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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But if there was a company which was able to do that and almost uniquely able to do that,
Could that start to command the kind of value and the kind of market capitalization that the companies of old did when they were almost monopolistic providers of services there?
Space was the only place where that is going to be possible again, because it's an area where commercial entities as well as governments are probably on the same level of footing.
And it's so much green space to go after rather than existing markets where people are fighting for market share.
To use the example again of the Dutch East India Company, it owned the ports, it owned the ships, it had the labor force which conducted all the trade.
It oversaw the entirety of the value chain there, rather than this being a fragmented set of companies.
That allowed them to optimize decision making and capital allocation for where it was most rational for the overall system rather than point solutions.
SpaceX is similar rather than following the path that other aerospace companies have of outsourcing a lot of that supply chain for often for political and patronage reasons.
They, by virtue of having this large balance sheet and the blank sheet of paper, were saying, it makes much more sense for us to do all of these things ourselves because we can be way more efficient with the overall system if we do that.
And so again, another analogy to be drawn there between the kind of companies which pioneer and dominate in industries are the ones which have that sort of system level of thinking and ability rather than just the individual product level.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the timelines which we were working to for this were definitely off.
The company has taken longer to develop products than the ambition certainly of the founder would have signposted at the beginning.
The joke is, which SpaceX often have, is that we make the impossible late.
There is still a lot of value in that, but the point is it's not making the impossible early, which I think might be a stretch too far, maybe a bit too ambitious.
And so, for example, the Starship rocket, now we were considering that that might be operational many years earlier.
But that hasn't undermined the value creation that the business is able to demonstrate.
And I think that's because competition hasn't shown up.
which I think was the other area where we got the research wrong.
We're saying we can point to several of the competitors which have got similar level of backing, similar mindset of where they see this market, but weren't able to deliver those product and business innovations in the same way that SpaceX has done.
Showing 61–80 of 235 · page 4 of 12
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