SpaceX To Rocket Market Higher, Or Will Gravity Win Out? | Eric Jackson

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**Eric Jackson** (1:00)
The dangerous thing about SpaceX right now is that, because it's such a high-profile name, a lot of people have opinions about it, are following it, are interested in it, and if there was a pullback in the markets, if there was a lot, NVIDIA had a bad quarter or something, a name like a SpaceX is going to really feel that and could potentially trade down a lot. And then a lot of people that were sort of the last in the boat because they got all excited about the IPO and everything, they're going to be the first ones out, and then they sort of contribute to the selling. So that's the risk.

**Adam Taggart** (1:46)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. And today, we're talking with somebody who it's his first appearance on this channel, although it's a bit of a throwback in time for me. We're gonna be talking with Eric Jackson.
He is the founder and CIO of a very successful hedge fund. He's also the founder of Event Horizon IQ, which is a risk intelligence platform. Eric has also been quite a successful activist investor, and that's how his paths and mine originally crossed, where he was following Yahoo very closely, and I was an employee at Yahoo at the time.
He also is a former PayPal VP. Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Eric Jackson** (2:32)
Great to be with you, Adam. Great talking again.

**Adam Taggart** (2:35)
Thanks. Great to see you, and it's really been fun to watch your career continue to vault to new highs after our relationship there during the Yahoo days.
You have been a follower of some great companies and great market stories, companies that have vaulted to amazing highs or have crashed and then made great comebacks from that. What I want to talk to you most about today is the SpaceX IPO.
It was all the rage in the headlines just a few short weeks ago. And also, I think a really interesting sign of obviously new technologies and where the economy could be headed. But also, it's certainly a marker of the level of speculation that's in the markets today. So anyways, it's a company that people are really still trying to figure out, and you have been putting on a ton of content, sort of giving your breakdown of the company and your thoughts on its prospects. So I want to roll up our sleeves and get into all that today. Before we do, if you don't mind, since it's your first time on the channel, I just love to give folks an introduction to how you see the world right now. So I'm going to ask you a relatively broad question, answer it any way you like, which is, what's your current assessment right now of the financial markets?

**Eric Jackson** (4:07)
Well, I think I tend to be an optimist, Adam.
So the most common question I get from, I guess, novice investors who start following me and hear me opining about SpaceX or other stocks, the first question that I get, more than any other is, oh, the market, I keep hearing the markets are at all time highs. And so I'm just going to wait for the next pullback before I get in. And I tend to be the type of investor that I more jump in with like two feet into the situation. And that's burned me a lot of times on stocks and on market timing and such. But that's, you know, I tend to be more optimistic than pessimistic. And so I tend to say to those investors, and I tend to believe right now about the markets, that I don't see any calamity around the corner. I was around during the.com era. I don't find anything in the current environment. Well, I mean, there are some similarities with the.com era, but I find the level of speculation to be probably like a three out of ten compared to that time, where I think it was more like a ten out of ten. There was just obviously the taxi driver type conversations that you were having back then or about what hot stock you were jumping into next. You don't have any of that right now. I think SpaceX and Elon Musk are sort of like an N of one. That's really only one type of them. We can talk about the valuation connected to it and so forth. But I would park that in a special category and the pixie dust that sprinkles over Elon. For most of the last 15 years, by the way, that pixie dust has been more right than it's been wrong, so it's tied to him.