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Notes -
The spacex IPO has happened and made Elon Musk a Trillionaire.
There are probably hundreds of potential topics from this story, feel free to go off on your own tangents.
What I am interested in is that this is a company that is building real world things, and not fake internet shit. It feels like a lot of new wealth and investment in America comes from and is directed to the internet. I think one of the main reasons has been that large investors are generally play-it-safe followers. They see which companies are newly striking it rich: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, etc. And they are happy to invest in copy-cats.
I'm hoping the spacex IPO has a similar effect. That investors start chasing new copy cats. But this time copy-cats of spacex rather than copy cats of facebook or google.
Having looked over the S-1, I need to respectfully disagree here. Even SpaceX itself is justifying its valuation with fake Internet shit. They position themselves as a frontier AI center. Almost their entire TAM is predicated on Grok being a fully generalizable software technology.
I have a hard time squaring this dual narrative. Are they a space company, or an AI company? Right now it seems it's whichever one will convince an investor to give them money.
It was always weird to stitch xAI and the SpaceX together. The latter is a solid, well executed company that is in a dominant position with innovative technology and a clear market, with its only downside being that its market offers (relatively) limited upside. The other is a gesture towards almost infinite upside, but in practice seems to be a data center REIT.
Combine them, sprinkle in some Elon reality distortion field, and you end up with wild 13 digit speculative TAMs of orbital data centers.
The best description I've heard is that SpaceX is a datacenter REIT bolted onto an AI company bolted onto a social media company bolted onto a launch business bolted onto a niche ISP.
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