SpaceX's First Earnings Report as a Public Company 🚨 SPECIAL EPISODE

**Dave McClure** (0:14)
Breaking news on Trading Places, the world's worst podcast for VC Secondary News. Aman, is today a special day?

**Aman Verjee** (0:22)
Well, besides being your birthday, Dave, happy birthday.

**Dave McClure** (0:25)
Oh, hey, thank you.

**Aman Verjee** (0:27)
Pretty big day for SpaceX. They had their first earnings report as a public company today. So that is, that's ETD over here. We're pretty big shareholders from SpaceX. So that was fun.

**Dave McClure** (0:38)
How did it go, Aman?

**Aman Verjee** (0:39)
I think it went like this.
I was hoping that Elon Musk would talk for longer than five minutes, because I know I've been doing this long enough to know the more that he's got the mic and Gwyn, the better off we are. And then the longer that Brett, the CFO, speaks, that's trouble. He spoke for about five minutes, Gwyn spoke for nine minutes. So there you go. As they opened, I think they started off with really strong top line. Revenues were way above expectation and 92% year over year, and kind of blew away estimates. So that's good. EBITDA was good. Their profitability, at least through the EBITDA line, was much better than expected. A lot of that came from Star Link, which is their cash cow, so that was good. And then they should have stopped talking.
But CapEx number kind of closed up. And the stock went from a slight positive to down 5% to 8% in after hours. So that was the story.

**Dave McClure** (1:31)
Well, I put together a few graphs and charts. You may have some too. But the numbers were good, right? The numbers were generally good on a growth basis, for sure. Maybe not so much on a, you know, CapEx basis. But connectivity was up, AI was up, space was up. Watch was up. Operating income across three segments was kind of like a push, maybe about break even or a little bit negative. But I think this is what you were talking about was, revenue was doubling, but CapEx is tripling.
The market probably not so excited about all of that. And that I think stock was up initially and then down a little bit after hours, right?

**Aman Verjee** (2:16)
Yeah, it was up.
You know, at the open of the day, the stock did go up 9% during the day. So it rallied to about 124 at the end of Tuesday. And I think that was a lot of shorts, didn't want to get caught on the wrong side of earnings call. And then while Elon and Gwyn were speaking, it went up to 125, 126
And then they kind of dropped the CapEx number, which is always the CFO's job, and never the CEO's job. And then the stock is down, they're probably down to the mid-1 teens, 115, 116 So, still above where they were 24 hours ago, and we'll see what happens tomorrow. But they gave up the early gain after the call, and are down probably 7% in after hours.

**Dave McClure** (3:01)
So that was this rise up until here, and then boom, fell down the ladder, kind of hanging out there. So, but still around 115, maybe 116 a share.
That translates to a 1.6 billion dollar market cap. Like that's still not terrible. A little bit under the IPO price, but we'd be happy with that number, maybe if that gets through to the end of the year, maybe we'll get a rise before the end of the year. Here was sort of the mid case, I guess bull bear and mid case. We did a little work with Claude, and this is kind of over the next 30, 90, 180 days, not quite 180 days, maybe a little bit less than that. The mid case is kind of where it's at today, maybe a little bit down to the next 30 days, but trending up by the end of the year, close back up to almost 2 trillion. If you believe the bull case, it's 3 trillion at the end of the year, and I guess if you're a bear, maybe it's only 1 trillion at the end of the year.
Which one of those are you leading towards, Aman? You a bull, a bear, you're somewhere in the middle.

**Aman Verjee** (4:04)
Yeah, let me give you the bull case with a little bit more detail and why to be optimistic where I think the street's probably not fully digesting a couple of these metrics. So let's start with what was said in the call. I'll give you the positive news. Elon, as I said, he kind of opened, and then he spoke for about 5 minutes. Actually, Glenn went in for about 9 minutes right before Elon, and they were both talking about the operational execution, the quarterly accomplishments.