SpaceX

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Dude, you gotta get on Starlink.

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
I know, I know. I can't wait.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:05)
Fix up this latency in a heartbeat.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
seriously.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
Welcome to season six, episode seven of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:28)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are talking about SpaceX, the company that will this very week be attempting to launch humans into space as a private company and make the United States a spacefaring nation for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program, which unbelievably was it a decade ago. David, how crazy is it that it's already been a decade since the end of the shuttle program? And also how crazy is it that we haven't sent humans to space as the US since then?

**David Rosenthal** (0:58)
So crazy. I remember when that happened, just like how disappointing that was, which makes what's about to happen so exciting.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:06)
Yeah, because I mean, there was no date set for when it was going to start again. We decided, okay, the shuttle program's coming to the end. You know, it was expensive. It was dangerous and it had its mishaps. And there's plans for stuff that's coming next, but there wasn't, there was no date, there was no plan, there was no mission. And so now here we are almost a full 10 years later.

**David Rosenthal** (1:30)
With a date, a plan and a mission, which we'll get into.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
All right, so listeners, here's the things that I knew about SpaceX, more or less before we started researching. They're the first private company ever to launch a rocket to orbit, recover it and reuse it. They can do all three of those things simultaneously where they bring two rockets back down on land and one rocket back down on a boat almost a thousand miles away. Pretty unbelievable. They're of course led by the controversial genius, Elon musk, or I should say genius entrepreneur.
And of course he has a plan, many would argue a credible plan of getting a million human beings to live on Mars. But until I dove into this mountain of research, I didn't understand the company's truly amazing business model, the winds of change going on around the company in the space industry at just this moment in time, or really how they were actually going to be able to pull any of this off. So what is the business? Who pays them? And for what? And what's with all these satellites that they've been launching recently? So today, David and I are going to dive into all of that in full gory detail.

**David Rosenthal** (2:48)
Yeah, we are.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:51)
Well, a few announcements before we get into it. If you love Acquired and you want more, you can become an Acquired Limited Partner. Our most recent episode was a crash course in fundamental startup concept pricing with Patrick Campbell, the founder and CEO of ProfitWell. So Patrick is literally the world's expert on the topic. And so we brought him in to dive into how you should price software, because most people do it wrong, how you can raise your prices and still have that be okay for your existing customers, and things like what's the proper way to do a free trial. So if you want to join, you can get access by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired, and all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial.

**David Rosenthal** (3:35)
And also come with access to our monthly LP calls that we've started doing, which I don't know about you, Ben, but they are super fun.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:42)
Super fun.

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
We've had a lot of awesome LPs joining us. Super great chat and just like an amazing reminder of the incredible people that listen to this show and our LPs. So I can't wait for the next one.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:55)
Great way to get to know so many of you. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:03)
So crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. because crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.