Ten31 Timestamp: Ad Astra Per Nasdaq

**Marty Bent** (0:00)
The 250-year anniversary of this country, the celebration is well underway, and vibes are high, vibes are high. John was just going on a rant.
We're eight minutes past our set time to hit record, and he was just ranting about the great men of history and where we may find ourselves. And something we may have to come to grips with is that history is written by a few great men, each generation.

**John Arnold** (0:24)
Look, it's a poetic timing coming up on the 250th for the, everyone can probably guess our opening topic here, the SpaceX IPO.
To be very clear with everything we talk about, none of this is investment advice or an endorsement to go around and buy the stock. I have no opinion on, or no educated opinion on the valuation, finger in the air, maybe seems a little high, but certainly, I think we're going to make the argument that SpaceX is a very meaningful company for the US., so don't interpret this as investment advice one way or the other. But yeah, everyone's eyes last week were on the IPO that the market has been waiting for for years of Elon's company, SpaceX. And the big headline that was blared across all the chyrons and the various news channels was, Elon Musk is now the first paper trillionaire, at least based on where SpaceX priced and closed on Friday. And there's a lot that I think we could say, but we're not going to say here about the what is being a trillionaire mean in 2026 relative to 100 years ago, 200 years ago, the Cantillion effect, which every Bitcoin podcast in the world has talked about, the debasing value of fiat currency and how that leads to these larger and larger numbers. We'll probably have a quadrillionaire in 20 years. That's all relevant. Not really going to talk about that. And yeah, but I think like the two big pieces to pull out of this are actually before we go into that. I included this picture here because I just feel like this is Elon famously looking at the wreckage of Falcon 1 But if you go back and look at just like the story of how they got to where they are today, it's a classic eating glass and getting kicked in the groin over and over again, dozens of times and just getting back up again and going. And I think anyone who looks at this combination of headlines, the trillionaire thing and the history of SpaceX and still comes away thinking that is unearned wealth or unjustifiable wealth is really just exercising a loser mentality. We can debate all day what Elon does with his wealth. Does he use it in a good way? Fine. But I think I'll just say definitively on the show, that is very much not our view. But I think that yes, here you go. This is a tweet. Marty's saying it succinctly better than I can. And the Robert Sterling tweet is one for the books. I'll be able to go read.
But to Marty's point on great men of history, I think it's hard to argue that Elon is not one of those at this point, at least as it relates to advancing industry and advancing human capability. To say nothing of his personal life, to say nothing of a lot of his viewpoints, certainly we've had our disagreements with his view on Bitcoin's energy use and proof of work, and I think he's misguided on a lot of that stuff.
But I think this is a relevant milestone for and is emblematic of what we're dealing with right now, that we've been talking about for the last year on the show. Because number one, it shows you the value of having an Elon on your side, an Elon in your country. There are 20 Elons, 20 Rockefellers, whatever, are worth 20 million podcasters.
There's very disproportionate value that can be generated by certain people in history.
For anyone who looks at the US current manufacturing backdrop and says, we're so far behind, we've lost these decades to China and others, and there's just no way to catch up. I've said this before on the show, but I really recommend everyone go read the book, Freedom's Forge, about US industrial mobilization heading into World War II. It's a common misconception that the US was already like this industrial powerhouse going into that. It could not be less true. We were extremely unprepared as late as 1940 You had a couple of guys, Bill Knudson being one of them, Henry Kaiser being the other, that really just decided that we were going to mobilize in an insane way that no one had ever thought would be possible. They were throwing out Elon level projections to the government, or in some cases being asked to hit those projections, and they came through. They made it happen, and that was on a basis of industrial unpreparedness and massive labor strife that we can't even imagine today. All this is just to say, you look at having some eons in the country, you look at the history of how analogs like this have played out in the recent past, recent enough for your grandparents to remember, you look at the depth of American capital markets that enabled SpaceX to 15 years, burn a lot of capital, raise huge dollars, and finally get to a point where they are today, where it increasingly looks like they've achieved legitimate escape velocity and really remade a category. You look at all that and you say, well, I don't know that I want to short that. This isn't even just rah-rah America stuff, right? This is, I don't really know that I feel comfortable declaring that it's a foregone conclusion that America is dead, we lost the manufacturing race, and the world is China's now. So I'll pause there, but I thought it was a really emblematic event for every single thing that we've been talking about the last year, just boiled down into one single headline.