Wedbush's Dan Ives Talks SpaceX IPO Plans

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tom Keene** (0:07)
What a treat here on a Friday, parachuting in after world travels. Dan Ives joins us here. Dan, I'm supposed to talk about Apple and NVIDIA. Forget about it. Here's the zeitgeist this morning, folks.
And Doug Kass, thank you for sending this on to me. Jeff Curry's out on the Twitter on this as well. Guess what? Tokens cost money. OMG, look at the CFO's bill for doing AI in your company. Dan Ives, Deloitte wrote this up in January, like 80 pages, OMG, this is going to be expensive. You see Microsoft limiting use of Claude because it's too expensive. How is this going to play out, Dan Ives?

**Dan Ives** (0:46)
I mean, look, that just speaks to, we're still in the early stages.
There's more data centers being built than active data centers. Costs over time will come down, but right now in this arms race, no company, whether it's large cap tech, small cap international could basically not go down this route. Because eventually what's going to happen is the cost and the monetization, they'll flip-flop over the next few years, and that's why companies are spending at this pace.

**Tom Keene** (1:17)
I agree on that, but on a macro basis, and you're world famous on this, does that mean we see a consolidation within the industry, and is that in the second inning year? Is the Red Sox trying to get to 4th of July, or is it in the eighth inning, the Yankees are ready to lose to the Blue Jays again? Which is it?

**Dan Ives** (1:36)
It's second and third inning. Because this is, look, it speaks to like the Bears in their caves hibernation mood that have missed every transformational tech stock the last 20 years. They'll continue to miss the AI trade, under estimating the scale and scope of what the spending looks like. And I've seen it just even a few weeks ago in Taiwan, in Asia. Demand of supply is what, 12 to 1?
And that is going to continue to drive this massive capex and the ripple effects across tech, energy and everything else.

**Tom Keene** (2:07)
Damian, a Torsten Slock publishing moments ago for Apollo Global Management. IT capex now accounts for more than one third of S&P 500 capex spending.

**Damian Sassower** (2:18)
Well, I mean, I have to, I mean, wow. I mean, but I have to, let's just shift away here. We have the world's largest, I mean, on record IPO coming out in SpaceX here. And I just got to ask you, Dan, I mean, what are your thoughts here on Musk and shareholder rights and minority rights and control? I mean, is this unusual, the type of structure we're seeing here?

**Dan Ives** (2:36)
Bottom line is betting against Musk. It's been the historically wrong move for investors, right? And I think many learn that betting against Tesla, you're betting on Musk. And I get some of the, in terms of voting rights, things like that. But look, SpaceX, you're talking about one of one, relative to what's going to really create a whole new category of investing. And that you've seen in the private markets, as more stock has come available over the last, call it three to six months.
And we're talking about a watershed movement, not just for Musk, not just for SpaceX, but as we've talked about, we think a year from now, over an 80% chance SpaceX and Tesla merge.

**Damian Sassower** (3:15)
Wow. So if that happens, I mean, how do investors position? How do we take advantage of that? Let's put our merger aura hat on.

**Dan Ives** (3:21)
Well, you buy Tesla, I mean, to some extent, because from a valuation perspective, I think Tesla, we've talked about, is almost a double from here, relative to the pure opportunities. We think about autonomous, robotics, and where this is all going in terms of the next level of AI. And that's why Musk is doing this, to bring this all under one hood.

**Tom Keene** (3:43)
On a Friday of Memorial Day, Dan, can you see Dan Ives out in the backyard with a grill?

**Damian Sassower** (3:48)
How can you not?

**Tom Keene** (3:50)
Michael Bart, do you think he's doing like the whole thing, the grilled chicken, the long-tongued?

**Damian Sassower** (3:55)
He's got long tongs.

**Tom Keene** (3:55)
The coolest one at the grill.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:57)
I could see it.

**Tom Keene** (3:58)
I could just see him there with the Milwaukee Best in his hand and the whole thing. Dan, give me Microsoft as just a stock idea.
You're on it. Ackman's on it. I get it. What's the why, the distinction, the differential of Microsoft?