Then you got performance stock units or PSUs. We only need to focus on Musk's structure as it towers over everyone else by a very, very wide margin. So the RSU's vest based on market capitalization milestones. But there are a total of a billion shares that Musk can unlock here as long as he's able to get the share price up. So current total shares outstanding are 12.5 billion shares. These are unlocked in 15 tranches, up to about 7.5 trillion in market cap. But the second part of this deal is what really, really caught my eye. So Musk has to establish a permanent human colony on Mars with a million inhabitants. Now, to unlock any of these awards, he must meet both the market cap milestone and the human colony on Mars milestone. So the market cap milestones seem much easier to me than the Mars colony milestone. My guess is that once there's a million people on Mars, the market cap of SpaceX will probably far exceed $7.5 trillion. So he'll unlock those PSUs all at once. My take on this is that I guess I don't mind it that much. Musk earns $0 beyond his paltry salary unless he creates shareholder value by increasing the share price. You can argue that yes, in the short term the share price is exposed to the whims of the market. I see that angle. But you know, the Million People on Mars is a completely company specific KPI that I think Musk has complete control over. You know, if SpaceX hopes to establish that colony in space, the space segment will be required to get there. And I assume it's going to be generating quite significant amounts of revenue. By point.
- [53:50]
SpaceX is just thinking about things in a totally different way than 99.9% of companies. And that even might be understating. And I don't think there's really any company in the world, for better or worse, that takes this sort of approach to how they think about the vision for the future and then actually set up their long term comp to match that. Right? I mean, to have a target of a million people on Mars as part of your executive compensation, it's either really crazy, which I'm biased toward, or just ambitious in a way that we've really never seen from any other company. And so this clearly creates a lot of uncertainty in the business. I'm not sure how to capture a million people on Mars in a financial model or dcf. But Musk has made a lot of money during his career dealing with uncertainty and he's definitely Accomplished some incredible things with the odds stacked against him. So I don't know, maybe we won't have a million people on Mars, but maybe it'll be 10,000. But I want to look now at some more of the risks underlying SpaceX, because I think with all three of these segments being in industries that are to varying extents brand new, from social media to rocketry and AI, there are all sorts of risks out there that we can only imagine now. But there's so many unknown risks that we just probably can't even imagine. And so how do you account for that when thinking about the fair value of a company?
- [55:22]
Yeah, you're completely right, Sean, and I completely agree with you. I mean, you go back 10 years ago and discussing things like AI data centers wasn't even mentioned other than in the most esoteric Silicon Valley circles. But now I've had multiple conversations about it with very, very intelligent investors and it's been pretty eye opening to see just how far we've come. And not only that, but just how quickly the pace of innovation is moving. And I think the biggest risk is the most obvious one when looking at SpaceX, not just as a business, but as a stock. You know, I've done a lot of research into bubbles and right now SpaceX, the stock has a lot of embedded risk in it. So as of June 18, the business is priced at 110 times revenue and somewhere around 500 times adjusted EBITDA. And that's annualizing the latest quarter and adding the 4 billion in revenue from Cursor. So I assume, you know, revenue probably is going to continue to climb up. But I think you, you get my point here. The stock is very expensive. Now you have to assume incredibly high growth rates here to make any type of return. And in order to support that growth, you need a massive market. Now I won't spoil the evaluation as we'll get to that later, but needless to say, I'm very skeptical that this would make a good investment at this time.
- [56:29]
A good reality check to do if you're trying to figure out whether you're buying the top of an absurd bubble is to think about, okay, what would it take to have a multi bagger return on this? What would have to be true? What valuation would have to be reached? And so at a $2.5 trillion valuation to get a 4 bagger, which is to be clear, a great return. But we often are really looking for 10 and 100 baggers on a 30 year time horizon. So to get a four bagger at current prices, with no dilution along the way, you would need SpaceX to become a $10 trillion company which is for context, bigger than India and Japan's economies combined. And so I say that sort of tongue in cheek because the math behind those values are not a one to one comparison. There's a stock to flow difference, but still it just highlights to me the magnitude of the numbers we're talking about here and how there seems to be so much more potential downside than upside based on current valuations.
- [57:33]
Yeah, that's right, Sean. I mean, if you're even contemplating SpaceX, you essentially have to look out into the future and you have to make assumptions that things are going to work out very, very well. You know, this isn't some sort of value play where you can look at the sum of the parts and you know, buy it for less than liquidation value. Not even close. So you know, if you are looking at this business, and I think by now we probably lost any real value investors talking about the numbers here. But I digress. Let's get back to the risks here. So some of the other risks that I see are actually quite similar to some of the other businesses that I've covered here. So I recently we discussed QXO and Brad Jacobs and that risk obviously was keyman risk. So let's be honest here. You know, if Elon Musk weren't the CEO of SpaceX, it wouldn't have anywhere close to the amount of fanfare that I think it does. And if we were to take him away, you know, I just don't think this business is nearly as good. He'd also be losing Musk's ability to tell a story, which I think he excels at. Plus he has the arguably the largest audience of anyone in the entire world. Now I've spoken about the concept of reflexivity before, but I think it really applies to SpaceX. The concept as outlined by George Soros states that an investor's perception and biases can influence the economic fundamentals that they are trying to observe, which in turn alters their perception and future actions. In SpaceX's case, I think the fact that Elon Musk is always providing content helps improve investors perception of SpaceX. And that's why they can go out when their shares have risen 67% since the IPO and make these all stock deals like they did with cursor.
- [59:04]
There's a saying on Wall street that with Tesla, the product isn't the product, the product is the stock that Elon is always just Selling the stock. And what that just means is hyping up what's possible. And so it seems like that same model has very much been cloned here with SpaceX and we're talking about million man colonies on Mars. And I also think it goes without saying that there's a tremendous amount of reflexivity here, and I can't believe we haven't said this yet, but Musk is also simultaneously the CEO of Tesla. And so it is truly striking how well he's been able to do it running both for a while now. But I don't know, unless he's a cyborg, I just don't see how it's humanly possible to run both, well, indefinitely. And so you know me, Kyle, it feels like we, in every episode we do, I'm always asking you about how regulation is going to affect an industry. With SpaceX involved in AI, space launches and wireless communication, it is also hard for me to believe that they aren't operating in industries that are either already highly regulated or will be in the future. So from regulation to simply musk time and the narratives that are being sold, I think that you can count a number of very substantial risks here.
- [60:19]
I knew you'd mention regulation, Sean, and I think it's. You're completely correct. I think it's highly relevant when discussing SpaceX. If you look at the launches, you know, SpaceX needs federal aviation Administration licensing. It holds a bunch of government contracts in NASA and Defense as well. If Musk, you know, were to get on the wrong side of the US Administration, they could easily make it their aim to make Musk's life a nightmare, which would definitely affect SpaceX's underlying economics. Now as for the connectivity segment, SpaceX appears to be in an oligopoly right now. As long as they are cutting prices, I don't see that much room for regulators to, you know, have a stink about that. But if we look a decade from now, when SpaceX is already cheap and maybe their growth levers kind of run their course and they don't have the Runway that they once did, maybe they'll start playing around with things like pricing, power, and in that case, you know, regulators might get involved. Now, as for the AI, you know, we just saw the US government shut down Anthropic's most advanced AI model yet. In Fable 5, the US government demanded that Anthropic suspend all access to any foreign national. And soon after, they took Fable 5 offline for everyone. While this isn't an existential threat to Anthropic's business model, as it has other AI models that are working, it's still just a nuisance. And with these models continuing to get better and better, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX's AI segment at some point doesn't get into the crosshairs of US regulators.
- [61:38]
It actually does feel like the political risk has dialed down a bit here. But I mean, just last year you had Musk falling out with Trump, which he did while running the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which was yet another responsibility he took on. And so anyways, it feels like he could clash with any global leader at any time. That was sort of my takeaway from that episode. And maybe that bravado has contributed to his success. I think it probably has. But as a shareholder man, seeing him get into what was, I think, objectively speaking, fairly juvenile arguments with the President of the United States that would have me really questioning his risk management as CEO. But anyways, I want to double click on something you said earlier, and that was regarding the TAM for SpaceX, which has been a pretty controversial topic to say the least. I don't think this is necessarily a risk to the business, but it's a risk for analyzing the business because it feels like SpaceX's numbers are just totally out of left field. And to the extent that you think any of their projections are plausible or not, really determines what you think of the valuation of the business.
- [62:54]
Exactly, Sean. And what you're Referring to is SpaceX proposed TAM of about $28.5 trillion that they outlined in their prospectus. Now, this assumes a tam of about $370 billion for space, 1.6 trillion for connectivity, and 26.5 trillion for AI. Now, just to give you an idea of how big these numbers are, the worldwide GDP is $123.6 trillion. So you're looking at a market that is proposed to be about 23% of worldwide GDP. And this just seems far too ambitious to me on the face of it. But let's dive into it in a little more detail in each segment. So let's start with the small space segment first. So SpaceX is getting a $370 billion number from Euroconsults figures. The problem with this number is that launch services, which is SpaceX's core business, doesn't make up 100% of that TAM. So that leaves the actual global commercial launch market. Now, it's really hard to get accurate numbers on what exactly that market is. I've seen numbers as low as 5 billion, and I've seen numbers as high as 14 billion, but we can definitely assume the segment is growing and at a pretty high rate. Another potential area SpaceX could work in is the lunar economy. So I recently had a conversation with a PhD physicist who mentioned that perhaps SpaceX will help with the construction of infrastructure specifically in space. Think of things like bridges or large infrastructures constructed specifically in space, then brought back down to Earth. Now, obviously this is way too speculative, so I'm not really going to give this any weighting at this point in the market, but you understand what I'm talking about. You know, there's a lot of potential out there. Now, with all that said, I think a more realistic number is probably closer to 50 to $100 billion over a long time period.
- [64:33]
Probably emphasis on over a long time period. And that is a much smaller number than a $370 billion projected TAM. But we have to remember that during the IPO process, businesses are incentivized to create as much hoopla and excitement as possible so that they can try and raise capital at a higher valuation, which allows them to get more bang for their buck, more dollars per share issued. And obviously SpaceX did not disappoint on that front. But maybe we can talk more about the connectivity segment, which I think we both agreed is probably the most promising part of the company. But also they've cited it as having a $1.6 trillion TAM.
- [65:18]
Yeah, I'll give you a hint here, Sean, and I think the TAM for all segments is overstated, but let's look at connectivity here. So the SpaceX claims are in three segments. You have Starlink, broadband, mobile and enterprise, and government. For broadband, they assume that the entire world is outfitted with satellite based Internet. Now if you have 1.8 billion households paying $31 a month, then you get to that kind of $670 billion per year. But you know, I find it hard to believe that they will both penetrate every household on earth and have 100% usage on households that are penetrated. You know, they currently have 10 million customers, so that number that they are using to get to just seems very, very, very far off and probably impossible to actually reach. We have to also take into account that not every household has the same amount of disposable income. I think their market, you know, maybe is more like 10% of global households at a price closer to maybe $25 a month. That alone cuts the TAM to $65 billion. The mobile assumption is $740 billion. But they run into similar problems. They will never take 100% of the market, nor will 100% of the market be willing to spend that kind of money on satellite connectivity. So if we assume 15% penetration and an average spend of about $16, you get a TAM of $52 billion. The enterprise and government TAM seems somewhat reasonable at 200 billion and that takes us to about $300 billion.
- [66:42]
I think listeners can probably tell here that during this work is based on estimating an uncertain future and that we are really going off estimates that are impossible to validate until we can see the future unfold. But I do think it's probably not a bad thing to bring some skepticism to the estimates that SpaceX is presenting here.
- [67:04]
Yeah, I think you kind of have to bring it, otherwise you can really make any value for SpaceX make sense to you and then you just go and buy the shares. But I think when I look at the space and connectivity segments, we're going to see new competitors popping up that SpaceX will need to compete with, and that's going to put further pressure on how much TAM they can actually take. So the AI segment at $26.5 trillion is pure dream world in my view, given what it will actually service. So the biggest segment is the enterprise applications, which they estimate is worth about $22.7 trillion. They're including the entire digital economy. But this total includes services that SpaceX just doesn't offer. For instance, it includes the TAMs of businesses such as Salesforce, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, as well as many other large, very well established businesses that I just don't think that XAI will compete with. I would estimate that the AI segment TAM for SpaceX is maybe closer to $200 billion. Perhaps they can expand that by adding new AI related services. And you know, that's still a very, very large number, but if we add that all up, we get to about $600 billion still, you know, a massive, massive number, but nowhere near the Tam that SpaceX released.
- [68:13]
So I don't think this has been the most ringing endorsement up until now of us thinking that SpaceX likely has an intrinsic value that justifies the pop in the stock post ipo. But we are at that time of the show where we need to discuss intrinsic value. And I think with all the uncertainty about margins and tam, to say the least, it is going to be a very difficult business to fundamentally evaluate. So I'm excited to see where you landed on it with your model.
- [68:46]
Yeah, I mean, as you already alluded to, this is not an easy business to evaluate, just given all the uncertainty into the future. But we do at least have some numbers today that we can base things on. But we don't really have a very long history of these numbers being very, very secure. And we don't have a very, very long history of the growth simply because SpaceX is involved in these brand new industries that I think have a very, very wide number of outcomes. But you know, let me take a stab. So the current valuation of SpaceX is insanely forward looking, as I already discussed. If I just look at its EV to EBITDA, I get 589 times, which is just mind blowing. Now the revenue multiple is 129 times. By the time you hear this episode, it could very well be different given how much volatility the stock prices has. But when you're looking at a business like SpaceX, you kind of have to be forward looking. Nobody is honestly looking at SpaceX as some sort of value play. I don't mind looking out into the future when analyzing a business. But with SpaceX there's just, there's so many moving parts to account for and the growth that is currently being priced in is obviously very, very high.
- [69:52]
We've actually invested in two companies that in hindsight were pretty wildly overvalued at ipo, with Uber and Airbnb. But the difference is that we bought them after the business fundamentals had caught up to the stock price. Whereas with SpaceX, if my life depended on guessing what would happen. So I say this with little conviction, but if you're forcing me to make a guess, I would probably say that most likely I think the stock will be down a number of years from now, maybe let's just call it, let's say 50% in five years from now. And in that sort of arbitrary hypothetical, perhaps we would find it attractive, you would have some moderation of the valuation, plus some five more years of progress in the underlying business, then it might actually be a compelling investment. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So how about we go a little bit more over your valuation and the assumptions that you've made of what would be a fair value for SpaceX today.
- [70:56]
Yeah, and before I do that, Sean, I just want to comment on something you said. So I looked briefly at Uber and Airbnb when they IPO'd and to me it was very obvious that businesses were really, really good. But that's kind of the whole point of the IPO process is that a really, really good business can make for a really, really bad investment. And I think if you invested in the IPO of Uber and Airbnb. Not sure I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I don't think he did very, very well. Whereas if you took a strategy of, okay, I'm going to watch this business for a time and let's see what happens, that makes more sense because both Uber and Airbnb decreased significantly after the ipo, which allowed investors like us to get entry into those businesses and make a half decent return. So I want to get back to your question here about the evaluation. It was pretty fun because it actually reminded me of qxo, a business that I recently pitched to you. And the similarity was that they both have these very, very fast growth rates going forward, much higher growth than basically any business that I've ever looked at on the show. So for my base case, my assumptions are that the business is going to continue growing at about a 37% annual growth rate in its top line. I chose this number because it's in line with what analysts are forecasting for by about 2028, but I made it even more conservative and had that forecasted out to 2031. The prospectus has a revenue KEGR at about 34% since 2024. But we have to remember that the AI segment is likely to accelerate revenue, albeit at lower margins compared to the other segments. From there, I'm going to assume that margins continue to rise. Even though the AI segment will be a drag on margins, I still think that we continue to get margin expansion from economies of scale. I estimate EBITDA margins rise to about 26%. I then apply a 30 times EV to EBITDA multiple on this, which I think is actually probably quite conservative in
- [72:39]
the context of everything else we've talked about today around SpaceX's numbers. Yeah, it does seem fairly conservative, but I don't know what makes you say that it is actually so conservative.
- [72:50]
Yeah, I felt the exact same way when I wrote that. But if you look at Tesla, so it has half the margins today that SpaceX currently has and trades at 131 times EBD, EBITDA. So that's why I think this is a somewhat conservative number. Despite the fact that it's optically expensive, Tesla is still growing revenue over the longer term at about 15%. Now, with all this, I get a value of about $110 in 2031, which is a downside kegger of nearly 10%. So to account for the massive uncertainty, I also feel much safer applying A pretty big margin of safety of 40%. And this gets the return all the way down to negative 18% compounded annually. So you can see here that either the market is heavily overpriced in the business, or my assumptions are completely off and I'm just being way too conservative. So keep in mind, with my revenue numbers, SpaceX is taking about 15% market share from the TAM that I already covered.
- [73:43]
And yet that still implies a pretty negative return for a while. I'm glad I didn't have to try and tackle valuing this one. But I'm also glad we did cover it though, because when a company instantly adds over $2 trillion in market cap to US stock indexes overnight, that really is something worth investigating. And yeah, I don't feel like I need to say much here because clearly this one is just way too rich for our tastes. At 110 times sales and at a fraction of that price in the private markets. I thought it was too rich, and apparently that was a mistake.
- [74:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
But we'll see how long this can persist for.
- [74:23]
Kyle Grieve
And maybe I come across as bitter for missing out on it, but I don't find myself with, with too much FOMO here. You know, when we start talking about Mars colonies, I don't mind waiting on the sidelines.
- [74:38]
Yeah, I, I, I completely agree with you. This business just has just too much uncertainty for me to really ever get comfortable with having any money in this. And even if the price were to get to, say, a hundred bucks, I just can't see myself ever wanting to make this into a position that would be anything more than a highly speculative, you know, 1% position. So I agree with you, but this just doesn't belong in the portfolio. I still think, though, it's going to be fun to see what happens, but given how Musk's businesses always seem overpriced, I think there's a pretty small chance this business ever gets interesting specifically in terms of price anytime soon.
- [75:12]
All right, folks, that's going to be it for today. I want to leave you with a quote. This one comes from one of the best venture capital investors of all time, Peter Thiel, who says, I would never bet against Elon in anything that's hard. Rule number one, if you ask what's been the innovation in SpaceX or Tesla, it's what I describe as complex coordination where you just have to take a lot of different pieces and the innovation is to combine them in a new way. So Elon Musk has been a master at doing just this, and I do think that praise is deserved from Peter Thiel and I. I think we are still wanting to give him credit here for what has been accomplished with SpaceX. We definitely don't want to be betting against Elon, but we just don't feel like the market has valued the business in a way that is attractive to us. So on that note, thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time.
- [76:13]
Sean O'Malley
Thanks for listening to tip. Follow the Investors Podcast on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, tax or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third party products, services or advertisers do not constitute endorsements and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network. All rights reserved.