The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, we are talking SpaceX IPO, the biggest IPO of all time, and there's a lot of smart analysis out there. This ain't that.
Sam, what did you call it? The two guys in a truck version of this? What did you say?

**Sam Parr** (0:15)
Two idiots in an S1.

**Shaan Puri** (0:26)
So this is for, look, there's gonna be people who are smarter, wealthier, more technical than us that are explaining SpaceX. But we promise to be the most relatable analysis you're gonna get.
Because I wanted to nerd out on this myself, I was like, should I be buying this IPO? Should I be buying this stock? And in order to do that, I was like, okay, let me sit down for a couple hours and just try to understand what even is this business? How does it work? Is this massively overrated? Is it underrated? How should I think about this? What do they even do? And so that's where I spent some time. Sam was picking through the S1, trying to find some of the more interesting, quirky, people aren't talking about this, but check this out, styled nuggets. So that's what we're going to try to do in the next hour or so.

**Sam Parr** (1:10)
I'll just play the character. It's all acting, but what would you say SpaceX does?

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
Okay, so SpaceX, what do they do? SpaceX builds rockets. I think that's the primary thing that they do. They build rockets, ideally rapidly reusable rockets, and they could take stuff into space. Now, why do you want to take stuff into space? Well, one version of take stuff into space and the origin of the company is let's take man to Mars. So how do we become multi-planetary as a species? That was the, way, way back, that was the original mission, still a part of the mission.
And I guess the origin of that was that they, Elon, after he sold, I think it was PayPal, after PayPal sold, he made a few hundred million dollars, 200 million dollars or so, and he was interested and excited about when NASA was gonna go to Mars. Oh, I wonder where the Mars mission is at for NASA. And he goes on the website, he looks it up, sees nothing about a Mars mission. He's like, wait, we went to the moon in whatever, 79 We have nothing planned to go past that?

**Sam Parr** (2:12)
Like he's planning a vacation. He's like, hey, so like I have some free time. Let's see if we can like take the kids to Florida and like watch like a rocket take off. How cool would that be?

**Shaan Puri** (2:22)
Exactly. And so he was looking at that. Okay, it's not happening. So then he thought, oh man, you know, go into space, go into the moon. That's a very inspiring thing. What if we funded a mission to take, I think it was like a plant, it's like a little succulent or something into space and it'll, you know, let's take life to Mars, life technically speaking, because it's a plant. And he thought, oh, that'll just generate some excitement, some buzz, it'll kickstart more enthusiasm around space. And that was the original idea. He goes to Russia, he tries to buy rockets from the guys in Russia, like an old ICBM missile, basically. And they laugh at him, they sort of spit in his face. He realizes like, oh, shit, after two trips to Russia, this ain't going to work.
And like any good entrepreneur does, doesn't take no for an answer.
Like any stubborn genius does, he decides, I guess I'll build my own. He took that personally.

**Sam Parr** (3:15)
Dude, when I was a kid during 4th of July, or like for some holiday, we would drive over the river to go to Illinois because they sold bottle rockets there and they didn't sell them in Missouri. Elon and I are basically the same thing.

**Shaan Puri** (3:26)
Same time.

**Sam Parr** (3:27)
Just if he is, you know, he's 200 million times richer and 200 IQ points higher, but very similar.

**Shaan Puri** (3:35)
Yeah, but I relate.

**Sam Parr** (3:37)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (3:39)
If you have SpaceX, so do you know their business model? What do they actually do?

**Sam Parr** (3:47)
When I was reading through the S-1, one of my big revelations was they do so much stuff, and frankly, I don't entirely know how it all contributes to the same thing. But I do know that the main reason why he started was that reusable rockets is the best way to make, going to space to happen because you can make things cheaper.