The Week: SpaceX, Iran, and the World's First Trillionaire

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**George Hahn** (1:46)
Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, June 19th. Today, the biggest IPO in history finally landed, minting the world's first trillionaire. Then, is the Iran War over? And finally, historian Heather Cox Richardson on Expertise, Power, and America's Future at 250
Let's get into it.
SpaceX went public this week. After years of waiting, the largest IPO in American history finally landed, opening at $150 a share, an 11% jump from its offering price, and climbing from there. By day three, SpaceX was briefly worth more than Amazon. Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire. But Scott wasn't celebrating. His argument? What happened this week wasn't a market event. It was financial engineering.

**Scott Galloway** (2:56)
And what I don't think people are focused enough on here, and there's been news on it, but it's really, I think, the whole shooting match, is that Musk threatened not to go public on the NASDAQ unless they waived the 12-month requirements for him to be included in the NASDAQ 100 So they backed down. They blanked. The S&P said no. The Dow Jones said no, but the NASDAQ blanked. And the result is they're immediately included in these indices.
If it's had $2 trillion and there's 50 trillion of market cap in the NASDAQ 100, that means all the indices that track the NASDAQ 100 now have to put 4% of their assets under management into SpaceX stock, creating anywhere between 20 and call it $50 billion in additional demand that no IPO benefits from. In addition, traditional IPO rules are that you have to issue at least 10% of your shares. They didn't. They issued 5%. So massive artificial demand or demand that no one else has benefited from, from constrained supply that no one else has been able to manufacture.
And what you have is a pop, a 20% or 25% pop on what I think is manufactured scarcity. Now the question is where do you go from here? And I would argue someone called me and said, I have access to share. Should I do it? I said, I think you should. But I would look at this as a trade, not as an investment, because eventually that manufactured scarcity begins to leak.

**George Hahn** (4:29)
When the dust settled, SpaceX was trading at 112 times last year's sales. For context, Meta went public at 28 times trailing revenue, Google at 10
And just as investors were digesting the biggest IPO in history, another piece of the AI story emerged. Open AI's financials leaked, and the numbers were staggering. Here's self-proclaimed AI skeptic Ed Zetron, who first reported on the leak.

**Ed Zetron** (5:04)
So last year, Open AI spent about $34 billion to make about $7 billion, and had about $22 billion in cash at the end of the year, lost about $21 billion. That $38-$39 billion number is what I would describe as gap voodoo. There is some very strange stuff, and I'll be going into this in future episodes, going on in the balance sheet and everything with this company. They turned from a non-profit to a for-profit, though they've remained profitless, last year, which means that their net loss is quite strange, it's like $38.5 billion. But the number I like to come back to is they lost $21 billion from operations, and they spent astronomical amounts on sales and marketing. They spent $7.5 billion on cost of revenue, $19.18 billion in R&D, but that sales and marketing cost, that $5.73 billion, is one I really like to hammer on, because, what?