SpaceX IPO, Iran War Fallout, Quantum Bitcoin Hack, The Space Opportunity

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All-In Podcast. David Sacks couldn't make it this week, but we have the trio. David Friedberg is here, your Sultan of Science, Chamath Palihapitiya. SpaceX filed, confidentially, to go public on April 1st, targeting a $1.75 trillion with a T valuation. When SpaceX goes public, if it's at that $1.75 trillion valuation, so weird to say trillion dollar valuation for an IPM, they would be the eighth largest company in the world, right behind TSMC and Saudi Aramco. They're both worth $17X at the taping of this podcast. Tesla is number 10 with $1.37 trillion valuation. Hey, if you were to combine those two, as many people are speculating will happen at some point, and you can buy the stock ticker ELON, that would be a $3.1 trillion company, and that would make them the fourth largest company ahead of Microsoft. They're aiming to raise Chamath $75 billion, which would be by far the biggest raise ever in an IPO. Expected to go out in June. I think they were trying to hit the 420 date, because that would have been even more hilarious, but they're not going to be able to do that.
SpaceX recently acquired x.ai for $250 billion. That includes X and Twitter and the XAI, large language model AI company, Starlink. Generating between 50 and 80% of SpaceX's revenue will have all those details shortly, and it will be close to $20 billion a year, according to reports. Launch of Rockets is the other 40% of the business, $5 billion in 2024, according to reports. Total revenue, $20, $25, $15 to $16 billion, with $8 billion in profit, according to Reuters. So let's stop there, and we're going to talk about all the other IPOs that could be coming. Chamath, I think people really want to know, and you may have mentioned this on an earlier episode, what are the chances that Tesla, if this IPO goes well, that Tesla and SpaceX could wind up being the same company we saw, they're collaborating on a FAP. 100% is what you're putting it on? OK.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:10)
OK, sorry, let me be clear. 99.999%. OK.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:16)
What will that mean if those two companies, or when those two companies merge?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:23)
One of the great things that happened in my career was there was a point where, you know how you grind at a level and then you just get exposed to things at a different level, and then you grind for years and you get exposed to things at yet another level. In one of those steps, I was very fortunate to be introduced by Thomas LaFont, actually, to the head of Wachtell Lipton.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:46)
It was a law firm.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:48)
Law firm. His name is Ed Herlihy. And he said, this is the most important, well-known, well-run, powerful law firm in America. Then I looked at the transactions and they're just in the middle of everything. And now, you know, my lawyer, Raj Narayan, who does everything for me, one of the senior partners at Wachtell, I can attest, are incredible. And they said to me in the middle of all of this stuff, when I was doing a bunch of deals, they said, Chamath, just get ready to pay a tax. And I said, what does that mean? They said, the way that the American capital markets are set up is both that you can be incredibly creative and do incredible things. But, and we talked about this a little bit last week, there's a bunch of tort that allows folks to hang around the hoop and get paid no matter what. You see this in all IPOs, shareholder lawsuits abound. And they try to create a class out of it. And the reason they do that is that there's DNO insurance that then will pay out some number of millions of dollars. The attorneys take 40 or 50% and then these plaintiffs get a few bucks. You saw how egregious this tort manipulation was when this guy with 10 shares sued Elon's comp package at Tesla and won. And what was that really? That was the trial lawyers trying to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting a scene.
It was a shakedown. Why am I bringing this up? If you take the Raj and Ed example of this, this SpaceX IPO is going to set up a couple of things. The first is there's going to be the natural noise in the market, and Elon will have to sort through all of the little ticky tacky things. But the most important positive thing that will happen from the IPO is a validated external mark-to-market valuation of SpaceX. And the market every day in real time gives you a valid mark-to-market assessment of the value of Tesla. And this allows you to put these two things together to minimize these losses. And I think that that's what Elon really needs. It'll make his life tremendously simpler from a governance perspective. It'll make the companies and this quibbling about his time a non-issue because, again, nobody talks about Zuck or Satya or Sundar or Jensen allocating time across various projects inside of Meta or Google or Microsoft or NVIDIA. Nor should they really make this claim from Elon because as you're seeing, there's actually an enormous overlap and commonality to the various things that he is doing. He's building the robots, but they're used inside of SpaceX. He's building a TerraFab. They're used inside of Tesla. He's building XAI. They're used across both. So I think we need to do this. It'll minimize the shareholder noise because it'll give less room to somebody that says, hey, he set a valuation out of thin air. But dollars to donuts, these things are going to merge.