Luke Ward

speaker

235 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Luke Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking - Baillie Gifford · SpaceX: past, present, future – and finding the next world-changers · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

Yes, continually.

This has much more in common with the earlier stage investments that we make for clients rather than the later stage, more mature ones, which we do.

That is the risk and the reward of investing in SpaceX or has been to date is that this company is constantly pushing the frontiers and doubling down on what they think the potential is here rather than resting on their laurels.

We want to be long-term growth investors for the benefits of our clients.

And we want to find companies which have a proprietary ability to reinvest capital at higher rates of return than others might be able to do.

This is a company which is increasingly trying to offer that in new areas and at new levels of scale.

So there is a real attraction in that, but there is also, to your point, a real risk in that.

The probabilities of success here are really important, but there's also a lot of uncertainty around that.

There isn't a precedent for a lot of the things that they're doing.

So to make a long story very short, yes, this is constantly something where assessing the risk and reward here is really important for us.

It's both, again, as with the businesses, it's risk versus reward there.

If you have a very dominant shareholder in any business, they set the direction of travel, they set the capital allocation decisions, they shape what this company will look like over the long term.

If you and your clients are aligned with that direction of travel, that can be quite a beneficial thing.

If there is a misalignment, that can be quite a detrimental thing.

So figuring out what is the direction of travel, what is the evidence of execution in the past is really important in terms of judging, well, is this something which you want to take a risk on for the future as well?

I don't think there's necessarily one size fits all for governance here.

And there's strong reasons for companies which are doing something ambitious to have a defensible cap table such that they are able to make these big bets with the capital which they have access to.

But then conversely, how do you sort of challenge and make your views heard on that?

So in terms of having activists come in and try and change the direction of travel for the company or saying, well, rather than investing in Starship, for example, let's just keep Falcon 9 going and Starlink and not be too ambitious about the future.

And there's maybe a very reasonable business which we could operate there.

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