Eric Johnson

Ed, great to be here and congratulations on your scoop and great reporting.

Yes, what we're hearing is a $30 billion raise, which if you look at the history of SpaceX, Musk is known for his grandiose visions.

They're building Starship, a colossal rocket, which he expects to put humans on the moon and eventually one day go to Mars.

so the money could be used for that.

He also has talked about, as you mentioned, the idea of putting data centers in space, harnessing solar power and having a huge amount of computing resources in space.

They would need to buy chips to do so, so the money could be used for that.

Of course, the other side of SpaceX is Starlink, the satellite internet business, which has grown substantially over the past few years.

So there's a huge portfolio that SpaceX is bringing as they transform space travel.

Absolutely.

This level sets the market valuation as a precursor to the IPO.

But essentially, SpaceX runs biannual tender offers, secondary offerings, where they allow existing shareholders, employees and others, insiders, to essentially generate liquidity from their piece of SpaceX.

And so as part of that,

They set a valuation of $800 billion, which is a record, beating OpenAI's latest tally from October of $500 billion.

So making it, once again, the most valuable startup in the world.

So this is walking up to that IPO.

And of course, as you mentioned, the IPO would be $1.5 trillion, roughly, valuation.

That's right.

They bring in the majority of revenue.

They're expected to do so last year.

As I said, now they've got thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.