🚀 SpaceX IPO Liftoff | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:It's a massive day today. SpaceX IPO priced at$135 a share, opened at$150. Where is it right now? Jordi, are you on it? Do you have the price? Oh, the price is up there. Okay, now we're getting the endless mirror. You can call the price. But we'll be tracking throughout the show. So stay tuned. It's$2.28 trillion company now. $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. Which is what I was told. I went with a percentage-based estimate.

0:44John Coogan: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.

1:24John Coogan:It will be revealed at noon as well. 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 are you laughing at? I didn't know what your prediction was. Did you see what it is? Yeah, Nick just shared it. He did. This guy over here. This is a funny guy over here. Funny guy over here. This is why you trade i was trying to this is why you trade bits not stocks 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 what where it opens after like i just saw your positioning was confused i just thought your position was confusing we got to have a discussion about this there's nothing right per share sure Everything's on the line, John.

2:18Everything is on the line.

2:20John Coogan:I was laughing about how you wouldn't take a side 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. Dog walker or dentist. Yeah. Beach debate. The beach debate. We never got your answer. And you were like, I need more information. I can't possibly make a call. It's such a tough one. because I don't know. No, no, no. Here's why it's tough for me. Here's why it's tough for me, John. Okay, explain. I have never in my life hired or worked with a dog walker.

2:55Yeah. My family growing up, we had a couple dogs. Yeah. We walked our dog.

2:59John Coogan:Yeah. Like we never. You've been to the dentist. I was the dog walker. Yeah. You've been to, you're not your own dentist though. So why are you just going dentist? I've never had a cavity. Every time I go in there, I guess I'm blessed. Okay. Every time I go in there, they're like, looks good, boss. Okay. And I just set out. So equally useless. Equally useless profession. So flip a coin, it's TV. Useless profession. No, I just don't have any connection. I need slightly more. Why don't you fall back to 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.

3:33I respect dog walk. Oh, you would go dog walker.

3:35John Coogan:Oh, you would be an elite dog walker over a mid-dentist? Here's kind of my thinking. there's a guy in my neighborhood who is walking dogs in my neighborhood all day long a lot of people in my neighborhood don't work they're just home all day why aren't you walking your dog but I think it's amazing that this guy is just like clearly printing all day long just going for walks he's listening to music super nice guy he picks up the poop when they poop on my lawn I appreciate it We have a, you know, maybe wish you wouldn't do that, but we have a fine relationship. But then dentists, I could get really excited about a dentist if they were.

4:16John Coogan:You're still torn. You're still not taken aside. Private equity backed roll up. OK, OK. Well, that's an option. The dentist was kind of a figurehead for some PE firm to be able to deploy huge amounts of capital into rolling up family practices and raising prices. Well, what if you're a dog walker, you earn so much money, you start being able to buy small dentist shops, rolling them up, you flip from dog walking into dentistry? Well, that would be the way. We don't know much about this story, but we do know there's a conflict. Yeah. But that would be the way for the dog walker to strike back is buy the dentist.

4:54John Coogan:So final answer. Come in. What side are you picking? If the dog walker will commit to. No conditionals. why can't i have conditions you can't have conditions because that's the rules that i'm laying down you got to pick one dog walker dentist whose side are you on dog walker there we go finally we got but i'm gonna put but i'm going i'm gonna put uh heavy the whole point is that is it real a serious amount of pressure i'll just take dentist i'm gonna put a defend that and steel man that i'm gonna put a serious amount of pressure on the dog walker okay and i will provide the financial backing to acquire the dentist's practice and shut it down because i know they have i know they have some conflict yeah and uh it sounds like it's over the beach it's really not that personal yeah yeah and access to the beach but i think there's an opportunity to make it personal okay 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 so they got to figure out how to make it personal and I think buying the dentist practice and then shutting it down.

5:57Or... As a dog walker?

5:59John Coogan:As a high... No, no, you can raise an SPV. Oh, okay. You can put the capital together. And 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. Okay, okay. For the... 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.

6:35Or maybe split screen.

6:36John Coogan:Whatever production team wants to do, we will do as long as the folks at home can see Gwen Shotwell giving her speech to the shareholders. I got to say, Tyler is looking like a young Kimball Musk right now. Today we make history again. We have a history of making history. So I want everyone to know that we did open this morning in a rather exciting way. We launched Falcon 9 launch Starlink satellites to orbit.

7:10So what company would do such a thing on the day that they open in the public market? it. SpaceX would. Right? 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.

7:56Yay. Yay. 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 everyone said, well, you can't get a real rocket to orbit. Two years later, we got a real rocket orbit, Falcon 9. Oh, well, 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.

8:28John Coogan:Doubters, right? Oh, you'll never fly Falcon 9 enough. You'll never get to production. Another one. 165 launches last year. Check. 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 second stage. We've already recovered the first stage and reflown 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.

9:08So 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. 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.

9:54In 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. It 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. If you're going to 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 Elser Goon. That's actually, people like to say like, oh non-traditional background. Oh, somewhat. Chrysler. Yeah, I mean. Not exactly like a target. 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.

11:10John Coogan:Back then, obviously, SpaceX was very young, less leverage, 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 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.

11:52John Coogan:What's the chance that that works? It sounds crazy. And it was at the time. She says, I was driving on the freeway here in L.A. 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. 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 they 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 and develop another huge business on top of it.

12:53John Coogan:And so this idea of building, building, building, and then finding the different opportunities. For a while, SpaceX point-to-point was the big residual capability unlock 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 back seat in the S1, took a back seat 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.

13:37John Coogan:Why not hop on a rocket to get across the world in 30 minutes? 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. I mean, Elon's hitting one T and she's just hitting one B. Well, yeah. Shotwell 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.

14:25John Coogan:She said it at 2020. Scotland mindset. That's pretty elite. I like is what's that called? Where you're superstitious. Superstitions. Rare, potentially underrated. What do you think? Do you have any superstitions? I mean, it's in the word super. Yeah. superpowers. What's your take on superstition? Do you have any? It doesn't sound like. I think it's quite distracting. Distracting? Yeah, kind of like, could end up being a pretty big waste of time, so I avoid them. So you feel like, unless you go through your whole ritual of eliminating all distractions, things aren't gonna go well. So you're superstitious about letting distractions creep into your workflow.

15:07John Coogan:I understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe I am. Maybe I am. 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. 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. Wait, you can imagine like she's reading X.

15:41She's like crying emojis, quoting six more posts, crying emojis. He's never crying at the office. He never does that. It's like two different people. 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. So I looked up she was SpaceX's seventh employee. 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.

16:32John Coogan:She sold 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 Sani also went back in time and told a story in the Wall Street Journal about one of the early days in the SpaceX journey. Vindication for young Elon Musk, he wrote. In 2004, he told the Senate that open competition would transform the industry. So this was an interesting story. And I wonder if we could find the actual video on C-SPAN.

17:14John Coogan:I don't know if it's out there. but in 2004, the Senate held a subcommittee meeting. 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 era, warned that without it, the country might spend years relying on Russian rockets.

17:52John Coogan:Nobody disagreed. Witnesses came in two panels. First, you got the NASA team defending the program through William Reddy, its associate 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 candle, a nuke one way or another? This is brutal for my prediction. I'm feeling pretty good. 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 project from start to finish.

18:33And 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 just think that if you were expecting 10 % swings up and down. I just think it's pretty small though, right? Like at least they're being traded. Sure. Sure. Very, very small. The last person on the industry panel. You got Lockheed, ATK, Aerospace Corp. It's Elon Musk. AP in the chat. Wait for dip. Wait for dip. Five dollars. Can you imagine? It's just nukes down to$5. So on the second panel, the industry panel, you got heavy hitters from Lockheed, other industry folks. You got a 32-year-old man who had founded a rocket company two years earlier, and he'd yet to launch anything.

19:18John Coogan:It was Elon Musk. He had a more immediate complaint. NASA had just awarded a rival, a quarter of a billion dollar contract without open competition, and his company had protested. So everyone's there to debate like, OK, 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 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. It was under government review already.

19:53John Coogan: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. Reddy misspoke when he said it was competitive. It was, in fact, not competitive. The chairman tried again. Let's stay to heavy lift capacity issues, Elon. Stay on message. And Elon says, absolutely. But 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.

20:30John Coogan: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 the economist Joseph Schumpter, a creative destruction. The industry had lost it. Not one successful new entrant in four decades. Space, Mr. 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 and open competition.

21:12John Coogan: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 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.

21:50John Coogan: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 described to skeptical senators became a fleet of boosters that land themselves and fly again.

22:27John Coogan: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. You know what's not ordinary? ffs investment yeah of 20 million dollars at a 200 million dollar valuation into yeah spacex did get diluted yeah 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 i think it's closer to eight trillion cents i think they made eight trillion cents got it trillion pennies uh pt needed a win what was the return in basis points. He needed a win.