News Block: SpaceX Makes History, Saylor Fires Back at Critics, and the Debate Dividing Bitcoiners

**Natalie Brunell** (0:01)
Welcome to the Coin Stories News Block, powered exclusively by Ledn. I'm Natalie Brunell, and in about 10 minutes or less, I'll provide you with insightful updates on Bitcoin, financial markets and the global economy. Everything you need to know in one block. Let's go.
The largest IPO in history happened this week, and it has something big to do with Bitcoin. SpaceX went public on Thursday, raising $75 billion in a single day and landing a valuation near $1.8 trillion, making Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Now, to put that in perspective, the SpaceX IPO is bigger than every IPO before it combined with Room to Spare.
Buried in the SEC filing was a detail that Bitcoiners quickly caught, SpaceX holds 18,712 Bitcoin on its balance sheet. No Ethereum, no Solana, no stable coins, just Bitcoin. The only digital asset the most valuable start up in history chose to hold is Bitcoin. Now, that makes SpaceX one of the largest public corporate Bitcoin holders in the world. And combined with Tesla's stash, Elon Musk's companies now hold over 30,000 Bitcoin. As Michael Saylor put it, a quarter of the new mega cap elite now hold Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And this IPO didn't just make headlines, it made millionaires. Thousands of SpaceX employees who were granted stock options years ago, including engineers, technicians, operations staff, are now seeing life changing wealth. People who took a bet on a company that was building rockets when the world said it couldn't be done. Of course, right on cue, the outrage machine fired up. Progressive commentators called it a massive wealth transfer. And politicians said we need to tax the rich. But let's get this straight.
These people are outraged that one man who built rockets, satellites and electric cars became a trillionaire, but they have nothing to say about the $40 trillion in national debt that their policies helped create. They're furious about wealth that was earned, but silent about wealth that was printed. The Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars out of thin air. By the way, that's probably how SpaceX is even at the valuation that it's at. Because dollars inflate asset prices for the already wealthy while quietly destroying the purchasing power of everyone else's savings. That's the real wealth transfer. But nobody holds a press conference about that one. But okay, what does the SpaceX IPO mean for Bitcoin in the short run? Honestly, it's a little complicated. SpaceX pulled $75 billion out of the market in a single day.
Anthropic has raised $125 billion. OpenAI has raised $180 billion. That's hundreds of billions of dollars being absorbed into tech and AI, capital that might otherwise have flowed into Bitcoin.
Strive board member Pierre Rochard laid this out very clearly in an article on X that I highly recommend this week. The AI boom has added $19 trillion in market cap to the world's 50 largest companies in the past year. Investors chasing that trade are selling Bitcoin to fund it. And that explains a big chunk of the ETF outflows we've been watching. But here's what history tells us. Every massive infrastructure build out, railroads, fiber optics, the internet was real. And every single one eventually overshot. Too much got built, the earnings didn't show up, and capital went looking for an exit. So when the AI overshoot comes, and we believe it will, capital is going to find the asset that doesn't have a board promising monetization, a capex budget spiraling out of control, or a wall of debt coming due. Bitcoin supply doesn't change because NVIDIA ships a better chip. It sits there, scarce, global and secure, doing what a savings asset is supposed to do. Bitcoin does not need a sales pitch, it just needs to still be there when the music stops.
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All right, I just wrapped up at BTC Prague and I want to share what I think is the most important takeaway from the week. Bitcoin is down more than 50 percent from its highs, the tourists are gone, the speculators have moved on and the people left in that room were the true believers. Heads down, building and having hard conversations. That's exactly who shows up at this stage of the cycle. But there was also some real tension in the air and it centered on one question. Has Bitcoin's corporate treasury moment gone too far? Strategy now holds more than 4 percent of every Bitcoin in circulation. ETFs hold billions of dollars of Bitcoin and banks are building more products, including lending against Bitcoin. So for a lot of original Bitcoiners, this all feels like a betrayal. Bitcoin was supposed to separate money from state and not hand it to the institutions. Now I get the concern, but I posted a thread on X this weekend laying out why I think that argument misunderstands how systemic technological change actually happens. And I want to share it here.