The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet

Get our Business Idea Database: https://clickhubspot.com/wjsl Episode 833: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) breakdown the biggest IPO of all time. — Show Notes: (0:00) what even is SpaceX (7:11) What even is a trillion dollars? (8:51) Launches explained (9:07) Starlink (14:07) Data centers in space (17:39) Starship (24:46) Grok (28:06) a wonderful business at a silly price? (34:16) the mission (37:51) SBF's $114B fumble (39:04) funny, weird, surprising nuggets from the IPO (42:35Who's getting rich this week? (51:13) The genius insight of Luke at Gigafund (55:46) Pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be right (59:12) Elon's comp package — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right, we are talking SpaceX IPO, the biggest IPO of all time. And there's a lot of smart analysis out there. This ain't that. Sam, what did you call it? The two guys in a truck version of this? What did you say?

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  Two idiots and an S1.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  So this is for, you know, there's going to be people who are smarter, wealthier, more technical than us that are explaining SpaceX. But we promise to be the most relatable analysis you're going to get. Because I wanted to nerd out on this myself. I was like, should I be buying this IPO? Should I be buying this stock? And in order to do that, I was like, okay, let me sit down for a couple of hours and just try to understand what even is this business? How does it work? Is this massively overrated? Is it underrated? How should I think about this? What do they even do? And so that's where I spent some time. Sam was picking through the S1, trying to find some of the more interesting quirky, people aren't talking about this, but check this out, styled nuggets. So that's what we're going to try to do in the next hour or so.

• 1:10Sam Parr?

  I'll just play the character. It's all acting, but what would you say SpaceX does?

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so SpaceX, what do they do? SpaceX builds rockets. I think that's the primary thing that they do. They build rockets, ideally rapidly reusable rockets, and they can take stuff into space. Now, why do you want to take stuff into space? Well, one version of take stuff into space and the origin of the company is, let's take man to Mars. So how do we become multi-planetary as a species? That was the, you know, way, way back. That was the original mission, still, you know, a part of the mission. And I guess the, the origin of that was that they, you know, Elon, after he sold, I think it was PayPal, after PayPal sold, he made a few hundred million dollars, $200 million or so. And he was interested, excited about when NASA was going to go to Mars.

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I wonder where the Mars mission is at for NASA? And he goes on the website, he looks it up, sees nothing about a Mars mission. He's like, wait, we went to the moon in whatever, 79? We have nothing planned to go past that?

• 2:12Sam Parr?

  Like he's planning a vacation. He's like, hey, so like I have some free time. Let's see if we can like take the kids to Florida and like watch like a rocket take off. How cool would that be?

• 2:22Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so he was looking at that, okay, it's not happening. So then he thought, oh, man, you know, go into space, go into the moon. That's a very inspiring thing. What if we funded a mission to take, I think it was like a plant, it's like a little succulent or something into into space and it'll, you know, let's take life to Mars, life, technically speaking, because it's a plant. And he thought, oh, that'll just generate some excitement, some buzz, it'll kickstart more enthusiasm around space. And that was the original idea. He goes to Russia. He tries to buy rockets from the guys in Russia, like an old ICPM missile, basically. And they laugh at him, they sort of spit in his face. He realizes like, oh, shit, after two trips to Russia, this ain't gonna work. And

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  like any good entrepreneur does, doesn't take no for an answer. Like, like any stubborn genius does, he decides, I guess I'll build my own. He took that personally.

• 3:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, when I was a kid during 4th of July, like, or like for some holiday, we would drive over the river to go to Illinois because they sold bottle rockets there and they didn't sell them in Missouri. Elon and I are basically the same thing.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  Same thing.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  Just if he is, you know, he's 200 million times richer and 200 IQ points higher, but very similar.

• 3:36Shaan Puri?

  But I relate.

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  If you have SpaceX.

• 3:43Shaan Puri?

  So do you know their business model? What do they actually do?

• 3:47Sam Parr?

  When I was reading through the S1, one of my big revelations was they do so much stuff. And frankly, I don't entirely know how it all contributes to the same thing. But I do know that the main reason why he started was that reusable rockets is the best way to make going to space happen because you can make things cheaper.

• 4:08Shaan Puri?

  So they, yes, that's correct. So they have, let's say, you know, three core components here, or I should say.

• 4:22Shaan Puri?

  Four. So they have launches, they have Starlink, they have X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, and then they have XAI. And those four are the four components of what SpaceX currently does with some new things coming online. Like they have something called the TerraFab, where he's building like the largest chip factory in the world. So that's like, you know.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  What are the chips, what are the chips going to be used for? Their own rockets?

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  His, their own AI. So basically, he's got XAI, which is his AI company. And TerraFab is basically his way of getting ahead of what he believes is like the chip bottleneck in the world, which is there needs to be more chip production, ideally in the United States. So again, if the, if the current manufacturers of chips are, are already booked out five, six years in advance, already at capacity, and the world needs more chips for AI, we'll go ahead and build the largest chip factory in the world, the fab.

• 5:19Sam Parr?

  Sarah and my wife and I, we took a road trip and we stayed at a motel and they only had rooms with two twin beds at the motel eight. And she was sad. She was like, I want to sleep in the same bed as you. It's so weird. And so I just got rid of the middle drawer and I pushed the two twin sized beds together. And I said, we don't need a king size bed. We have a super bed. And that is sort of what Elon has done with this company, you know? It's all of these, he's just made a super bed.

• 5:45Shaan Puri?

  Except he kind of put like one of the, you know, like, what's the little, what's the little footrest thing called? That's like Twitter. He's like, yeah, it'll just be here at the bottom. Because the only downside, when you look at the analysis of this thing is that Twitter revenue is like half of what it was when he bought it. So that one hasn't really worked out, but he, he rolled it together with all this other great stuff so that the investors did well, even though that business didn't do so hot since then.

• 6:09Sam Parr?

  So he has a super company. Let's hear.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  He has a super company. The company's going public right now. It's the largest IPO in history. I believe it's going public at 1.75 trillion dollars, which is very polarizing because you have on one side, people who are.

• 6:27Shaan Puri?

  Rational, lógico criaturas que miran esto y dicen: Wow, así que es un cien veces el ingreso, eso es bastante asombroso. ¿Qué estamos comprando aquí exactamente? Y por el otro lado, tienes el culto de Elon y tienes a gente que es loco sobre el futuro de la tecnología, que creen que, en Elon, confiamos. Y no se trata del precio a la renta de los ingresos, no se trata del precio de las ventas, se trata del precio a la renta del Elon. Y si es una empresa de Elon, vas a tener diez veces el precio que probablemente no tendrías en una empresa. Y es una empresa muy interesante que está en publicidad porque es tan grande y tienes a gente que es tan apasionada en ambos lados, como un equipo de deportes o como una religión. Y supongo que la idea aquí es, ¿podemos tratar de entender lo que está realmente pasando

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  y tal vez llegar a nuestras propias conclusiones?

• 7:13Sam Parr?

  Así que, solo para poner esto en contexto, el término "trillón" ha sido usado mucho. Anthropic está a punto de salir a la publicidad o algo así. Es worth around a trillion or 900 billion. Lo mismo con OpenAI. El término "trillón" se está usando mucho. Y quiero poner esto en contexto porque un trillón es realmente, realmente difícil de entender. Un billón es difícil de entender. Un millón, mucha gente puede entender eso. Así que un millón, si fuera segundos, un millón es 11.5 días. 100 millones, que es un número astronómico, digamos si tienes 100 millones de dólares, si tienes una empresa de 100 millones de dólares, eso es una empresa muy grande, eso es 3.2 años, si 100 millones de segundos. Un trillón es 32,000 años.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  ¿No es increíble? Es difícil faltar cuán grande es un trillón.

• 8:04Shaan Puri?

  Eso es increíble. Y cuando este IPO suceda, Elon será el primer trillónario del mundo, al menos en papel.

• 8:10Sam Parr?

  Y estamos hablando de 2 trillones, ¿verdad? Así que son 60,000 años si fueran segundos. Eso es mucho, eso es muy grande.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  Así que, ok, vamos a explicar un poco sobre la empresa. Así que, hey, quiero decirte algo bastante cool. Tenemos una base de datos de todas las ideas de negocios no sexy que han sido discutidas en este podcast. Cientos de episodios que el equipo de HubSpot pasó a través de. Llevaron todos los ideas no sexy. Así que no los de alta tecnología, pero los de simple, relatable, interesante, rentable ideas que hemos brainstormado y son disponibles para descargar gratis. Solo clickeen el enlace en la descripción abajo. Gracias a nuestros amigos de HubSpot por patrocinar este podcast y juntar este recurso gratis para ustedes. Vuelve a la serie. On the different dimensions that I mentioned, launches, they dominate. They're like the Google search of launching rockets.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  They launch, I think, something like 80 to 85% of all the payload that goes into space goes through SpaceX. There might be a second, yeah, there's a second place technically, but the gap is so large. And so they dominate the launch category. Now, what do they launch? They take satellites up into space. They take satellites for the government, but they also, I think about 40% of their launches are just for their own satellites for this product called Starlink. So if you don't know what Starlink is, Starlink is basically internet service. Specifically, it's really great at giving you internet in places that have shitty internet. So rural areas, remote areas, countries where the infrastructure gets damaged or blocked during wars. Starlink basically gives you internet anywhere. It's great for airplanes.

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  It's great for boats, anywhere you can have internet that's traditionally is quite difficult to get. And this Starlink business is gangbusters. So it is basically up like, you know, it's quadrupled in the last two years. They have 10 million paying subscribers to Starlink Internet. It makes like $11 billion a year in revenue. It's like 40% EBITDA margins. It's recurring revenue. So the Starlink business has like all of the wonderful characteristics of a business. There's no competitors. They have an extreme cost advantage. It's recurring revenue. It's extremely high margin and it's a product that everybody on earth, you know, essentially needs is the internet. And they specifically solve the problem in rural areas.

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  So Starlink is very, very interesting as like, that's the cash cow of this business. Which is new. It's only like four years old, I think. Only like four years old. And there's, by the way, some crazy story about how like the Starlink team, they worked in Seattle and the project was kind of going nowhere. So he's like getting status updates and he gets really frustrated one day. And then he goes like, you ever seen that episode of Entourage where Ari, Ari Gold walks into the office with a paintball gun? And just starts blasting people that he's laying off. That's basically what they did to the Starlink project. They went there and they just were like, what the hell is going on? Nuked everybody, restarted it from scratch and then, you know, it now is like. Like one of the the greatest sort of businesses in the world right now is just the Starlink

• 11:06Shaan Puri?

  business unit inside of inside of SpaceX.

• 11:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that's that's easy to understand. That's that's pretty straightforward.

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  That's easy to understand. And then they and you might think, okay, well, how big is this sort of rural internet thing? Well, in the US, there's, you know, probably tens of millions of people who who will be subscribers to this, maybe like another thirty, forty, fifty million on top of the ten million that they already have. But then you have all around the world, you know, there's huge, you know, fifty percent of the earth basically has shitty internet coverage. So we're talking about like parts of Africa and India, whatever. Now, the problem is those people don't have a lot of money. So they're not paying the same kind of thousand bucks a year that people in the US are paying for Starlink. So there's a question about what that's going to be worth. But then they have this other thing called direct direct to cell. You know about this?

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  No.

• 11:49Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so direct to cell is basically if you've ever been, you know, driving and you're like, oh, I just hit up my call dropped. I hit a I had a dead zone.

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Shaan Puri?

  Right? Maybe you're driving on a bridge, or maybe you're just like, oh, yeah, this one area on my route to work always has like shitty service. Well, they basically can now do Starlink from the satellite direct to your cellphone. So you don't need the little satellite dish like you need for the the home internet service. You don't even need that. It just goes straight to your phone. So they they partner with T-Mobile, for example. And so in areas where you have crappy reception, you'll still be able to send text messages. You'll still be able to download some data. You'll still be able to make a phone call. And so they're basically looking at this like whether they launch their own T-Mobile, right? They launched their own Starlink, just that's what you use for your cellphone plan, or it's this little add on to every cellphone plan on earth where it's like, oh, yeah, and for an extra three bucks a month, five bucks a month, ten bucks a month, like

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  you just have guaranteed coverage everywhere. When you don't have good service, it falls back to satellite service. And so they're like, yeah, that's gonna be pretty big because there are, you know, the the market for, you know, internet services across cell phones and home internet is like two trillion dollars or something. And they actually have, and and by the way, there's no differentiation really between any of these. If you go to T-Mobile or AT&T or whatever, they're all Verizon, they're all essentially the same.

• 13:08Sam Parr?

  Which commercial do you like best?

• 13:10Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's all the same thing.

• 13:12Shaan Puri?

  Who like, you know, is Patrick Mahomes like your favorite player or you hate him? That's a good decide who you go with. And so they're the first ones to go in that space with something that's actually a different proposition, which is like, hey, our service works everywhere. Those don't. And secondly, um, you know, it can be lower cost because of the way they're doing it in, in, uh, in space. They don't have to do ground build outs of towers. So that's kind of like the, the kind of core business. They got so good at launching rockets that it became cheaper and cheaper. I think they basically brought the cost of taking like a kilogram to space, down by 50 or a hundred X what it was pre SpaceX. So they have like a, you know, if it cost a hundred dollars before, it now costs one or $2, right? As an equivalent of like the biggest, how big the cost drop was. And they keep doing that.

• 13:57Shaan Puri?

  So wherever they are today, when they have their new rocket starship, it's going to be half of what it currently is. So they're just like a, have a massive cost and volume advantage in launches. That lets them have the satellite business, which lets them have Starlink. Okay. So that's kind of the, the business as it is today. Then you say, well, what's the next unlock? And if you look at their investor presentation, it's all about data centers in space. And you're like, you know, when you hear this, you think, I don't know what you think. I what the hell, you know, you think about like literally a building floating in space.

• 14:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's hard to fathom. I think like we're colonizing the moon or Mars or something like that. But I also think like, is there not enough room here? Like it's, it's sort of, it's, it's unfathomable. So that's hard to understand.

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  The answer is we got plenty of room. It's hard, it, we're, it's a little slow to build and expensive to build. And there's some shortages like in turbines and things like that to build. But the real problem is literally just red tape. It is easier to figure out how to launch the heaviest rocket ever and take, and build a data center in space than it is to get like, you know, Alameda County to approve of a data center in your backyard. That is literally the problem. That is, there is so much regulation and so much anti data center backlash, that the people who even have the money and the engineering chops.

• 15:20Shaan Puri?

  And the power and the the reserved equipment to be able to build, they can't build in in the United States, which is kind of insane.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  Well, what's you know, it's really so think about this. So I'm a history nerd. So one of the reasons, one of many reasons why the American Revolution happened was when American colony colony folks, they started taking over what is now America. They started going further and further out west and they started having a lot of fights with Native Americans. And the colonists were like, hey, England, like, we need some help. You're supposed, we're supposed to like be your country. Come protect us. And England's like, dude, it's so far away. It takes us four weeks to get there. And plus, once you're there, it's like 3,000 miles long. We can't do this. You guys, I know we said that you can go everywhere else, but please, you gotta come back in. And George Washington was like, no, this is my land. This is my land. You're not going to tell me what to do with my land. Screw you guys.

• 16:11Sam Parr?

  And that was one of the reasons why there was tension. And it sort of begs the question that when you go the figurative Wild West space, when everyone's doing their own thing, what's going to happen in 50 or 100 years when people are like, okay, now we actually have to like rein this in. What are we going to do? Who gets what? Because and that's actually another thing that's quite challenging to understand. It's sort of like sectioning off the ocean or water or something like that. Like who gets what's area of space or Mars or moon?

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  Well, the moon, I think definitely, right? Because it's actually like a limited land area versus space, which is, you know, the biggest thing ever.

• 16:49Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I don't know enough about this to know like what's true, but like, are there like highway routes that satellites take where it's like, you know, this is the best, this is like the the best route. And like, you know, we can only have so much like debris in this.

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't think so. I mean, maybe, maybe there's some future state where space travel is so cheap and easy that so many people want in and the demand is so high that now we're running out of space in space like maybe, but like that's not the problems today. The problems of today are, wow, it's really expensive and hard to get permitting to build on on land. So it's it's such a like, I'm going to take my ball and go home or just like the, you know, men will do anything to avoid therapy type of. Conclusion. We're going to space. I guess we'll just go to build in space then. I don't even want to talk to it. Like I want so little to do with politics that I'll rather build this in space and figure out deal with the engineering. So the big risk of this company right now is two, two questions.

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  The first is, are they going to be able to build something called Starship? It's like their big ass rocket, bigger, way bigger than the Falcon nine. And so I think it carries like seven to 10 times more payload than the Falcon nine. And so if you know Falcon nine is bringing up, what, let's call it 10 satellites at a time. This thing will bring up 70 satellites at a time. And so they haven't yet been able to get Starship to work. They're building it, they're testing it. It's taking years. When they do it, it'll be the most impressive rocket and probably the most impressive like feat of engineering in human history. But there's a question of if, so you're the one, some people might not believe that they'll ever get Starship to work. That's tends to be a foolish bet.

• 18:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, betting against Elon's technical ability has proven to be like the most unprofitable bet you could make. Even if you're right for a year or two, you're eventually wrong. And so one question is, is Starship ever going to happen? And can they make it rapidly reusable so that it could fly? Like he was talking on a podcast and he was talking about it like, yeah, we're going to do whatever. 10,000 launches and the guy was like, so wait, so that means like, you're launching like multiple times a day, obviously, right? Like you're launching. 30 launches a day. Times a day. And he's like, yes. And they're like, but you can't even launch one right now. He's like, yes. They're like, so it's going to be, and he's like, it's like an airport. You know how many times a plane takes off a day?

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, we are going to launch that many times in a day. It'll be like airports, it'll be like, you know, we figured out how to make cars reusable. How to make airplanes reusable. We are going to figure out how to make rockets rapidly reusable. So you can land, turn it around, launch it again, land, turn it around, launch it again. Just like airplane lands, they clean out the, the, you know, get your crumbs off the, off the seat. And then they go and you know, 45 minutes later, it's up in the air again. And that's like a key part of how air travel became cost effective. They're trying to do the same thing with rockets. And so. So one bet is, is the star of the ships thing ever gonna happen? And then if so, there's another set of doubt or risk or uncertainty, which is, can you even do data centers in space? Is this even gonna work? And there's people who argue that, you know, one of the reasons you put it in space is not just the red tape, it's the cost.

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  So basically, one way of thinking about this that Elon talks about is that the entire game is taking energy from the sun and so turning those like photons, basically, or electrons into tokens for AI. Like, that's kind of like the pipeline. That's kind of the world where the world is going is we are gonna need an insane amount of AI tokens, whether that's for, you know, chat GPT like things, whether that's for digital employees, work that's being done, whether it's for science and medicine, whether it's for robots. Like, we're gonna need a shit ton of AI in the future. It's pretty hard to bet against that. So then the question is, who could be the low cost provider of tokens?

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  And basically, if you look at, when you have a satellite in space, it's powered by the sun. You don't need any cooling because space has like, you know, space is basically freezing cold and has like a radiative, whatever, cooling mechanism where as the chips get hot from being used, there's like a natural physical mechanism to cool them down. Some people argue against that, but Elon believes it's no problem. And that basically streaming AI tokens from space is gonna be far cheaper and more effective than any land build out of data centers and then figuring out how to transmit those. And the physics, the paper, the paper papers, the question is, can they build it? And historically, Elon is very good at doing this.

• 21:21Shaan Puri?

  He's very good at taking no market risk, meaning if I could make this, you'd want it, right? And it's like, yes. Then the only question is, can I make it? And the answer for him has always been, yes. And so that's kind of where we're at with this business.

• 21:34Sam Parr?

  This string of letters that we're putting together to make words into sentences is, like, the words that are coming out of your mouth right now are wild to me. I just like.

• 21:44Shaan Puri?

  It's like, I just like learned German yesterday.

• 21:47Sam Parr?

  Like, it's just the fact that language has changed.

• 21:50Shaan Puri?

  So much that in the last five years, it has come to the point where we're now saying we're gonna go to space to create AI. Like, imagine explaining this to someone. There's this old man that I hang out with in my building who's 96 years old. And every time, every once in a while, I go down to his room and he tells me like where he was when JFK died and he'll tell me cool stories. Just imagine like explaining this to him. It's like, well,

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  it's just crazy how fast humans progress.

• 22:17Sam Parr?

  You're, how old's your daughter? She's two?

• 22:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay, so you haven't quite reached this point, but like, my kids are like, how does TV work? And I'm like, honestly,

• 22:28Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea. And you know, they're like, you know, so wait a minute. So this is happening right now somewhere else. I'm like, yeah, there's a guy with a camera. How does the camera work? Couldn't really tell you. But he's got something called a camera and that sort of gets like piped into like those towers. There's like cables on the road. You see those? There's like satellite and like there's Wi-Fi. That's a tough one too for me. Bluetooth, kind of like Wi-Fi, but something, something's different there for sure. And it's showing up on our TV and where's the remote?

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  I've had to experience my, you know, I've been humbled by my kids so many times trying to just even explain the current shit that I don't understand.

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like I wonder if these like analysts who are asking him questions.

• 23:13Sam Parr?

  Like, do they ever just say like, yeah, it, you know what I mean? Like, ah, I don't know.

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  There are so many things that boggle my mind about, you know, today's technology. So I'm with you that like this sounds mind boggling.

• 23:25Sam Parr?

  That's crazy, but also that someone is audacious enough to keep pushing, like keep, what, okay, we did that. What about this? What about this? What about this?

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:34Sam Parr?

  And to have that open mind, it's, these are engineering feats, but these are also personality feats. Just like when Joey, Joey Chestnut ate 70 hot dogs at the Coney Island Hot Dog Contest when the previous record was 19. That's what we're dealing with right now and it's just unfathomable.

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  It really is. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 24:19Sam Parr?

  What about Twitter and XAI? Okay, so that's kind of insane to me. The fact that a rocket company owns Twitter.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You know when you invite someone to your party? And then they bring that friend?

• 24:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Shaan Puri?

  Kind of, it's kind of the Twitter problem right now.

• 24:37Sam Parr?

  And I think it was sold for $250 billion to SpaceX, is that right?

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  So I did a lot of my thinking with Claude yesterday for this, and I had Claude build me my own, my own deck about SpaceX. Here's one of the things about Twitter. So Twitter's ad business is 40% the size of old Twitter. So X advertising is at 1.8 billion now. It's down 100 million from last year, and it's half of what the ad revenue was before he bought it in 2021, five years ago. He added subscriptions and payments, whatever, so that's now $1 billion in ARR. So the total, you know, is 2.8 billion, and it was 4.5 when he bought it. So the X stuff has, you know, has not quite worked. He did figure out how to spin it, right? So he figured out, hmm, okay, the X business is not that great,

• 25:24Shaan Puri?

  and I can't get the engagement to be as high as, you know, WhatsApp or Instagram or TikTok or any of these other apps. But what it does have is data. And maybe I can use that data to power Grok. And then he tried Grok. Now Grok is falling behind Anthropic and ChatGPT. So he said, but, but he, again, you know, I think one of the great hallmarks of entrepreneurship is basically failing forward. And so maybe in the same way that X sort of failed forward into like, oh, well, it gave Grok some differentiation, but then Grok hasn't quite kept up with everything else. He used his Grok asset, where he's trying to build a ChatGPT Anthropic competitor, even though it's way, way behind. He built the largest

• 26:07Shaan Puri?

  Data center for training AI, Colossus. And he's really good at building the machine that builds the machine. So he's basically the, what he's the best at is building factories at this point. And so, you know, Tesla has its own factories and produces, you know, enormous amount of cars. Fast and anyone else designs and builds. He's doing it now with the TerraFab. He does it with the rockets. He did it with, with data centers here. So he built the largest cluster of GPUs, bigger than Google, bigger than Facebook, bigger than anyone. The problem is he doesn't have enough users. So he has this like, you know, he bought a huge mansion and doesn't have any friends to come over to entertain.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  Well, because what does Twitter have? I think you say 500 million. That's shockingly, 500 million is still, this is amazing, a niche social media network.

• 26:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and Grok has 100, you know, 100 billion users, whereas ChatGPT has a billion, so 10 times smaller. And so he doesn't have the use of it. So what did he do? He just turned it to Airbnb. He started renting out Colossus to Anthropic and to Google. And so just in the last, I don't know, two months, they announced two deals that I think are combined worth like $20 billion or more. A billion dollars a month, so 12 billion a year to use his data center. And that's Google. Google themselves was the best at building data centers. And they need to rent from Colossus. And then same thing with Anthropic, where Anthropic is paying, you know, over a billion dollars also a month to rent out. Now, these are short-term agreements. They can cancel with like 90 days notice.

• 27:44Shaan Puri?

  So who knows, five years from now, it might just be a temporary stopgap solution. But again, failing forward, like figuring out like, okay, are we fucked? No. What if we did it this way? And then finding a way to survive and advance.

• 27:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they basically like, they put this S1 out, I think, four or six, I forget when, one or two months ago. And I think it was last week or maybe a Monday. It was almost like a quiet amending of the document that says, hey, Google just signed up to spend a million dollars, a billion dollars a month with us to become a customer. And that, that's insane. That's such a huge number.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I have to think the, the 9D chess move there was that they knew and they staggered the, they sort of staggered the announcement. Maybe it was truly, uh, oops, forgot to mention this, but I think it would have been smart if they intentionally did that too.

• 28:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was cool.

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  Do you want to see any of these slides, by the way? Can I just run you through these?

• 28:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Did you have a sit down with your wife? And you're like, OK, so hear me out. And you showed her like every slide?

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  No, you're, that's you. I'm doing that with you, right?

• 28:48Shaan Puri?

  I told it to explain it to be like I'm Charlie Munger trying to understand the business. And it's like, OK, Charlie Munger would ask like, is it in my circle of competence? How do I lose money here? Show me the incentives. What's the moat? Prices, price is what you pay, the value is what you get. And so I started to basically break it down. Starlink is the part that makes money. XAI is the part that burns it. And the rockets are the railroads in between. You're not buying SpaceX, you're buying three different companies that are stapled together. You have the space launch business, the internet connectivity business and the AI business. And then it, you know, here's the high level numbers. So 18 billion in revenue, losing two and a half billion, 6.6 of adjusted EBITDA.

• 29:22Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna bring that up in a second.

• 29:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's whack. They burned eight billion of cash last year. This is the Starlink business, so it grew from two, two, two million subscribers to 10 million subscribers. But you can see like it is starting to slow down. So that's like one, one cause for concern was that key, you know, key one this year was, was not, not high growth. And that the average revenue per paying user as they go into like more third world use cases of who needs, who needs internet where they have low connectivity, obviously they can't charge as much. They dominate the rocket business 85% of all launches, 80% of all mass to orbit. Let's see, everything is dependent on Starship, which is not a guarantee. And that's the big, the big question. And then, oh, they also bought Cursor.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  So they bought Cursor for 60 billion or have an option to buy Cursor for 60 billion. And Cursor, I think is at three or four billion in revenue. And so like, again, trying to play catch up in the AI game by, by merging. You know, Cursor needed to figure out a way to have compute and, you know, their own models and a way to survive against Codex and Cloud Code. And so like, you know, it's the sort of game theory where, where the, the bottom players like can survive or perform at Alliance in order to like, to, to flip the game on its head, basically. Let's see if there's anything else here. Oh, he owns forty-two percent of the company. Do you know this?

• 30:40Sam Parr?

  Wow, no.

• 30:42Shaan Puri?

  It's amazing. After twenty years, and you would think rockets are like the most capital-intensive business that he's had to raise for. For him to still own forty-two percent, just to put that in perspective, like Aaron Levy from Box, which is like cloud, you know, a folder in the cloud. I think he owned four percent of Box when it went public. And he somehow still owns forty-two percent and has eighty-five percent of the voting control.

• 31:03Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 31:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, some other things about his comp package is pretty crazy. We can go there. But anyways, AI says Charlie Munger would put it in the too-hard pile. It's a wonderful business at a silly price is the AI Charlie Munger conclusion. And it's a great business. You can admire it from afar. You didn't need to own it. Was the was the conclusion that he had.

• 31:23Sam Parr?

  It's just, logic doesn't particularly matter. I don't think, like, I don't think that you can use like a traditional way of looking at this. An Elon asset is not a normal company. So it's really, it's hard. It's hard to price this. It's almost like this weird thing where it... I always thought it was interesting. Whenever you're like going through an M&A process, someone will say like, I'll, you know, I'll buy this company for fifteen times earnings. And what I like to do is change earnings to the word "years." So it's like, I'm gonna give you fifteen years of payment upfront. And when you look at this, you know, the the the present value of a company is the sum of its future cash flows. When you look at this, you're like, it's hard to, I don't even know what it is.

• 32:08Sam Parr?

  Is it a hundred years? Is it hundreds of years? Is it fifty? I'm not sure. But however the length of it is, at this point, it's so big likely that it's like, will Elon die or not?

• 32:18Shaan Puri?

  I think the crazy thing about this, and then even when somebody, why would somebody pay fifteen years? Hey, it's because you're growing. And so, yeah, it's fifteen years at the current rate. But looking at the growth, that might only be six. Might only be four.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  But your growth rate is dependent on like, you're you're making the Elon bet, which is can he figure it out? But I'm like, I don't even know if he exists by the time that like, this is like the the, you get the sum of your future cash flows on this one.

• 32:44Shaan Puri?

  Well, here's what you'd need to believe. You'd need to believe that the Starlink business alone, which is at 11 billion in revenue, is probably going to grow to 30, 40, 50 billion in revenue over the next, let's call it, five years. You'd need to believe that Starship works and that they can take, you know, so they can scale both Starlink as well as the data centers. So you need to believe that Starship works. You need to believe that data centers in space are going to be a thing. And with that, you'd have to also, I don't think this is as much of a you need to believe as in it's not really a leap of faith. It's more of a realization, which is, you know, Saudi Arabia made trillions of dollars because they owned the oil.

• 33:27Shaan Puri?

  They were the largest and lowest cost producer of oil and energy. And the world ran on energy. Well, if you look at the next 20 years, it seems like the world is going to run on compute. Every single business, every single consumer, every single robot, every single car, every single appliance is going to have a compute need. And so then there's a question of who's the Saudi Arabia of compute? And what you would be thinking with, if he goes to, if he's the one who could put data centers in space and data centers in space are going to be giving AI tokens at a maybe, whether it's 50% or 200% lower cost than ground-based compute for inference,

• 34:11Shaan Puri?

  then he's Saudi Arabia in space. And he's the only one positioned to do that currently.

• 34:16Sam Parr?

  So they have a line item or a section of the S1 that talks about future business lines. And he actually says that mining asteroids is, and potentially mining Mars and mining the moon for energy. And I guess that potentially means some type of oil or something like that. And so they actually have that covered as well.

• 34:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Of course, naturally, mineral mining.

• 34:44Sam Parr?

  So, let me listen to this. So, this is actually a super interesting thing. So, listen to what the company's mission is. The mission is to make life multi-planetary and understand the true nature of the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. And then it goes on to say that they want to create like a specie level redundancy. So, consciousness isn't tied to one planet and that they don't want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs. That's what it says at the top. That's the mission of the company. Is that crazy?

• 35:16Shaan Puri?

  What's the Hampton mission? Let's just put those side by side.

• 35:22Sam Parr?

  Like, you know, to connect people, but like, for 99% of the people, the mission of any business is to take the money in your bank account and to put it into my bank account. Okay? So, it's really challenging for me to compare this to make life multi-planetary and make sure that we don't have the same fate as dinosaurs. This isn't fair. So, that's kind of incredible. Also-

• 35:48Shaan Puri?

  You know, I've met, I've met a few doctors, surgeons, that have like, kind of a god complex. And in some ways, it's like, look, if that's what it took to get you to become the best, you know, I actually want my, you know, my heart surgeon or my brain surgeon to have a bit of a god complex, a bit of a savior complex. I don't mind that he's got a bit of a god complex, a bit of a savior complex. It's okay. That's what it takes for, just to be like, hey, you're already the richest man on earth? You want to sleep on the factory floor? You want to, you want to go ahead and build these and put it all on the line again? It takes something that is irrational to make man want to do that. And that could be noble, or you could read into it like, eh, it's kind of a, bit of a insecurity, personality defect.

• 36:29Sam Parr?

  No, that's not how, what I'm getting at. I, I, I wouldn't say that I'm the huge, like, Elon fanboy, but I think this mission's awesome. No, I think it's great. I'm, I, I think it's fantastic. I'm not mocking it. I think that it's incredible. I think it's inspiring. I think it makes it easier to inspire your employees. There's the famous story of like, someone talking to the janitor who worked at NASA in 1968, the year before it was the moon, and they said, sir, what do you do here? He goes, I'm helping us get to the moon. Like, I think that's awesome. I, I think Wall Street Journal had a, an article on the blue collar workers at SpaceX and how much money that they were going to make on this. And they all seem incredibly inspired. So, no, I'm on board. I think it's awesome.

• 37:07Shaan Puri?

  So look at, I don't know if you saw this, but SpaceX IPO is expected to create over 4,000 new millionaires, including some cafeteria workers who's compensation packages included employee stock options. And then this, me and the SpaceX lunch lady.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's so crazy. Yeah, I think it's great. I think the amount of wealth that's going to be created, I actually wonder, I don't know enough about economics, but like with all these new rich people being created with Anthropic, ChatGPT and SpaceX, I wonder what that's going to do just to housing prices. Obviously, San Francisco is insane. Have you been seeing anything in San Francisco?

• 37:42Shaan Puri?

  My sister just sold her house, but it was like pre the IPO chatter. And she literally, she didn't put it on the market. She bumped into a real estate agent, was like, I have somebody who's looking. The guy walked in, literally, this is not an exaggeration, he walked in for five minutes without his wife and made an all cash offer on the house at like what they were going to list it at. And that was it. It was done. He literally never came back even and bought the house. I've never seen anything like it.

• 38:12Sam Parr?

  It's just crazy. I wonder what's gonna, obviously, the coastal cities are gonna like, you know, things are gonna change, but I wonder what it means for us the country. What's this say?

• 38:20Shaan Puri?

  So pour one out for Sam Bankman Fried. He's on the, there's a lot of winners out of this IPO. He would be one of the losers out of this IPO because he had an investment in SpaceX that would have been worth $15 billion. And his overall portfolio, he had Anthropic, which would be worth 80 billion, because he was one of the earliest investors in Anthropic. He had Robinhood, which would be about 5 billion. He had Cursor, he was one of the, I think he was literally the first investor, maybe in the first round at least. And that's, that would be, you know, a 3 billion plus stake. He's got SpaceX 15 billion, Solana 5 billion. And his overall portfolio out of, you know, what he, his slush fund that he was inappropriately using, illegally using customer funds to go invest, it'd be $114

• 39:02Shaan Puri?

  billion today. He'd be seen as one of the greatest investors of all time.

• 39:06Sam Parr?

  Who gets those? Who gets the shares?

• 39:09Shaan Puri?

  So they liquidated all these when they did the bankruptcy. So nobody won, actually. The people who bought out of the bankruptcy estate, it's kind of like when Tim Draper bought all that Bitcoin.

• 39:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Shaan Puri?

  At a low price from the US government when they seized the Silk Road Bitcoin. You know, it's whoever bought the bankruptcy, the assets out of when they did their liquidation, that's who won.

• 39:31Sam Parr?

  That's insane. One thing that I want to call out, and I don't have a good explanation for this. But they talked about in the S1 about having like, okay, so the way it works is you see this, you see EBITDA, which is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization. Then they do this thing called adjusted EBITDA, which in my opinion makes no sense. I guess there's a lot of reasons as to why they do it, but the best way that I could explain it is, you know, every month, my wife and I, we sit down and we look at our budget. And we say, how much did we spend last month? Is that in line with what we predicted, whatever? And so that can help us predict future expenses and let us know that we're keeping to our financial plan.

• 40:11Sam Parr?

  Every once in a while, or rather, in the first six months of us doing this, we kept saying to ourselves, well, we took this vacation, but like.

• 40:17Shaan Puri?

  It's a one-off.

• 40:17Sam Parr?

  It's a one-off. You know, we took our parents on vacation. It was to celebrate this thing. And then in month six of doing this, we're like, you know, we just took this other once in a lifetime vacation. And you know what? I think we just have to like assume that we're going to have these like one-off things, gifts, vacations, buying a car. So we just got to up the budget and that's what we're going to do. Adjusted EBITDA is just like saying, you know, you had this one-time lawsuit or this one-time. And I think in the case of SpaceX, it's about depreciation, which doesn't exactly make sense. They're like, we're going to have this one-time depreciation. I think that's what it said. Plus earnings before interest and depreciation. I don't understand why you would add the adjust for, it doesn't make sense to me. Does that seem weird to you?

• 40:58Shaan Puri?

  No, I mean, I think you're spot on. I think Buffett and Munger famously hated EBITDA as a thing. I think they just called it bullshit earnings. It's like, it's like our earnings are this, and then our bullshit earnings are this. And especially in a company that's so capital intensive, like I think they had like 20 billion of capex spend in the last 12 months or something like that. Obviously depreciation is very, very real. I think. For software companies, you know, it can be a little bit different, but this is not a software company. And then the adjustments, you're right, you know, it's like, oh, except for, you know, we adjust back in for stock-based compensation. It's like, well, that's how you pay the people to do the work. So why are you keep, why do you keep adding that back in? Is that going away anytime soon? Not really. For example, it might be the go public costs. Sure, that's an adjustment.

• 41:40Shaan Puri?

  Uh, but you know, the adjustments tend to be far more favorable than that.

• 41:44Sam Parr?

  I think there was a few other funny things. Do you know, they, I think they own like $2 billion for the Bitcoin. And I think some of the adjustments was that Bitcoin price has gone down. Did you see that?

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  That's what I need, dude. I need my adjusted net worth. It's just adjusted for my stupid ass investments.

• 42:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And then they, uh, another funny thing was they did a project where they paid a vendor in shares. And the strike price of the shares was like 420. I think it was like $42.20 or something like that. And then I think that when they did like a 409A valuation for Twitter, it was like, I'm, I'm screwing up the exact numbers. But I think if it was $42 billion, they made it like $42 billion, like 420. And like, if you do like a control F 420, it's all, it's everywhere. And that's kind of insane.

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  It's the most tryhard part of Elon. I, I despise his 420, uh, obsessions.

• 42:39Sam Parr?

  Is there a Hitchhiker's, I've never read Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. Is there like a 420, is this like a weed 420 reference?

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  It's a weed 420 thing. Yeah. Hey guys, I'm cool too, right?

• 42:52Shaan Puri?

  I think it's, I think in Hitchhiker's Guide, it's like 42, that's the number for the universe, but that's not, I think why he's doing 420.

• 42:59Sam Parr?

  Okay. Well, yeah, I wasn't sure, but that's pretty silly. What's this?

• 43:04Shaan Puri?

  Shout out to the Ontario's Ontario, Canada Teachers Pension Fund, which in 2019 decided, you know what? We're going to slang an investment into SpaceX back before SpaceX was pretty obvious. And they're going to make $12 billion this year. Um, and in the, in the IPO, which, you know, more than funds their pension, it's, you know, $33,000 per teacher. That's in the, in the fund, uh, for the 300 something thousand teachers that are, that are in the, in the pension fund. So I think that's pretty cool and a great move by the Ontario fund, which is also hilarious because I'm pretty sure they like boycott Elon. But like, whoops.

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's pretty hypocritical. Did you put a appendix on your slideshow, which is funny tweets? Cause that would be wonderful.

• 43:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this was manual because Claude don't have that sense of humor that I have. So I had to do this work myself.

• 43:55Shaan Puri?

  Can I tell you a couple of other nuggets that I thought were interesting?

• 43:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Shaan Puri?

  Did you see who else is on the cap table?

• 44:01Sam Parr?

  No, not really.

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  So I'm always interested with these IPOs like who Joe? I don't know. This episode, this part of the episode is brought to you by Pocket Watchers. I want to know who else is getting rich out of this.

• 44:12Sam Parr?

  Of course. Dude, when I was watching the Knicks game the other day, I kept pausing. I'm like zooming in, I'm like, who's that person?

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  Courtside?

• 44:18Sam Parr?

  Who's that person?

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I'm begging for this courtside app. I just want somebody to take a picture of the entire courtside seats and tell me who everyone is, what they do and how they made their money. And I'd like that for every single game.

• 44:27Sam Parr?

  And like the schleppier the guy, the more I want to know. Because I would zoom in, I'm like, this guy.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  Shalom, move your head. Who's that guy?

• 44:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, I get why you're famous, you're hot.

• 44:36Shaan Puri?

  Who's the guy with the triple chin that's courtside at New Balances?

• 44:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Shaan Puri?

  How much waste management does he do?

• 44:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what I, that's all I want to know is who's the schleppiest looking person?

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Not even the New York ones, when they're playing in San Antonio or Oklahoma City. I'm just like, oh, what is, oh, he, you know, he collects all the used chicken wing bones from restaurants all around the country and turns it into bone broth? Like, ah, that's what this guy does.

• 45:02Sam Parr?

  There's this funny video of this like guy who looks exactly like you're describing. I think, I forget exactly where it was, maybe Canada, but Drake's sitting at the game. And this guy and Drake are sitting next to each other. He looks like he's six years old. He's got a beer belly and he's just sitting there and he looks like he's like laughing hilariously. And they put the camera on Drake and everyone's cheering. And the guy looks over at the Drake and he goes, are you famous or something? And Drake was like, yeah, I'm kind of famous. And then like the, the, the meme actually found that guy's identity and he's significantly wealthier than Drake and he's like this big shot who no one knows and he owns some type of like boring business and it was pretty funny.

• 45:41Shaan Puri?

  By the way, that's one of the only cool things you can say to a celebrity. Like, I've actually played this scenario out in my mind many times of like, how do you, if you see, if you actually see someone really famous, like, if you avoid it, lame, no story. You go up to him, you ask for a picture, no way. Just, you know, you walk away with a picture and no dignity. You annoyed them, like, what, do you go tell them you're a big fan? What do you, what do you actually do? I think, you know, what you just said, which is like, are you famous or something? Is great, because then they have to be like, yeah, I'm, I'm Drake, I'm a, then they just have a blank face like, I'm a rapper. They're like, okay. And they're like, and you have to start justifying yourself, like, that would be great. I just, I want to do that to Drake.

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  Dude, six months ago, I saw this guy in the street. And he was a cool looking dude, he was young, he looked around my age, and he had this beautiful dog with him. And I, I was out to eat, like, on the street, like, we were at a sidewalk table, and he was just standing there, it looked like he was waiting for his wife or something. And I walked over, I'm like, man, that's a beautiful dog. I had a dog that looked just like that, and I showed him photos of my dog, I showed him my tattoo, and, and I just learned, we, I hung out for 20 minutes. He's like, yeah, I just moved here, I'm so like in New York City, this and that. And I was like, cool. And these people were like staring at him, and I'm like, are you famous? What, what, what are you doing? He goes, yeah, I, I just, um, I, I play for the Knicks, my name's Landry, and he told me his last name. What's his last name? Is it?

• 46:58Shaan Puri?

  Shamet.

• 46:59Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 47:00Shaan Puri?

  Shamet.

• 47:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, I totally had the opening, like, his wife came over, my wife was talking to his wife, and we totally had the opening where I could have like exchanged like-

• 47:08Shaan Puri?

  You didn't notice he's 6'5"?

• 47:11Sam Parr?

  He, I, no, I didn't, everyone in New York is like, got looking like, and striking looking, I just thought he was a dude. And, uh-

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  You didn't notice he looks like the original Jesus? Like, does he look like Jesus?

• 47:23Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man, he didn't, no.

• 47:25Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's Jesus, that's why everyone's staring.

• 47:27Sam Parr?

  He didn't look like that, no, in real life-

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm surprised you didn't tell him, like, sorry, everyone's staring, I have a podcast.

• 47:34Sam Parr?

  Sorry, do you use Twitter?

• 47:36Shaan Puri?

  No, I think it's because I'm on the Knicks.

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  No, we, I literally sat with him for 20 minutes talking about his dog, and like, there was totally, by the way, some chemistry going on, where we could have like, you just moved here, I just moved here, you know, we should, do you want to do that?

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  Your leash is intertwined, and you left it that way for a bit.

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  And, uh, and I, I thought he was like a walk-on, I thought he was just like, you know, like, the lucky guy, and then I see him last night, and I'm like, Landry, what's good, dog?

• 48:04Shaan Puri?

  My brother in law has a great move. He pulls with famous people where if he sees them, he just like he saw Mike Tyson once and we were walking and he just goes up to him and he's, "Mike, what's up, man? Good to see you." And he just daps him up. And he just says, "Good to see you," like as if he's seen them before. And then they're like, "Who's this guy? Seems like he knows me. I must know him." So they just treat him really well and they just dap it up and they move on with their day. And I've seen him do this now four or five times and I have to say this currently like the best move that I've seen anyone do with these people.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  I use my kids now. I saw Tom Hanks recently at a pizza place and it was just me, my daughter and him at this pizza place. And I was like, "I don't really want to like, approach him, but like, it's kind of the greatest guy ever." So I let my daughter wa- I saw which way he was walking and I was like, "Nah, me. Walk that way." And she walked and like intercepted it and like intercepted it. And he was like, "Oh, hey, little girl. How are you?" And he started talking to her and I was like, "Yeah, got it." And so I heard his voice and it was awesome. So I do that now.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  You use your child as bait.

• 49:07Shaan Puri?

  Naturally.

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  Back to who's famous on this list.

• 49:17Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna read you a name. I want to see if you even know who this person is. Antonio Gracias.

• 49:22Sam Parr?

  He's like his buddy who like started a hedge fund?

• 49:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So the second biggest shareholder of SpaceX is Antonio, who owns about 7% of the company. He's the only one over the 5% threshold as an individual, I think. And it's through, you know, he has this thing called Valor. And basically Antonio, he's in Elon's biography a bunch, which is, he had been like, I think post-business school, they started like buying, like businesses that did manufacturing but weren't being run well and like a meatpacking business or stuff like that. And so he just got really good at like, running and operating businesses that had manufacturing or production facilities.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  And so when Elon needed help with like early days of Tesla or early days of SpaceX, he would just bring Antonio in to like, yo, can you help me figure out the bottlenecks and the production line and the factory and like how we should be doing things differently? And they kind of both like, he became his study buddy for ramping up production. And Antonio was always there to help. He had, there's a story about how when, uh, when Tesla was like on the brink, he loaned Elon like, I don't know, a million dollars or something like that. Personally, not for any equity, just like, uh, you need it, here you go. And so he's gonna make like $90 billion in this IPO.

• 50:35Sam Parr?

  Oh my god.

• 50:37Shaan Puri?

  Which is incredible.

• 50:38Sam Parr?

  There's also a guy, one time when I hosted a HustleCon dinner at your office, there was this guy named Steve who came.

• 50:46Shaan Puri?

  All right, big news. We just hit 300,000 subscribers on Spotify. Thank you to everybody who subscribed. If you're not, go there and watch the episodes on Spotify. It's the best place to watch our podcast.

• 50:57Sam Parr?

  And back then, I knew Steve via my friend Neville. He owns this thing called, or helped start this thing called Gigafun. Have you heard of Gigafun?

• 51:06Sam Parr?

  It's a, it's a fun, but sorry about two guys. Steve, who is the, I'm acquaintance.

• 51:11Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if Steve, I only, Luke is the other guy.

• 51:13Sam Parr?

  So Luke is the, one of the PayPal founders, I believe, or, uh, founding team members. And, uh, Steve and Luke got this thing going. And at the time, I don't know if they described it this, as this, but it was pretty much, it was called the Gigafun and it was just find Elon. And, and this is me talking, not them, but they would say like, we're just gonna raise money and invest in Elon. And I believe they are one of the big shots as well. But Steve was actually at your office. I don't know if you knew that.

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  I did not know that because even though you hosted events at my office, I didn't really get the invite all the time to go attend them.

• 51:48Sam Parr?

  That's not true.

• 51:50Shaan Puri?

  I was working, I was working. Um, I want to read you an email. I have opened right now a email from somebody who used to be at Founder's Fund.

• 52:01Shaan Puri?

  And GigaFund spun out of Founders Fund. Luke was at Founders Fund and then he left to start GigaFund. So the email basically says, you know, one of the smartest and bravest things I ever saw someone do was when Luke was at Founders Fund, he just kind of like sat back and realized that the optimal way for him to invest was simply to just back every Elon company. And that's it. Take all the money and put it into the Elon companies. And at the time, that seemed like, you know, kind of crazy because Elon was doing pretty crazy companies. And in addition, it also seemed not sophisticated, which I think is the underrated part of this and actually the part that's more interesting to me.

• 52:44Shaan Puri?

  Like if you, if you look back, like the last 15 years, all you had to do was buy like Google and Facebook and Amazon and just sit on your hands. You didn't need to do anything. You know, Bitcoin and chill. You didn't need to do anything. Like we all want to do advanced, complicated, smart, sophisticated sounding things. But in reality, if you just pick the right, you know, pick the right horse and in some cases, like what I'm talking about with Google and Facebook and Amazon. These were obvious horses. These are not like, it was not a surprise to anyone in 2010 that those were going to be important companies over the next 15 years. And you just had to not do other shit. Famously, you know, Bill Gates selling his Microsoft stock.

• 53:27Shaan Puri?

  Bill Gates would be the wealthiest man in the world had he just not sold his Microsoft stock. Chumoth laughed at Facebook, you know, started his own fund and then started doing SpaceX and bought the Warriors. And he's done this and that and this and that and this and that. All he had to do was just hold his Facebook stock from when he was an employee. He would have done better than everything he's done since then. So we, we seek out sophistication. We seek out activity. But, but simplicity is actually, you know, the more powerful thing if you, if you get it right. And so he was, this email basically says like, I remember when he said that. I remember whatever he was thinking and

• 53:59Sam Parr?

  Was it like a chain email? Like, like he announced that he was leaving and he sent it to like his buddies?

• 54:05Shaan Puri?

  No, no, this is somebody who was at Founders Fund just emailing me telling me about this.

• 54:09Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow.

• 54:09Shaan Puri?

  And, um, and so, and I've, it always kind of stuck with me. And now when I'm looking at this filing and you see GigaFund and Luke, Luke Nozak.

• 54:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, they're listed, so they have a huge stake.

• 54:19Shaan Puri?

  They have a huge stake.

• 54:20Sam Parr?

  Got it. I was, I was never sure how big it actually got, but I remember Steve, through a friend of a friend, someone was telling me Steve's story and he was like, he had this company that was like doing really well, but he kind of quit it to just do this. And I'm like, that, that's it? That's all he does? And I, I remember the same, I had the same emotion. I'm like, but why would he, there's got to be more to it. And obviously.

• 54:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you can do that, but you should also do XYZ. It's like, no, actually you should not do XYZ in addition. You should just do the one thing. So I thought that was pretty funny. Uh, Steve Jervison is who I thought you were going to say. Do you know Steve Jervison?

• 54:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I do.

• 54:52Shaan Puri?

  He started DFJ, like a fund, now he's got his own fund, Future Ventures. I've met him once, really surprised, like just a not really nice guy.

• 54:59Sam Parr?

  He's like a wacky, like silly.

• 55:01Shaan Puri?

  Wacky, future, future, a true futurist. And if you go, I think a fun, interesting read is, go Google, if you're a true business nerd, go Google Steve Jervison and go look at his Flickr. That's right, Flickr, like the old photo sharing website. For some reason, he, he, he's like an amateur photographer. He loves to, like, he would go and take pictures of the early rocket launches at SpaceX and shit like that. Um, and like, you know, the first Bitcoin mining rig, he'll go take a picture and he's talking about Bitcoin back in 2012 and he's excited about Bitcoin. And he would basically take a photo, post it on Flickr and write like a mini, a caption that was essentially a blog post, but why he's really excited about a certain technology.

• 55:40Shaan Puri?

  I've actually learned a lot just by going, reading Steve's Flickr. Um, I think there's very few true, like futurists in the world and he's one of them. And he was one of the earliest investors at Tesla, earliest investors at SpaceX, never sold a single share, which is the other remarkable thing is to hold, uh, through all the, the ups.

• 55:58Sam Parr?

  His, his wife, Genevieve, was my boss at my first job ever. And so I knew Genevieve very well.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  He's cool, yeah.

• 56:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and she, and I'm friends with her on Facebook. And so like, I've seen like this whole thing. And like, I, you know, I see all these like cool photos of what they're doing. And it's like, uh, going to rocket launches, this and that. And it's been really cool to like, see behind the scenes, a little bit of that. And so that's been kind of funny as well.

• 56:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and you know, I think there, uh, one of the reasons on this podcast, I try to be more optimistic and, uh, benefit of the doughty with, I don't know, technology. If you're like, yeah, a lot of people get things wrong. Yeah, a lot of people build dumb stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff doesn't work. That's pretty obvious. And I do that for two reasons. One is I have this phrase, which is like pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. If you hang out in Silicon Valley long enough, you realize that pessimism is a losing strategy. Um, when you're around innovation and technology, it pays to be an optimist. That's the first thing. The second thing is, um, I had a friend recently who, uh, you know, had a family member who was dealing with like health issues and had had that like, you know, health issues for decades. And this kind of like, it was resolved to like, I have to live with this.

• 57:09Shaan Puri?

  And then on our podcast, we, we've talked about that guy from, uh, GitLab, who like is curing his own cancer using AI. And, uh, you know, that sounds like futuristic, but like, he actually, you know, did it. It's not like a, not like a theoretical thing, like the, you know, at least, at least one person did it. And, um, and so he went back home, uh, recently and, you know, on the East Coast and was like, hey, I've been talking to Claude and I got some ideas, we could try this. And if I get this data, I can feed it to here and I could do this. And what I told him, I was like, you know, it's not that, oh, there are different types of people, they resist it and we don't. It's, we are in the bubble where you hear about people doing these remarkable things. It becomes normalized. It feels possible. It's like the Roger Bannister four minute mile type of thing. Like, once you hear that somebody cured their own cancer with AI, guess what?

• 57:53Shaan Puri?

  You're going to approach somebody, you know, a loved one with cancer, uh, very differently than you would have if you had just not heard that that was possible. And one of the great things about hopefully listening to this podcast, but also just generally being around ambitious, interesting, innovative people is that

• 58:09Shaan Puri?

  You get that normalization of what's not normal. You get to hear, you get, you, you get your frame broken enough where you will, in your own situations of life, approach it slightly differently. And, you know, because I think part of this is like, you know, it's just Elon glazing and it's SpaceX glazing. But like another part of it is like, damn, this dude literally called his shot 20 years ago. Learn, you know, self taught, learned how to, you know, build rockets and recruit this team. It did what was, you know, pretty much impossible. And then today's, you know, the biggest tech IPO in history. You, you have to, you know, respect that and also like, forget about how good it is for them. But like, let it break your frame a little bit so that in your life, when opportunities strike or an idea comes, you don't count yourself out.

• 58:53Shaan Puri?

  You don't, you don't miss that opportunity. You don't, you don't ignore what's in front of you and you actually take action.

• 58:58Sam Parr?

  One of my biggest takeaways of living in Silicon Valley for 10 years was to use the word mostly and almost more often than not. And what I mean by that is I used to say things like, that will never happen, or that cannot happen, or that's impossible. And then I, then I started changing this to where I see something I think is unlikely. I, and I, I almost always try to say, it almost never works, but sometimes it does. Or like, you know, it, it mostly ends this way. Instead of saying that will fail and it will end this way. I've seen this so many times where I think in my head, like, uh, too black and white of like, if A, then B, you know, if someone has this idea, it cannot work or this cannot happen.

• 59:40Sam Parr?

  And then, and you have to train yourself to always think in like, um, not absolutes, but like the, the odds are this, but those are still like odds that like, if enough people try, it could work.

• 59:51Shaan Puri?

  Well, speaking of the impossible, uh, one thing I wanted to bring up was the, uh, his pay package. I didn't know this until I was digging inside. I thought this is kind of new, new learning. So you remember at Tesla, when he had that like crazy, Elon had that crazy pay package idea? And he was like, yeah, like if we, if we become, you know, the world's most valuable car company by far, if we get to like, you know, 500 billion in value and we're delivering this many cars and we do this, and we do this, then I get this like huge pay package. And if I don't, I get nothing.

• 1:00:23Sam Parr?

  And it's like laughable when they sign it. They're like, yeah, dude, whatever you do that. And then it happens and people freak out over it.

• 1:00:29Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. There's a compilation of people of mocking it, laughing, being like, this is ridiculous, never gonna happen, blah, blah, blah. So ludicrous, but you know, whatever. And then it happens and he gets the money and then a dude with eight shares sues him in Delaware.

• 1:00:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Shaan Puri?

  And says, no, you know, that wasn't, that wasn't, he shouldn't, that shouldn't have been approved. That's too generous. And it's like, dude, it was seen as impossible before. And he got stripped of the pay package and then blah, blah, blah. You know, he got, ended up getting re-voted in reinstated, but.

• 1:00:59Sam Parr?

  The plaintiff was like, uh, nah, uh, that, that was basically the argument.

• 1:01:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's insane. Have you seen what his pay package is here? And he has like the same one. Um, okay. So let me just read this to you. So the very first one is called the Mars Award. So Elon gets 1 billion shares in SpaceX.

• 1:01:21Sam Parr?

  How much, what, what, how many points is that?

• 1:01:23Shaan Puri?

  So it's going public at $135. So that'd be 135 billion at today's value. But obviously if he did all this stuff, it would be worth a lot more than today's value. It would be, the, the total grants are like 750 billion dollars. That's his like hypothetical comp. If he, if he hits all these things, but now listen to what he's gonna hit. Two things are required. One, the market cap has to grow to seven and a half trillion, which would be the most valuable company ever. And two, a permanent self-sustaining colony on Mars of at least 1 million people. Both have to happen for him to get paid. That's the Mars Award.

• 1:01:59Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 1:02:00Shaan Puri?

  A million people living on Mars. The other one is the AICO Award. So this is 300 million shares. So a third of that. This is kind of like the, uh, like the consolation prize. You know what I mean? Like this is like a little ice cream he gets as a treat, which is the company goes to 6.5 trillion in value and he's delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year from non-Earth data center. So he does the space data center thing and delivers 100 terawatts of compute per year. Now you might be wondering, 100 terawatts? I don't really know how to put that in perspective. Guess how much? So he's trying to, he gets it if he does 100.

• 1:02:41Shaan Puri?

  I guess how much the total kind of current US, uh, terawatt production is?

• 1:02:46Sam Parr?

  I don't even know what a terawatt is. So we're talking like a unit, you said 750, is that what you said?

• 1:02:52Shaan Puri?

  Uh, he wants, if he does 100, he gets the award.

• 1:02:55Sam Parr?

  100, okay.

• 1:02:55Shaan Puri?

  What is that relative to all of the US?

• 1:02:57Sam Parr?

  So he gets money at 100. What's the current USA? I don't know.

• 1:03:01Shaan Puri?

  Take a guess.

• 1:03:02Sam Parr?

  50.

• 1:03:03Shaan Puri?

  So that would be like if he doubled the, the US total electric grid, that'd be pretty crazy, right? It's currently one terawatt. So we'd have to 100x the entire US grid just to get this award.

• 1:03:15Sam Parr?

  In space.

• 1:03:17Shaan Puri?

  In from space data centers. Yes. From something that doesn't even exist and people don't even believe is possible. So, yeah.

• 1:03:24Sam Parr?

  Huh.

• 1:03:25Shaan Puri?

  Goals. Set big goals, I guess.

• 1:03:29Sam Parr?

  It's, it's hard to reply to that.

• 1:03:31Shaan Puri?

  By the way, his base salary on the, on the way is zero. I mean, he owns obviously a huge percentage of the company anyways, but like, this is the additional grant he gets for continuing to work in the company.

• 1:03:40Sam Parr?

  This is crazy, man. You, I'm, I, it goes back to the factor, like the biggest risk is that he dies. That's the

• 1:03:47Shaan Puri?

  The biggest risk is that he dies.

• 1:03:48Sam Parr?

  The biggest risk is that he dies. Like, the biggest risk is that he doesn't, like, if I'm a shareholder, I'm like, you have, you must have a dietitian. You must have a sleep coach. Like, that's what we're talking here.

• 1:04:01Shaan Puri?

  Or is it like a John Jones situation where?

• 1:04:04Sam Parr?

  Like the more coke you do, yeah.

• 1:04:06Shaan Puri?

  That creates the fighter, you know what I mean? And if you, if you put him on that, you know, sleep at 8pm schedule, he's not John Jones anymore.

• 1:04:12Sam Parr?

  Dude, I talked to a person who trains professional athletes and he was like, it's so funny. I used to train these baseball players and the ones that were the most eager and did exactly what I said and came to me all the time and said, give me more. I want more. I want to do this. They almost always were never as good as the guys who were like eating M and M's or doing skid, like eating skid, eating poorly and like going to bed at late because they played video games all night and they just show up. And like, he was like, one guy made like a game winning shot and afterwards I was like so excited. I ran up and high five him. He's like, what are you doing, man? He's like, you did the shot. He's like, oh, whatever, dude. Who cares? And he like kept walking. He's like, the guys who cared, you know, treat them mean, keep them keen. The guys who cared the least amount and like tried, not exactly tried, but like,

• 1:04:55Sam Parr?

  put a brain space on like the effort or the best. And that maybe that's what's happening here. You know, the, the weirder that things are, the better that he's going to perform.

• 1:05:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, which is, which is, but I mean, how crazy is it that when we hear this stuff, it's like, uh, like, can he make Starship work? Can he make Orbital Data Center work? It's like, we think the higher risk is just that he dies. It's like, in the probabilities game, we're like, I don't know, the bigger risk seems like that.

• 1:05:20Sam Parr?

  It just, it's, you've learned so many times in a row that it's, it's not wise to bet against. So I, I don't think that, like, I'm a dumb idiot and we should preface this before this episode, don't listen to anything. But the one thing that is true is that he's a challenging person to bet against. And so all these science fictiony things, I, I, I think that he's bad at timelines, but I think he's good at doing it eventually.

• 1:05:47Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay. Well, the glaze fest is over. If you hate Elon, we're sorry.

• 1:05:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Shaan Puri?

  This wasn't the episode for you. If you hate Elon, um, hate to break it to you. Maybe the thumbnail should have given that away, but if you made it all the way here and you hate watched this whole thing, I'm sorry. It's like, you know, you know, the, that percentage of the population that they taste, what is it like the thing cilantro?

• 1:06:11Sam Parr?

  Cilantro, yeah.

• 1:06:12Shaan Puri?

  It tastes like bleach to them, like genetically. This might've been the cilantro for some people and I'm sorry if it was.

• 1:06:19Sam Parr?

  All right. That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

• 1:06:32Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Cause if you're listening to this, you like podcasts and what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out, it's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q and A sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.