🚀 SpaceX IPO Liftoff | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  It's a massive day today. SpaceX IPO priced at $135 a share, opened at 150. Where is it right now? Jordy, are you on it? Do you have the price? Oh, the price is up there. Okay, now we're getting the endless mirror. Crazy. But we'll be tracking throughout the show, so stay tuned. It's a $2.28 trillion company now.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  172.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  $172 a share. I had Tyler and Jordy submit confidential estimates for where the stock would be at noon, effectively. Jordy went with a market cap based estimate. Tyler went with a share price estimate, I think.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Which is what I was told.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  I went with a percentage based estimate. You can translate between all of them. We'll get there. But the stock's doing well. The IPO is successful, I would say. There's been a bunch of chatter back and forth, bull cases, bear cases. But overall, it's hard not to look at this as a success. The, you know, Bill Gurley doesn't want a crazy pop on day one, doesn't want it to go up 100%. If we're in 10, 20, 30% range for something this big, that just feels like everything came together properly. And so, so far, looks really, really good. So at noon, we will check in with our predictions and see who won. There is an exciting prize for the winner, by the way. It will be revealed at noon as well.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  We can pull up this video from Gwen Shotwell, who is the president of SpaceX and has been on an absolute tear building the company for basically its entire existence. What? What are you laughing at?

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know what your prediction was.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Did you see what it is?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nick just shared it.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  He did?

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  This guy over here. This is a funny guy over here.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Be revealed.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Funny guy over here. This is why you trade.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  I was trying to pull.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  This is why you trade bits, not stocks.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  I was trying to pull an estimate out of you, and you were like, asking me 25 clarifying questions. The purpose is content, to have a conversation. Just pick a number, and you're like, oh, well, does it count where it opens, or where it opens after?

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  I just saw your positioning was confusing.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  I was just like, just throw out a number. We gotta have a discussion about this. There's nothing that crazy at stake.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  Share.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Everything's on the line, John. Everything is on.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  I was laughing about how you wouldn't take a side on the, on the dog walker versus the dentist. I was like, dog walker, dentist, blind, who are you going? And you were like, I can't possibly, I couldn't possibly, in the name of good television, just pick a random side for the purpose.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Dog walker or dentist?

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Beach debate.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  The beach debate. We never, we never got your answer. And you were like, I need more information. I can't possibly make a call.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  This is, it's such a tough one, cause I don't.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  It's not that tough. You pick one randomly. Why is it tough?

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  Here's why it's tough for me, John.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Okay, explain.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  I have never, in my life, hired or worked with a dog walker.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  My family growing up, we had a couple of dogs.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  We walked our dogs.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, we never.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  You've been to the dentist?

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  I was the dog walker.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. You've been to, you're not your own dentist, though. So why are you just going dentist?

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  I've never had a cavity. Every time I go in there, I, I guess I'm blessed.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Every time I go in there, they're like, looks good, boss.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  And, and I just head out.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  So equally useless.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Equally useless profession.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  So flip the coin, it's TV. Useless profession.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  No, I just don't have any, I don't have any connection. I need, I need like slightly more.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Why don't you fall back to like the economic power of the dentist industry versus the dog walking industry? Like, if you had to pick a job, if you were trying to get a bag.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  I respect dog walker.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Oh, you would go dog walker? Oh, you would be an elite dog walker over a mid dentist?

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's two, here's like, here's kind of my thinking.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  There's a guy in my neighborhood.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  Who is walking dogs in my neighborhood all day long.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, who, like, a lot of people in my neighborhood don't work. They're just home all day. Like, why aren't you walking your dog?

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  But, I think it's amazing that this guy is just like.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  He's printing.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Clearly printing, all day long, just going for walks, hanging out. He's listening to music, hanging out, super nice guy. He picks up the, the.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Sounds like you're going dog walker.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Picks up the poop when he, when they poop on my lawn.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate it. We have a, you know.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Good relationship.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  I maybe wish he wouldn't do that, but.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  We have a fine relationship. But then dentists, I could get really excited about a dentist if they were.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  You're still torn. You're still torn. You're still not picking a side.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Private equity backed roll up.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, that's an option.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  The dentist was kind of a figurehead for, for some PE firm.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Be able to deploy huge amounts of capital into rolling up family practices.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  And raising prices.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  What if, what if you're a dog walker, you, you earn so much money, you start being able to buy small dentist shops, rolling them up? You flip from dog walking into dentistry.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, that would be the way, I don't, we don't know much about this story.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  But we do know there's a conflict.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  But that would be the way for the dog walker to strike back is by the dentist.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  So final, final answer.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Come in.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  What's, what's side are you picking?

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  If the dog walker will commit to.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  No conditionals.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Why can't I have condition? Why can't I have condition?

• 5:05John Coogan?

  You can't have conditions because that's the rules that I'm laying down. You gotta pick one, dog walker or dentist. Whose side are you on?

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Dog walker.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  There we go. Finally, we got.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  But I'm gonna put, but I'm going, I'm gonna put a heavy.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  The whole point is that, is that.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  A serious amount of pressure.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  I'll just take dentist side and I gotta defend that and steel man that. That's fun.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna put a serious amount of pressure on the dog walker.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  And I will provide the financial backing to acquire the dentist practice and shut it down.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  As, because I know they have, I know they have some conflict.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  And it sounds like it's over the beach. It's really not that personal.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  And access to the beach.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  But I think there's an opportunity to make it personal.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think at this point, if they're getting written up in the journal about this conflict, I think they should make it per, so they gotta figure out how to make it personal. And I think buying the dentist practice and then shutting it down or.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  As a high, high.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  No, no, you can raise, you can raise an SPV.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Capital together and I, I would be willing to, you know, I need to meet the guy first, but I'm at least moderately interested in providing at least some of the backing.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  For the.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  I got you. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let's play this clip from Gwen Shotwell, standing at the NASDAQ on the day of the SpaceX IPO. I think we might be able to play it on the big board. Stock is doing well, holding steady at 2.27 trillion.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Split screen.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Whatever production team wants to do, we will, we will do as long as the folks at home can see Gwen Shotwell giving her speech to shareholders.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is looking like a young Kimball Musk right now.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Today we make history again.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  We have a history of making history. So I want everyone to know that we did open this morning in a rather exciting way.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  It sounded like Pete Hegseth.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Falcon 9 launched Starlink satellites to orbit.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  We have a history of nation history.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  So what company would do such a thing on the day that they open in the public market? SpaceX would, right?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  I am so proud of this team. Today, we're 24, not today. This year, we are 24 years old. Elon founded this company in 2002 initially to build rockets and spaceships that will take humans to Mars, the moon, and even beyond. We've done, we've not quite gotten to Mars. We're almost at the moon. But let's just quickly run through the amazing things that you guys have accomplished. 2008, six weeks after a failure of Flight 3 Falcon 1, we got the first liquid-fueled rocket to orbit from a private company. Yay. Yay.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  By the way, I should have prefaced this with, everyone said we could never get to orbit. Check. But it was a little rocket. Then it's, everyone said, well, you can't get a real rocket to orbit. Two years later, we got a real rocket to orbit, Falcon 9. Oh, well, you'll never, you'll never get to the space station, because that's what we really want to do, right? We want to take humans outside the bounds of Earth. But you'll never get astronauts to the space station? Check. We did that, too. Doubters, right? Oh, you'll never fly Falcon 9 enough. You'll never get to production. Another one. 165 launches last year? Check.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  You'll never build a rocket large enough to take humans to the moon and Mars. We build one, we've flown it, and this year, I believe, we'll get to orbit with that vehicle and we'll recover the first, the second stage. We've already recovered the first stage and re-flown it. With the merger, the acquisition of XAI, we now, as a group, own the largest coherent gigawatt-class compute on the planet, which will help us truth-seek and understand the universe. So congratulations to all of us for that. So we're about 22,000 strong. I'm super proud that over half of us actually bought additional stock in this opening, totaling almost a billion dollars.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  So, thank you for that, too. But, really, the thank yous go to all of you for hanging in there, for keeping a straight spine, as the doubters doubt, to achieve historic things, sometimes every day, multiple times a week. Thank you, all of you, for doing this. And I hope today is a day that you feel great about and that you're celebrating. Take a moment. Now, the Falcon Recovery Team can't take a moment today, but everybody else can. And I hope Falcon Recovery Team could take a moment a little bit later. Yep.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  In all seriousness, congratulations to the SpaceX team. It is, like, truly one of the most remarkable stories in the history of capitalism, in the history of America. Started in a little town called El Segundo. And Glenn Shotwell, one of the most impressive executives of the modern era. And we all should have known, just due to the nominative determinism.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're gonna build a rocket company, hire somebody to run the company with the last name Shotwell, because she has shot quite well.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  She worked at Chrysler, and then began work at El Segundo.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  That's actually, people like to say, like, oh, non-traditional background.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Uh, somewhat.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Chrysler.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean...

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Not exactly like a target.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, she worked at the Aerospace Corporation, did technical work on military space research and development contracts. She said, "When I was considering joining SpaceX back in 2002, I was struggling with the decision and drawing it out for weeks. It's crazy, leaving Elon on red for weeks seems extremely risky. It feels like every decision he makes now is like, go, no-go today, get back to me right now." Back then, obviously SpaceX was very young, less leverage, less, less energy, less momentum, so these decisions would be drawn out. She said, "It seemed so risky for me, personally, to join this little startup in an industry where none had ever succeeded." I think she was starting a family around that time, and so it was risky from a...

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Career perspective, she said, at the time, I was a part-time, single mother. Yeah. And this was just too far out of my comfort zone. She was used to bigger corporations, more established companies. She's going to this small startup that has, at that time, it's like a guy who made money on the internet. Now wants to do rocketry. What's the chance of that works? It sounds crazy and it was at the time. She says, I was driving on the freeway here in LA when it finally hit me. I was being a total idiot. Who cares if I tried this job and either I failed or the company failed. What I recognized at that moment was that it was the trying part that was the most important. Try that risky thing. Be a part of something exciting.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  What a fantastic run. I'm not sure if she coined the term residual capability, but that's a big phrase that she started using around the time. Starlink started working, just this idea that they would go and build ahead of demand almost. So SpaceX built basically more launch capacity than there was demand for. But then because there was space on every SpaceX rocket and they were able to build them so efficiently, so affordably. They were able to put up a massive constellation of internet-connected satellites, Starlinks, and develop another huge business on top of it. And so this idea of building, building, building and then finding the different opportunities.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  For a while SpaceX point-to-point was the big residual capability unlocked that was coming in a few years. The idea that you get on a spaceship, a starship in New York and you'd be in Tokyo in 30 minutes. Because you would have gone all the way to space and back and it would land. I think that's still part of the plan, but obviously took a backseat in the S1, took a backseat in the marketing materials for the company. But something that is still possible if you wind up delivering incredible safety and performance and cost reductions to the rocket launches. Why not hop on a rocket to get across the world in 30 minutes?

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Sounds pretty cool and probably oddly easier to approve than hypersonic planes since those have been stuck in regulatory approvals for years and decades and never really worked out.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I mean, Elon's hitting one T and she's just hitting one B.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  Well, yeah. Shao Wu was paid 86 million last year, mostly in the form of stock options. She's one of eight board members at SpaceX. She's 62 and has worked with Musk for two decades. She has a specific ritual for launch days. Because she was in Scotland the first time the company successfully got a rocket into orbit, she now writes Scotland on two sticky notes and places each inside her shoes to be in Scotland for every launch. She said it in 2022.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Scotland mindset.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  That's pretty elite. I like, is, what's that called? Where you're, uh, superstitious?

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Superstitions. Rare, potentially underrated? What do you think? Do you have any superstitions?

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's in the words, super.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Superpower.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  What's your take on superstition? Do you have any? Doesn't sound like.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think it's quite distracting.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Distracting?

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, kind of like, could, it could end up being a pretty big waste of time, so I avoid them.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  So you feel like unless you go through your whole ritual of eliminating all distractions, things aren't going to go well? So you're superstitious about letting distractions creep into your workflow? I understand that.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe I am, so maybe I am.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's been a staunch defender of Musk. Musk, she worked to prevent business fallout during all the political turmoil. She worked with NASA officials and assured them that tensions would pass. She doesn't love social media, uh, social media. I like his in-person self better than his Twitter self. In fact, they feel like two different people many of the times. She has a much different social media presence than her boss, posting sparingly, exclusively about SpaceX. She's focused. She was raised outside of Chicago.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you could imagine like she's reading X. She's like crying emojis, quoting six more posts, crying emojis? He's never crying. At the office, he never does that.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  Pretty locked in, actually.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  This feels like, I feel like I don't know this guy. He's always crying.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, when she first joined SpaceX, she was VP of Business Development. So not in the, in like a co-founder, chief executive type role on day one. And so that probably explains a little bit of the equity position and how that developed over time. But she was promoted to SpaceX's President and Chief Operating Officer in 2008, the same year the company won a critical $1.6 billion NASA cargo transport deal.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  So I looked up, she was SpaceX's seventh employee.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Wow, that's pretty early. She'd be disappointed if SpaceX didn't have a settlement on the moon and wasn't building a manufacturing facility on the moon. Within 10 years, she shelled time. She lives on a 1,000 acre ranch, close to a SpaceX facility in Texas. She married a fellow SpaceX engineer and has two children. She put a Starlink mini-terminal on top of her car to speak with Musk on her 40-minute commute without the call dropping. Interesting. Jimmy Sonny also went back in time and told a story in the Wall Street Journal about the, one of the early days in, in the SpaceX journey. Vindication for young Elon Musk, he wrote.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  In 2004, he told the Senate that open competition would transform the industry. So this was an interesting story. And I, and I wonder if we could find the actual video, like on C-SPAN. I don't know if it's out there, but in 2004, the Senate held a subcommittee meeting, gathered on, all the subcommittee gathers on Capitol Hill to ask a question that now sounds quaint. Could America still reach space without the space shuttle? Of course, we do it like every couple of days, thanks to SpaceX. The shuttle was grounded, 14 astronauts had died in two disasters, and the hearing room was thick with anxiety of a nation that feared it had lost a step. Senator Bill Nelson, who had flown on the shuttle, sort of the Jared Isaacman of his

• 17:46John Coogan?

  era, warned that without it, the country might spend years relying on Russian rockets. Nobody disagreed. Witnesses came in two panels. First, you got the NASA team defending the program through William Ready, its Associate Administration for Administrator for Spaceflight, accompanied by a retired admiral. After NASA spoke, industry did. They got a vice president from ATK, another from Lockheed Martin, a director from the aerospace group. Are you looking for a, for a new, a candle, a nuke one way or another?

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  This is brutal for my prediction.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  This is brutal.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I'm feeling, I'm feeling pretty good.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  We're settling in.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  But it's also brutal for anyone that wants drama on the chart because you're not getting it today. It's very stable. I think this is a very well managed, uh, project from start to finish.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  And then now it's just like a trillion dollar company. So it's hard for it to move super.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I, I just think that if you were expecting 10% swings up and down.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I'm feeling Shark Island is pretty small though, right? Like, uh, at least that they're being traded.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Sure.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Very, very small. The last person on the industry panel, you got Lockheed, ATK, Aerospace Corp. It's Elon Musk.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  AP in the chat, wait for dip.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  It's just nukes down to $5. Uh, so on the second panel, the industry panel, you got heavy hitters from Lockheed, other industry folks. You got a 32, two-year-old man who had founded a rocket company two years earlier, and he'd yet to launch anything. It was Elon Musk. Uh, he had a more immediate complaint. NASA had just awarded a rival a quarter of a billion.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  And his company had protested. Uh, so everyone's there to debate like, okay, can NASA get to space without the shuttle? And he's there being like, what about my contract? He shows up to this thing to testify and they keep having to try and keep him on track. It's a very interesting, uh, way to like, get his word in edgewise. So the senators thought the matter was off limits. Like this hearing isn't about that Elon. It's not about your contract. Uh, it was under government review already, and they kept having to steer him back to the day's subject, specifically heavy lift, the blunt problem of getting big things off the planet. Certainly, he said, although it's worth correcting, I think Mr. Ready misspoke when he said it was competitive. It was in fact not competitive.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  The chairman tried again. Let's stay to heavy lift capacity issues, Elon. Stay on message. And Elon says, absolutely. But his, his correction was safely on the record. He said something the panel wasn't ready to hear. The past few decades Elon Musk told them had been a dark age for human spaceflight. One costly government program after another failed to reach the pad. The public's drift from space, he argued, wasn't the apathy of a tired people, but the disappointment of a hopeful one. It sounded in 2004 like a man with a grievance and a half-built rocket. He was dismissed. He had made the same case the summer before in one of his first Capitol Hill appearances at a 2003 hearing on commercial spaceflight. There's a borrowed concept from

• 20:53John Coogan?

  The Economist, Joseph Schumter, a creative destruction. The industry had lost it. Not one successful new entrant in four decades. Space, Mr. Musk, Musk, pointed out, had barely improved since Apollo, while every other technology from computing and the internet to intercontinental flight had been transformed by newcomers in open competition. Restore that forcing function, he said, and space would change no less dramatically. The government need only be a customer, not a competitor. He could be glib. Every launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, he said, was required by law to be studied for its effect on the local SEALs at $10,000 a flight, even as that population had been climbing by nearly 13% in a single year. He says, the SEALs are doing fine. Let me launch. With that population growth

• 21:38John Coogan?

  rate, Mr. Musk observed, it seems clear that if anything, the Vandenberg launch activity serves as an aphrodisiac. Dropping lines, dropping zingers on Capitol Hill. People laughed. It was the laughter you gave a clever outsider. But we can grade that clever outsider's argument now, because more than 20 years have passed and the record is in. The fear that haunted that 2004 hearing, dependence on Moscow, was not ended by the shuttle but by Mr. Musk's company. In 2002, a SpaceX capsule carried two astronauts to the space station from American soil, closing a nine-year gap in which the United States paid Russia as much as $90 million a seat to hitch a ride. The semi-reusable rocket, Mr. Musk

• 22:21John Coogan?

  described to skeptical senators, became a fleet of boosters that land themselves and fly again. Today, SpaceX launches more than half the world's payloads. On Friday, it goes public in what is expected to be the largest IPO in history.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  You know what's not ordinary? FF's investment of $20 million at a $200 million valuation into SpaceX did get diluted, but it is still, I think, like, the best venture investment of all time. Wait, no, I thought it was more like, it's 50? I thought it was more like 80.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  I think it's closer to eight trillion cents.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  I think they made eight trillion cents.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Eight trillion pennies. Uh, PT needed a win.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  What was the return in basis points?

• 23:06John Coogan?

  He needed a win. He needed a win, uh, because apparently-

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  What was the return in basis points?

• 23:11John Coogan?

  They're getting out with him on chess.com. Have you seen this?

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Do we need to play this?

• 23:15John Coogan?

  We need to play the video of, uh, a gentleman on Instagram who found Peter Thiel's chess.com account, played him and won.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Do you have the video pulled up?

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Victory lap. It's in the timeline, deeper down there, as he found Peter Thiel's chess account, played him. I mean, we already spoiled it.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  On chess.com. I don't know if anybody knows about this, but Peter Thiel has a chess.com account with his real name, under which he's played over 50,000 games over the past 10 years. And the reason I know it's him is, first of all, his friends are all these Silicon Valley and ex-Stanford ex-founders. And I put this account into a database called OpeningTree, which allows me to cross-reference his most played moves with his public tournament games that he played in the 90s, and it's all the same stuff. So our game went e4, e5, knight f3, knight f6. I played the Stafford Gambit, and on move 6, he fell into a very basic opening trap.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Well, no, no. He didn't fall for the Gambit, but he could fall for a classic blunder.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  And I could just play knight takes e4 here. And the point is that when he takes back, played bishop takes f2, winning his queen by four.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  So most players would just give up. They would just resign in this position. But Peter Thiel-

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Never give up.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Played on. And a few moves later, he made another very elementary mistake. Played bishop takes a7. And this is the kind of move that you see beginners make. Very rarely does anybody over 2,000 not see that you can just play b6 afterwards, which traps the bishop, and I'm just gonna scoop it up in a few moves. Even here, he didn't resign. He kept playing on until I checkmated him shortly thereafter.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  I find this really funny because Peter Thiel has a reputation being a sort of chess genius. So I wanted to take this opportunity to show the real Peter Thiel, who falls for basic opening traps and refuses to resign.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Elon, uh, never, never gives up.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Ordinary guy, proof that they're all ordinary guys.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Elon never gives up, right? Famous picture of him standing there, everything's in shambles, never gives up. Also makes elementary mistakes sometimes, picking it, you know, accusing the president of things, you know, on, you know, social media, right? Kind of an elementary mistake, you know, if you're a government contractor, right? Lawsuits. That's right, that's right. Elementary mistakes. And so, again, I think PT never gives up, makes some elementary mistakes.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  There's less than there.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Less than in there.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Less than in there, for sure. Uh, let's pull up this post from Andy, showing a visual guide to the SpaceX IPO while I tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So what is this saying? What's gonna happen here?

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  This is technical analysis.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Okay, this is technical analysis. And he's saying that it's gonna pop on IPO day, sell off for three straight years? And then go to the moon? Is that this? Is that, and, and every, he's basically saying that everyone's gonna be taking victory laps if the stock trades down in 2026, 2027, 2028. But then ultimately, they will all be upset. I mean, there, there are some crazy, uh, articles out there that are like, uh, the rise and fall of Elon Musk a year ago, like, he can't possibly come back from the reputational damage he's done to himself from political stuff.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no one's buying the cars.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  No one's buying the cars, and it's like, well, they're buying the stocks, so, you know, it's gonna be okay, I guess. Founder's Fund investment at 200 million might be the best venture investment in history. A lot of that is just the holding to fruition, like, because the early investors in Google, or Microsoft, or... Amazon, like a lot of them distributed an IPO at like a 5 billion valuation.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Even some of the founders, right? Bill Gates.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he sold too early, right? Paper Hands.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  No, the only thing is I do think Masa hasn't beat, I think Masa hasn't beat with Alibaba. Cause it was like 20 million into 70 billion.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  On a shorter time horizon.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Ooh, get mocked, mocked. Anyway, heard in the chats, I put $1 million SpaceX order through a private bank and just got filled only 50K, one twentieth of what this individual asked for. Most people I spoke to have gotten even less. We had some folks on the team put in orders for 20 shares, 50 shares, 100 shares and only get a small fraction of that. How much did you get Tyler?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Uh, I got 22.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  22 shares, but you requested more?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And then, yeah, I mean, we've had a lot of people, they say they only got one share. Brutal.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  The one share wonder.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  That's almost worse than zero shares, because you can see it in your portfolio.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. What if they could give you short interest? They're like, you asked for five shares, but we give you negative one share. We give you, we give you the inverse ETF, actually. It's over for you.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, uh, I was surprised by this.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Given the, given the offers that were, given the offers that were flying around, I got, uh, uh, offered like a $50 million allocation. Obviously not, uh, wasn't going to take that down myself, but, uh, I just, um.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Wow, just say you risk off.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I, but I, but I responded to the guy and I was like, I don't even know, I'm not even going to text anyone. Cause like, it feels like this is, there's like so much allocation available for everyone that it's kind of, it's just not even worth firing off texts.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, but turns out there, uh, there was, there was a lot more demand than supply.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Uh, it's, it's making its way through, through the world, through the, through the iMessage DMs. Buddy needs to relax, says RJ C. SpaceX IPO this week. Thoughts on SpaceX? SpaceX IPO, what are we thinking boss? Who is this? It's Kyle. I was your Uber driver three months ago.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Nick had a funny, uh, Nick had a funny text.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Uber drivers don't get your phone number anymore. It all happens in the app. This is ridiculous.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Maybe they had a good conversation, they exchanged numbers.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also these just like, like the rendering of the text, it doesn't look iMessage enough to me. I don't believe it, but it's funny.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Nick did get a funny text this morning.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  From somebody who is certainly not.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  A professional.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Not a professional investor saying, texting him advice being like, you want to get in, but then you want to get out.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  You want to get in and get out.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Get in, get out. Get in, get out. Get out, get in, but then get out by the end of the day. And Nick's sitting there with his one chair.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Codex and the Road to Olympia Expansion Pack, which is sponsoring this episode. It takes your training split and refactors it into production-grade hypertrophy code. No more junk volume, no more spaghetti programming, no more deprecated rear delt functions. Just clean, scalable mass architecture with automated progressive overload, test coverage for calves, and one critical warning. Build failed insufficient carbs. The Codex Road to Olympia Expansion Pack is available now. That's a good one.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  That's a good one. Well, John, it's noon.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  I think it's time.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, let's reveal our predictions. What was the price per share when it IPO?

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  135.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  135, okay, so I said 0%. I said 135. I said the bankers, this is, the funniest outcome is that the bankers got it perfectly correct. The market is perfectly efficient, no pop, no sell-off, completely flat line on the chart.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  That's a very Kukin bit, but like, you don't want that.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  No, no, you want a 20% pop.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  You want a little bit of a pop. And I would say they've done that, like, they've gotten it very, very, very close, right? Currently sitting at a 24% pop.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  What did you say? What was your percentage?

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  I was.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  I had 0%.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Too.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  It's at 24%.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  I was too bullish.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  You were too bullish.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  I was expecting somewhere around $183 to share by two minutes ago.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  $183.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  We're currently at 167.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Okay, so what percentage is that?

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  I thought it would open, I thought it was going to open above 170. I thought it was going to open above 170 and then run more.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Turns out it opened in the 60s, dropped down to around 158, and then built back up from there.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  I was off.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  So I had, so I had 0%, you had 33%. It's at 24%.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  I was just right.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I went 31%, which would be 176.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  176.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So I'm a little high, a little high.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  So you got the...

• 31:48Speaker 01

  But I win.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  You win, you win. And does everyone want to know what Tyler wins, what the prize was today? The prize is that whoever wins gets to do one extra Ramp ad read. It's such a treat.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  That is special.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  And I get to, I hoard them every day, so here you go, Tyler.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I got it.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Feel free to read the Ramp ad for the audience.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  All in one place. There we go. That was great. I hope you enjoyed that, Tyler. Don't get too comfortable with that.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Switch back to Tyler.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, Manitas says, "It brings me no joy to report I spent a year wondering why I was constantly sleepy and had a low sleep score on my Whoop. That was totally cured by simply stop wearing the Whoop."

• 32:34John Coogan?

  By simply stop wearing, stopping wearing the Whoop.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  But...

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  And X is turning this into a whole new story. Ditching Whoop tracker cured financiers' sleep worries.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Financiers? That's hilarious. You want to track your sleep? Like, are you sleepy? Like, think about it.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Come up with an answer. That's your sleep score.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  What's funny is like, I never actually care about the score.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  The score takes care of itself.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, but with 8 Sleep, I like the cooling. Like, that's nice.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, and with 8 Sleep, I'm actually interested in like, how is my REM versus deep sleep trending?

• 33:07John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  Things like that, resting heart rate, all these other things. I never am like, oh, what's my score today?

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Oh, the score, unless we were competing, because then that was fun.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  It seems like one of those like, Goodhart's laws type things, right? Where if you like, oh, I need to get a better sleep score, then it doesn't like, work as well.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  There's a new challenge that hit the timeline. Apple threw down the gauntlet. They said, they said that no one could make Siri their girlfriend. Said Siri won't be your AI girlfriend. This is from Apple's Craig Federighi. Well.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  I'd like to see you try to stop me.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  So Craig Federighi says Apple won't be your AI girlfriend. Quite the opposite, because as you may or know, many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement and sycophancy. They want to kind of pull you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself, then use that as a basis to establish a connection. We view it quite the opposite. I mean.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  Very kind of fitting, like kind of a very 2025 take, which is kind of fitting, given their AI progress.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  But if you try and engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri's not up for that. Siri's 100% not into that. And so the Rizlers in the chat.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  I mean, he's just, he's just opening himself up to get dunked on, right?

• 34:19John Coogan?

  A little bit.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  You can, people have jailbroken every single model that's ever come out.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  But also, one of the cool things about the Siri AI system is that it will, it builds a rag.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Look at his face, says, "System prompts, don't be the user's girlfriend."

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  He's like, "Yeah, we've, we cracked the code." It's like, problem that has been plaguing the AI industry.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. Congratulations to anyone that got in on the SpaceX IPO. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Flashbang out.