Inside the SpaceX IPO Filing & the Billionaire Space Race 5/21/26

20:59Andrew Ross Sorkin:Stand Joe by in five seconds. Four, three, two. Wipe up to him. His mic. Q. Joining us now, Jay Clayton, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former SEC chair. We are going, oh, we're not going to take a quick break. Now, we could get it out of the way and just let you talk because I asked you a question and we want you to opine. I heard from you yesterday. Everybody was riveted to Andrew's interview with Jeff Bezos. and I was talking about it earlier on the show, I'm sure Andrew wants to get involved. I was saying there's one side that doesn't want to hear that we're already spending too much because they've got another 10, 15, 20 things that they want the government to do before we really get things all fixed.

21:43So there's not going to be any spending cuts if they had their way. Your point is, what, we're probably at maximum revenue right now in a lot of places and it's only one way or the highway. We have to cut spending or get rid of waste or become better at what we do in terms of the government. Yeah, first of all, that was a fabulous interview. I was sort of getting ready to go to work, and I was late for work because I watched the whole thing. It was tremendous. Did some criminal not get prosecuted yesterday because you're watching Andrew? They don't get out of bed early enough. Right, they're sleeping in.

22:18But look, he was so candid and so clear on a lot of these things, and a lot of things that we don't talk about. You just raised one. It used to be that we talked about what would be peak revenue in terms of taxes. Now, I believe that if you raise taxes much more in New York in a couple of years, you'll have less revenue because flight and and all of those things. And that's been proven over time. So, you know, like I think we're about close to peak revenue. What I liked about about Jeff's talk is he was like, look, I don't mind paying. I don't mind paying what I'm paying right now. I do mind the way you're spending it.

22:53and the incredible waste. And this is where what I'm seeing in my job is very disappointing. Why are you seeing that, that there's waste? And where do you see it in your day-to-day operation? Let's look at the New York Housing Authority, NYCHA. We indicted 70 people for bribery and related charges. And if you look at what the New York City Housing Authority spends each year on capital and on day-to-day run rate, it's in the tune to$12 billion. Here. Yeah. Do you think that the 500 ,000 or so people that are living in public housing in New York feel like they're getting$12 billion worth of value a year?

23:31Absolutely not. It is, I mean, it is ridiculous. Jeff Yass had a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about$42 ,000,$44 ,000 per pupil in New York. The results are terrible. And he said, look, look at it this way. If you took half of that each year and put it away at 2%, not at 8 % or some kind of pension level, but at 2%, at the end of the 13 years of that education, each child would have over$300 ,000. And you'd have$22 ,000 a year to pay for school, which I will bet you they could get a better education for$22 ,000 with vouchers. That's the kind of waste that we're talking about. Where's the problem?

24:11Where are the actual problems? Bezos didn't think it was teacher salaries. They're not getting paid enough, he said. Where does that money get siphoned off? Look at the level of administrative change in schools over the last 20 years, the number of administrators versus the number of teachers. It has exploded. Also, who is contracting with the schools to provide meals and provide services and all of those things? Are those contracts really being bid out efficiently? That's what we were looking at at the housing authority. We brought charges. You know, those are the kinds of things. And let me say, I think there is light at the end of the tunnel.

24:49AI is going to affect business, like you talk about on this show all the time. The place where it's going to have a profound effect is in the public sector. What it used to take for us to uncover Medicaid fraud and Medicare fraud, teams of people going through paper and the like. As long as it's digitized, you can use the new tools and find in days what used to take months. Now, watch this closely. Are municipalities, our cities, our states actually going to collect and provide the data? One of the problems you have in detecting fraud and detecting waste is it's difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and fraud.

25:29And the way to do it is to have good data. Andrew made the point. Andrew, I know you're listening closely, but Elon Musk was retweeting, or at least commenting on the Bezos interview, and said, yeah, he's right. But Andrew points out what happened with Doge. You go in, you try to do it. It's a lot harder than it was. They gave up, finally threw up their hands, said I. Look, Doge was a great start. It really was. It showed that you could look at data and uncover things that just don't make sense. Medicaid, there are tons of things going on in this city. And we're going to find them. Look, I'm telling people right now, if you are committing Medicaid fraud, But if you're if you're saying I'm doing a job over here on Monday and I'm doing a job over here on Monday and I'm collecting for both, we want to find you because, you know what?

26:16New Yorkers want us to find you. They know health care costs way too much. And one of the reasons it costs way too much is fraud.

26:24Andrew Ross Sorkin:But, Jay, is that a is you believe that this is more acute at the state or city level than it is at the federal level? And the only reason I raised it is for a long time on the federal level, we used to say in the same way that Jeff saying, you know, we could cut three percent on a Tuesday out of the budget. And you'd like to think that that's possible. And yet Elon brought in his whole team, spent a year trying to do it at the federal level. And I think ultimately it was like 0.1 percent or something that was just the challenge of it was was so great in large part because for everything you're taking away that that to some to one person looks like a giveaway or something that doesn't make sense.

27:05Andrew Ross Sorkin:It's taking something away from somebody else. And that's what makes this so challenging. Andrew, let's just stipulate that I'm not talking about cutting any benefits. I'm talking about cutting out fraud, theft, cheating. That will make a big difference. It will allow for better delivery of services. And your question about state and federal, there are areas, Medicaid being one of them, where it's not actually in the state's interest, although they are the deliverer of care and the administrator of it, it's not necessarily in the state's interest to catch fraud or to drive efficiency because they get federal matching dollars.

27:41One of the problems that we've seen with our health care system and the government's involvement in our health care system is it's a cost plus system. So everybody involved is very happy for costs to keep going up. Last week was a different world. And I heard from you then as well. Who was this guy? Al-Sadi. Yeah. And how did this come about and wreaking havoc for four years, and finally he's done, right? Well, look. Tell the whole story. International terrorist, okay? And he is here now in America. He is facing charges in America. Is he Iranian or Iraqi? He operated out of Iran, and the complaint alleges that he was providing material support to a number of the terrorist organizations that you talk about on this show from time to time, including the IRGC.

28:32And I always need to emphasize this, that in America, you are innocent until proven guilty. But he is here to face charges. And the charges, as laid out in the complaint, are supporting terrorism across Europe and attempted terrorist acts here in the United States, including in Los Angeles and here in New York, radicalizing people online. The complaint is available on our website. I would encourage people to look at it, Because it gives you a flavor, stepping back, for the type of activity that our enemies engage in. Using social media, using cryptocurrencies, using new tools to radicalize people in America, to radicalize people in Europe, to commit acts of terror.

29:13That's a reality. It's something we're fighting against. Only this country could bring this man to justice. the strength of, and I'll give President Trump incredible credit here, his respect on the world stage across all these areas is what drove us to be able to bring this man to justice. We got unbelievable cooperation to get him here and to demonstrate to the world that if you engineer attacks against the United States, you cannot hide from us. What do you think, what do you know that was in the planning stages in this country? I guess I like to scare myself, because they're still out there.

29:55No, and again, you can look at the complaint, radicalizing someone in the U.S. to bomb a synagogue or to do harm against a synagogue. That was one of the attempts that was here in the United States. And if you look across Europe in the complaint, we show that there were a number of public attacks on people in Europe that these organizations engineered. We have been reporting that oil went back up because apparently the supreme leader, I don't know, I thought he was in a coma, but supposedly he said that they're keeping the uranium, the enriched uranium. They're not going to send it to another country.

30:37You've seen the back and forth. the president keeps saying we're this close to just giving up on negotiations because you know how these people operate in Iran. You talk to them. How do you see this in your view? It's just your opinion. I know. But are we finished with military endeavors there? Or is this? No, I don't. Is Israel and the United States going to have to go back in here and just much harder? Here's what I do know, and again, this is my view, but it's come to the fore. 47 years of terror, the type of person that we just talked about, is way too long. People who believe in that kind of terror and support that kind of terror cannot have a nuclear weapon.

31:19I very much believe in finishing the job. That's on the nuclear side. That's my personal view. On the other side, the strait, the fact that, let's pick a number, 20 million barrels a day, is somehow controlled by this radical state that believes in terror, that believes that Western civilization should be eradicated. That's a 47-year mistake or a 30-year mistake or whatever it is, and we need to correct that. I was kind of amazed reading overnight because I'd been kind of wondering why they hadn't done this, but apparently they have been working on this. There's a pipeline that the UAE is building to subvert the Strait of Hormuz.

32:01It would go straight into the Gulf of Oman. They are apparently halfway finished with it now, and they plan to have that open by 2027, which takes away another leverage point from Iran. And to me, that was more of the reasoning behind why Iran might have said, we're not giving up this enriched uranium because the Strait of Hormuz is their biggest leverage point at this point. If they don't have that and they don't have any uranium, they don't have any leverage left. Right. And I don't think we want them to ever have leverage again. And Becky, you point out something that we didn't know six years ago, seven years ago.

32:34Now we know, which is how amazingly nimble the U.S. economy is. And to to extend it to the global economy, to think that people find a way. People find a way. We found a way from it. We're finding a way like they're going to lose their leverage one way or another because the world is not going to let them have it over the long term. Sounded like Jurassic Park. Nature finds a way. Nature finds a way. Nature finds a way. I saw it happen in Maduro. Go ahead. I don't know.

33:04Andrew Ross Sorkin:No, I was going to pivot to a different topic. You're still there, but were you moving to Maduro? Is that where you were going? No, I was going to Cuba because that's what we did with him. We found, you know, we got a good reason to indict him, and then we can go down and snatch him. Yesterday, we decided we're going to indict the gentleman in Cuba for murder from years ago. And I'm just wondering whether this is going to open another front where we're going to be involved with Cuba. But take it wherever you want to go, Andrew. Look, Jay, I was going to ask you, and you may not be able to answer this question.

33:41Andrew Ross Sorkin:So you can you can you can wave it off, I guess, given given who your bosses are. But I was just curious what your reaction was to the settlement between the president and the IRS. But maybe more importantly, this fund that's been created, this one point eight billion dollar fund that's been created for victims of weaponization. There's been lots of questions about it, questions about, you know, how the president could reach a deal with a government or an administration that he controls, how you think the public should think about the credibility of a deal like that, and then how this fund may or may not work, given some of the things, including Pam Bondi's memo last year, suggesting that a fund like this shouldn't exist.

34:24Andrew, let me take a step back and tell you the way I look at this as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District when we are investigating people and bringing charges against them. Criminal charges against any individual from a financial point of view can be absolutely devastating. And one of the one of the huge things you have to think about is, you know, do I have enough here? Is this to bring criminal charges and put somebody through that kind of financial route? It's a reality. And if and if people have been pursued inappropriately, that financial cost i i'm supportive of there being relief for that financial cost i think the vice president went through i was looking up i don't know where i saw it today but the first gentleman that's going to file for damages was some guy who was totally harassed during the by the biden i don't i didn't read the specifics i don't have it but that's the very first it's not look it's not people that beat up cops at j6 those aren't people we're talking about that The media will immediately say that's getting complicated.

35:34Let me do something and try and take the temperature down and take this out of the current context and say that this does happen. We had a guy here in New York, Eliot Spitzer. Eliot Spitzer pursued people inappropriately, I think to the extent that many would say was unlawfully. Lawfare happens. It should not happen. You don't think it happened to Trump? What I'm trying to do, Joe, is just say, look, it happens. It shouldn't happen. It creates financial ruin. You have lots of people on this show who are incredibly respected, who went through the years. Here's where I said it yesterday. So it does happen and it shouldn't happen again.

36:09In agreeing with Andrew on this, the president feels wrong. Before he was president by the IRS, he hated the IRS. And he probably, there's some merit to how he feels about this. So at this point, I said the president sometimes will do things because he can. And the attorney general is the only guy that could have done this, that could have put off the audits and gotten rid of the old audits. And there might be 100 million there for a double. I don't know what it was. The New York Times reported maybe there would have been 100 million dollars worth of damages possibly to the president. So he's able to do this with Todd Blanche, who was his personal attorney.

36:46He can do it fine. And I think he does it because he can. but it doesn't mean that it helps matters in terms of perception for someone like you that has to defend. No, look at it this way. Anybody whose tax returns have been intentionally leaked should have recourse against the government. Ten billion. Was it a ten billion dollar worth of recourse? Should President Trump have to say, you know what? No, I'm the president. Then he can settle with himself, with his own government. It just it doesn't smell right. Even like conservatives like Andy McCullough, they're looking at this and like it seems a bridge too far.

37:19Well, did he get any money out of this? If you believe that one of those audits would have come up with$100 million of... No, did he get any money out of his tax returns being leaked? By settling and putting this provision to not look back at his audits, he could have benefited. Would you take that settlement? I'd take that settlement. On either side. Trying to help you here, Andrew. And you're silent.

37:42Andrew Ross Sorkin:I'm trying to understand why you'd say... Look, my question is slightly different, Jay. You said you take the settlement on either side. I'm just trying to understand why you take the settlement on either side. Because for both sides, it ends. But it's not the president. Pretend it's me. Yeah. Why? And let's say you thought that I was a tax cheat. Why would you I'm not saying that he was a tax cheat. I'm just saying let's say you thought that I owed the government money. wouldn't you want me to pay the money? Why would the government not want me to pay the money? Andrew, we have two things going on here.

38:19We intentionally leak your tax returns to embarrass you in the public. You have a claim against us. There's an audit that we don't know whether there's money owed or not owed. To resolve that, we say, you know what, Andrew, we're going to drop the audit. We're going to move on and you're going to drop your claim against us for trying to name and shame you. That's a deal I think that, you know, is actually a pretty good deal for the government if the government intentionally leaked somebody's tax returns. That's a horrible thing.

38:47Andrew Ross Sorkin:Do you think it's any different? I don't just look at the leaking pieces. I agree with you 100 percent. The only question I have for you that relates to this is whether you think being in the position of being the president changes that dynamic at all. I do. What do you is the president supposed to say, you know what, you can do whatever you want to me and I have no recourse. And it was done when he was a private citizen. I don't think we're going to be talking about it. I just wonder maybe there should be a third party that makes the decision or something like that. I don't think we're going to be talking about this issue in a week because the American people are going to say, look, they leaked his tax returns.

39:23They tried to name and shame him. They tried to destroy him. OK, we resolve that in terms of the audit that had been going on for years with obviously, you know, no findings to date. That's gone. Let's look forward. This, as I read the settlement, the audit going forward, the tax returns that are filed going forward are subject to the same scrutiny as anybody else. It's just in the past. It's in the past. And presidents get, by law, get audited every year. What I love is everybody's like, let's just move on. And then when we move on, people are like, I don't like that we're moving on.

39:53Andrew Ross Sorkin:Are you a lawyer? Look, I'm not. Play one on TV. I have no idea what's in the tax returns. And I'm not arguing that we should be doing one thing or the other. I'm just suggesting that I think because of the perception of it, there's a question about how it should be done. That's the question. Yeah, I think the American people are going to be satisfied. And that's what I mean. I think the president is so PO'd at what was done to him that if he can do something, he's not even going to care about it. He doesn't care about the repercussions at this point, Andrew. I really don't think he does. No, I think that's probably right.

40:27Andrew Ross Sorkin:I mean, I think that's how I imagine he feels. I'm not disputing that. All right. So do you do private practice if I get in trouble for something? Can I, I don't know what it's going to be. I'm just preempting it. Actually, I have your phone number. Yeah. I know where to reach you. Thank you, because you're good. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Always good to be here. Next up on Squawk Pod, we're going to the moon again. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both have big ambitions for space. But Musk is making an IPO pit stop first. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, joins us. He focused ever since he was a little kid on Mars.

41:07Andrew Ross Sorkin:Occupy Mars was the mantra. He has pivoted some in the past year or two to say, all right, let's build a base on the moon first.

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42:51What can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more. you're listening to squawk pod today with joe kernan becky quick and andrew ross sorkin joe and becky were in new york city today and andrew well he's fresh off a day with jeff bezos at the

43:09Andrew Ross Sorkin:blue origin rocket park in florida guys um you know being there was just i must tell you we keep talking about the scope and the scale of it it's so hard to believe uh we saw so much yesterday You know, they're planning to land on the moon later this year. He talks a lot about, by the way, trying to get to the moon, get to the moon quick, especially in the competition between the U.S. and China, trying to get to what he calls the high ground, if you will. So I do think we should expect a landing possibly on the moon later this year. And, of course, New Glenn is going to be up in the sky soon in this big competition with SpaceX, especially as SpaceX is going public.

43:48Andrew Ross Sorkin:But that team, it's remarkable just to see what they're building down there and what the future of all of this ultimately looks like. And you can find the rest of that conversation so much more on CNBC dot com. So do check it out. Andrew, when he says the race to get up there and claim the high ground, that means claim areas of the moon before China is able to kind of market as a U.S. territory. Look, the politics of being on the moon are complicated. I think what's happened at this point is, you know, if you can get to the moon and claim your area of the moon, if you will, from a national security perspective, it's a super important thing.

44:28Andrew Ross Sorkin:And and whether it's ultimately SpaceX that gets there or whether it's Blue Origin, I think just from a national security and competitiveness standpoint, There is a view that we, the United States, needs to get to the moon and stake out that territory, especially because he often talks about, you know, lunar permanence. I think we mentioned this yesterday on the show, this idea of using the moon to then be able to go to Mars and to be able to go to other places, almost as a way station on the way there. If you can get out of orbit, it actually makes everything that much more, that much easier.

45:01Andrew Ross Sorkin:You could manufacture certain things on the moon and the like. So there is a race, if you will, just to do that as we speak. Walter Isaacson is here. Obviously, he's Elon Musk's biographer. We're going to talk to him about SpaceX and this IPO. But, Walter, I see you shaking your head, nodding about this race to get to the moon. We've gotten to the moon before. We did it more than 50 years ago. Supposedly. Supposedly. Yeah. For real. But what we're going to do now, as Andrew said, is put a base on the moon, a permanent base on the moon. And it's interesting because it's not really a race between SpaceX and Blue Origin, Musk and Bezos.

45:41Andrew Ross Sorkin:They're both working with NASA doing the human landing system. NASA's got this huge Artemis project. And I think that space will be the new AI by 2027 when they start building this base there. Where's China on this? China is a little bit behind at the moment, but they're going to an easier place on the moon to try to build their base. I think China will be there with a base by 2029 or 2030. But that sure lit a fire when Jared Isaacman, the very charismatic, smart new head of NASA, went to Capitol Hill. And it's like, hey, here's where China is. So just like Sputnik going up when I was a kid helps us get to the moon.

46:28Andrew Ross Sorkin:And I think the race with China and in some ways the competition but collaboration between private companies, SpaceX Blue Origin, NASA, with a great NASA administrator is going to be the most exciting story in the next three years. Yeah. I mean, all of these things seem real. Just the idea of data centers in space, which I didn't believe when I first heard them years ago. You know, one of the funny things about Elon Musk to get to his IPO is that he decides he wants to go to space. and then eventually backfills with really, really good business models like, oh, I can put up 10 ,000 satellites and recreate the Internet and outer space.

47:09Andrew Ross Sorkin:And now in the past year, it's, oh, we can put data centers in low Earth orbit. We can maybe even put them in the moon. So these are, when he talks about a total addressable market in that IPO document. What was it,$29 trillion? You know what, that sounds pretty insane. About the size of the U.S. GDP last year. It's a quarter of the global GDP. Yeah, but this is bigger than the U.S. This is, you know, solar system. Well, not quite. Let's stick with our solar system. Well, let's talk about that SpaceX IPO and what we learned in this. They are shooting for$80 billion or more in money that they raised to give the valuation, the company a valuation of$1.5 trillion, potentially making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

47:51When you first started your autobiography, when you first started with Elon Musk, your biography of Elon Musk, when you first sat down with him, were these things that you thought were realistic goals? How many years ago was this, and where are we now?

48:05Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, one of the goals he had then was to make humans multi-planetary. And the interesting thing is he focused, ever since he was a little kid, on Mars. Occupy Mars was the mantra. He has pivoted some in the past year or two to say, all right, let's build a base on the moon first. So these are the type of things he's able to do is pivot. But yes, this will be a trillion dollars for him. And it's almost like he's playing a video game. It's not like he uses that money to buy yachts. He even pokes fun at Bezos for spending all his money. Elon just wants to hit a trillion as if he's playing Eldon Ring or Politopia or trying to rack up points in the game.

48:53Yeah, the biggest scoreboard wins, I suppose.

48:56Andrew Ross Sorkin:I guess so. But did you believe it? First of all, when did you start on your biography of him? How many years ago was this? I started around 2020, and I certainly believed in the Falcon 9 rocket, which Jeff mentioned in his interview with Andrew, which is this workhorse rocket. I'd see it go up. What I did not believe, and there are many things I didn't believe when he first said, he said, we're going to land it upright and just reuse it. Nobody else has done that. China hadn't done it. NASA hadn't done it. Boeing. And then he said, we're going to land it upright on the launch pad and catch it with these Mechazilla arms.

49:32Andrew Ross Sorkin:And I'm saying, all right, excitement guaranteed. but I you know and even things like totally full self-driving cars I'm never a believer until suddenly I see it right I have to say I've gotten dragged kicking and screaming kind of along the way to these things too so when you look never bet against them though I mean exactly when you look at the SpaceX prospectus what what do you see in it that sounds fantastical what do you see that maybe something some people think is fantastical but you might think is real based on what you've seen it accomplished to this point? I think what's fantastical is this notion of building data centers in the near term, in low Earth orbit or on the moon.

50:15Andrew Ross Sorkin:But it makes a lot of sense. Your energy costs, and by the way, with all the backlash against data systems, I mean data centers. So I think we're going to need these huge data centers. This was not a market anybody knew about three years ago, like huge data centers that needed enormous amounts of electricity. That's part of the addressable market in the IPO for SpaceX. And I think Bezos told Andrew, hey, that's not quite as going to happen quite as quickly. But Elon has been able to make the impossible merely the slightly late. Andrew? Well, that's what I was going to say, Walter. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of excitement around this particular IPO and trying to but trying to make the math work, not just over time.

51:06Andrew Ross Sorkin:I think directionally, it's going to obviously be a huge, huge company that's going to have enormous success. The question is, does the success come as fast as Elon wants or in some cases needs it to, depending on how quickly data centers get to space, what they're able to do on the moon? And there's all sorts of other products. And we talked about it with Jeff yesterday that may ultimately turn out to be real. People talk about putting mirrors in space that effectively direct sunlight down to solar so that you'd have solar 24 hours a day. I mean, there's all sorts of things that could come. But the question is sort of how quickly they come and recognizing that there is going to be big losses along the way.

51:48Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, first of all, SpaceX has huge amounts of revenues along the way, including, I think,$1.25 billion a month from Anthropic, just for the lease of data. A month. A month, I said. A month, that number is. Yeah, data centers. And then you talk about things you made have happen easily. Soon, I mean, I've got Starlink on my phone here. Starlink,$11.4 billion in revenue. Yeah, and soon the direct-to-person cell phone market, maybe not in Manhattan. But in Louisiana, where I live, that's a huge market that hadn't been thought of too much before. So I think the potential for near to medium term revenue is much higher than you made it sound like in that question.

52:33Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, did the risk factors that are listed in this? No, no, no. I think the revenues. Go ahead. Go ahead, Andrew. I think there's a delay on that. Oh, I was going to say, no, no. I think the revenues are going to be off the charts. I mean, one of the things that Bezos and I were talking about just yesterday is just the pent-up demand for service right now. There's not enough rockets that can get to get to space fast enough. So you're actually the demand is real. That's not absolutely I think SpaceX will be giving would be selling Jeff Bezos some lift capacity. But, yeah, you're saying that the law, the losses will be there, too.

53:06Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, no, my question is just how quickly you think they'll get to profitability and maybe how much the investor community will care. I mean, one of the things that's been amazing, and it's to Elon's credit, is actually, you know, how there have been periods of time where the true believers have held on to Tesla and he has been right. But there were these sort of tough periods along the way. And I'm only raising that as a question because you're going to have a big retail community, I think, that's going to try to get into this early and it might be volatile. Well, it will be volatile. And if you look at the board that he has for the SpaceX IPO, if people have been with him since the very beginning, put the money in Tesla, put the money in SpaceX, and boy, they are going to be paid off well.

53:51Andrew Ross Sorkin:So I think the main volatility comes from the cost that comes from the AI part of SpaceX. Now that SpaceX is SpaceX AI and he merged his AI company into it. But once again, you're going to see new markets, including physical world AI, robots, self-driving cars, AI that absorbs visual information and can walk around. That's why I do think you'll eventually see a combination with Tesla and SpaceX. That's what I was just going to ask you. Dan Ives is thinking that the combination between the two comes in 2027. You think it comes that quickly? Yes. You do. Oh, 2027, yes, yes, yes. I mean, first of all, it's already almost happening.

54:39Andrew Ross Sorkin:There's so much stuff going back and forth, engineers back and forth, the buying of Tesla, cyber trucks, or space. In other words, he kind of melds his two companies. And I think it makes absolute sense because with Andrew's good question of how do you make up for some of the huge investments that keep the profits down, I think you have to also have the revenue streams. What would that do to his ownership stake? Because I think it's voting stake of about 85 percent with SpaceX. And that's been very important to him, wanting to have a controlling voting stake. Can he do that with Tesla getting wrapped in?

55:18Andrew Ross Sorkin:He will. I mean, he won't wrap it in unless he has some sense of control. Now, he makes fun of Mark Zuckerberg for having totally two classes of stock where you can never oust Mark Zuckerberg. He just says, I want sort of, you know, some strong control. But if I go nuts, it's fine if the shareholders oust me. Okay. The key man factor, the risk factors that they lay out in the prospectus, one of them is Elon Musk himself. First of all, he's a key man. The company's entirely dependent on him. Also says that, by the way, you're not going to get his full attention because he has Tesla. He has the Boring Company.

55:58He has Neuralink and all these other companies. And then it also says, you know, he draws a lot of public attention with his actions and his words. And those could impact the company as well, either to the good side or the bad side.

56:12Andrew Ross Sorkin:I've written 600 pages on this. It's ever been done for the past two decades. He's always been the key man. He's always drawn lightning and criticism for various things. You do see, however, if you go, I'm going to go down to Starbase soon just to see one of the Starship launches. If you look at SpaceX, quietly behind the scenes, Gwen Shotwell, she's truly a great manager. You have Bill Reilly and Mark Ginkosa, who are great at propulsion and rockets, and figuring out Starlink and how it works. They're not generally in the limelight, but you've got a lot of good people running that company. Walter, thank you for joining us this morning.

56:54Hey, fun. Walter Isaacson. Name dropper. One of the first ones that you're talking about. Glenn Shotwell. Glenn Shotwell, who's on the cover? You're right.

57:04Andrew Ross Sorkin:Have you been on the cover of Time Magazine? You're right, but you can go deep in. I'm sure you go deep in all these companies. I don't, yes, definitely. But I don't think there's a person you've probably never heard of, Mark Ginkosa. He'd be upset if he knew I mentioned him because he gets really low profile. That's the second time you've mentioned him. That's the amazing genius. And he and his friend Bill Riley down there in Starbase, Texas, you know, it's Elon driving this. Elon figuring out even how do we do the heat shield on the Raptor engine for Starship. But these people are good. You know what I'm most excited about?

57:38I can't. Your autobiography. Of me? Which I said at the beginning, yes. It's not announced. It's not out yet. You don't do it. I might do it.

57:50Andrew Ross Sorkin:Those of us who cover people in the arena don't fall prey to the conceit that we're in the arena. We try not to. And that is Squawk Pod for today. Thanks for listening. If you want more, Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview with Jeff Bezos on the Blue Origin Factory floor lives in its entirety. right in your SquawkPod feed. It should be the podcast just above this one. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern. To get the smartest takes and analysis from our TV show right into your ears, please follow SquawkPod wherever you get your podcasts.

58:28We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

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