Robinhood Co-founder's plans to take over space

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Baiju Bhatt** (0:30)
We're building our own rocket program to build data centers in space. It's arguably the biggest economic opportunity in the history of the space industry.

**Brian Sozzi** (0:38)
It's been hard for you to make that big.

**Baiju Bhatt** (0:40)
I mean, I think the hard part is the fun part, right?

**Brian Sozzi** (0:42)
Sure.

**Baiju Bhatt** (0:42)
If you want to do big stuff, a lot of the time, the path to the right idea is just getting started with the idea that you think is right.

**Brian Sozzi** (0:50)
What is the biggest pain point for getting your operation to where you want it to be?

**Baiju Bhatt** (0:54)
It's a very complicated business. One of my sort of algorithms for this is asking a question.

**Brian Sozzi** (1:04)
All right. Welcome to a new episode of Power Players. I'm psyched to bring back this guest. We haven't talked in a little bit, but he's got a lot going on. Baiju Bhatt, Cowboy Space Corporation founder and CEO. Baiju, last time I talked to you, it was called Different Company, man. It was. It was Ather Flux, right?

**Baiju Bhatt** (1:18)
Yeah, it was. It was.

**Brian Sozzi** (1:19)
What happened?

**Baiju Bhatt** (1:20)
A lot of stuff has happened, man. A lot of stuff has happened. Yeah. So should I catch you up a little bit on what's going on?
So we had a big announcement a couple of months ago, three things. First one, we renamed the company Cowboy Space Corporation, the artist formerly known as Ather Flux.
And yeah, actually really stoked about that name change. It's like, I mean, as you know, I tend to like the counterculture a little bit. So there's a little bit of that, there's a little bit of Americana. And also, I mean, the second part of this is that we're building our own rocket program to build data centers in space. And so we're kind of forging our own path to space, which is, I think, also very cowboy. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is that we raised $275 million for all this development work. So company is giddy up and ready to go.

**Brian Sozzi** (2:13)
It's great, Abe. So compared to what you were doing, Ather Flux, how is this company different?

**Baiju Bhatt** (2:17)
Yeah, it's actually an evolution of a lot of the core technology. So I started, left Robinhood a little over two years ago now to work on space full-time. And the thesis in the beginning was, and kind of still is, around energy and space. And what does the energy infrastructure of space look like in building a native energy company in space? The company started out with the idea of space solar power, which is an old idea from the 1970s, and specifically around collecting power in space and beaming it to places where there's no existing power grid.
So we're actually going to be doing that later on this year. So we have our first satellite going to space that's going to do space solar power, which we're very excited about. And that's going to collect power in space and beam it down to locations and likely in places like White Sands, New Mexico.
And we're going to be able to convert that into electrical power. To do that, we ended up building a pretty significant amount of technology around the optics and laser power management side and the ability to be able to point a laser from space down to earth.
The second mission we have going to space is actually going to use that technology for data transmission. And this is kind of the transition from focusing primarily on space-based solar power and power beaming to the other application for energy in space, which is using it to power data centers. And so we've got a lot of work that we're doing in that regard. And the goal for that is to actually launch our very first megawatt-class data center, which is the entire upper stage of a rocket. And that's targeting at the end of 2028 So a lot of stuff that goes into that, including building a whole rocket.

**Brian Sozzi** (3:58)