SpaceX’s $1.75T IPO, Strategy Sells Bitcoin & Crypto’s Hard Reset

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:00)
Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.
All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We got a, I've got a home court advantage on this one. It's East Coast time, 5:20 p.m. We're good. I got three guys who are between 11 and midnight here. So I think I got the home field advantage. Rob, Santi, welcome. And we've got a special guest, fan of the pod, Ryan Zurrer. So Ryan, welcome to the show too.

**Ryan Zurrer** (0:50)
Thanks for having me guys.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:52)
Santi, Rob, how's Europe? Whatever you guys are doing?

**Santiago Roel** (0:58)
Well, I'm in Amsterdam for Money 2020, which for people who don't know is pretty much the biggest fintech payments conference in the world. They do one in Vegas in October and one in Amsterdam in June. And the one here during June is basically like a trade show, like every big payments company and fintech company in the world comes. And same as last year, literally the only thing people want to talk about are stable coins and AI, essentially, in agentic commerce. And at the same time, having these conversations and everyone's, the biggest tech companies in the world are talking about implementing stable coins. Bitcoin is just nuking.
And somebody, maybe Michael Saylor, is just selling and selling and selling. And so it is funny to this dichotomy because nobody I'm talking to has any idea what's going on. And I'm sitting over here when the world is melting.

**Jason Yanowitz** (1:53)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

**Rob Hadick** (1:55)
Guys, how stupid is it that we're evaluating the technology based on the price?
Like this is how bizarre crypto and industry is. Companies don't make a decision whether to buy Anthropic or SpaceX or Tesla because the stock is up or down. Like USS, this is like, to me, that's why crypto is so early. But you can't go in a conversation and talk to people to deploy like MoonPay or Deal. And they're like, you know what guys, we're not going to do this because Bitcoin is back to 67K. And Michael Saylor, the Ponzi that is micro strategy is pumping, dumping coins. It's like, who gives a shit? You know, it's like we keep talking about price.
You know where I stand on that. I'm sort of tired of it because I've been the drum that I was deeply buried since November of last year, but I don't care anymore. You know, I'm talking about AI and other stuff. Ryan, I know you're a big investor in SpaceX. I want to hear all about that stuff.

**Jason Yanowitz** (2:49)
Yeah, I think we should.
There's two events we need to recap. So Rob, give us the money 2020 Ryan and I were just hanging out at this all in summit, which is either, you know, cool or cringe depending on who's listening. And yeah, you know, it's all right.

**Ryan Zurrer** (3:05)
I thought it was great.

**Rob Hadick** (3:08)
Rob was on the waiting list. So, you know, maybe it gets in next year.

**Santiago Roel** (3:11)
I just didn't get in.

**Ryan Zurrer** (3:12)
No, it was very well curated, you know. Everyone you talked to was really, really thoughtful, you know, CEOs or GPs of really significant funds.
Like, the onstage content wasn't overdone. A lot of the best lessons came out of the random conversations that you were having, and you kind of like felt a need or desire to have lots of random conversations because there was so many smart people in the room. So I thought it was great. I don't know, Jason, what would you think?

**Jason Yanowitz** (3:45)
Yeah, I thought it was one of the better curated events I've actually ever been to. I mean, it's very few speaker sessions, but the speaker sessions were incredible, right? It's like Bill Ackman, Brad Gerstner, you know, Gavin Baker, you know, Thomas LaFont's presentation. Thomas LaFont, you know, Co2 founder. I thought Sarah's presentation was probably, or conversation was probably the best, the CFO of OpenAI.
I think she'll be the next CEO of OpenAI. She was fantastic. So yeah, a lot of learnings. So Ryan, I want to bring you on because, you know, we are, this is a crypto podcast, but we do need to talk SpaceX because my biggest takeaway from the All In Conference was crypto is like a dot on an elephant's ass right now for the real capital allocators. It is, I know Rob is at Money 2020, and it's very hot there, but like from a capital allocation perspective, there were every single panel at Money 2020, except maybe Nikesh from Palo Alto turned into a conversation about either Open AI, Anthropic or SpaceX, and every dinner conversation was SpaceX, and every drinks conversation was SpaceX, and you are, for people who don't know you very early crypto person and did very well, and one of the, I think, first employee at Polychain and now wrote a fund called Dialectic and have done very well in crypto. But I think your maybe biggest position is not crypto anymore. And you've been accumulating a lot of SpaceX. I'd love for you to maybe talk through just how you view what's going on right now and how, honestly, how historic this is, I'd say.