Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The SpaceX IPO is almost here. Motley Fool Hidden Gems investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoyum, joined today by Lou Whiteman and John Quast. Guys, the big news of the week is that SpaceX's S1 is out.
If you're not familiar with an S1, this is the document that gives all the financial information, the total addressable market, maybe something we'll talk about with SpaceX. Basically, all the financials, all the things that we've been speculating on for years are now public. And this is kind of the last big thing before the company actually goes public. So
John, I want to start with you, and I'm just going to start this wide open. This is a multi-hundred page document. What stuck out to you?
Well, the big thing that stuck out to me, ignoring everything else, is that I think that we thought that this was going to be a rocket company that had a little bit of AI on the side, but really the S1 is pointing to this is an AI-first company that dabbles in rockets. I don't want to...
be too bombastic in stating it that way, but look, it has a total addressable market that it's putting out there of 28.5 trillion. We can talk about that all day long, but 80% of that TAM is for enterprise AI.
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Chapter 2: What financial insights does SpaceX's S-1 reveal?
That is extraordinary, but it's putting its money where its mouth is here. 76% of first quarter capital expenditures going to AI. In other words, what it is spending in AI is more expensive than putting rockets into space. This is a very big surprise to me.
Yeah, Lou, I want to put these numbers out there because they are fascinating. Space is... And this is their total addressable market that they have published in the S1. Space, $370 billion. Connectivity, so that's Starlink and Starlink Mobile, broadband and mobile, $1.6 trillion. And AI, $26.5 trillion. This is from the company that...
is now renting its GPUs because its utilization for its own Grok products was so poor that that's what they needed to do. And yeah, John's right. They're spending, in the past three months alone, CapEx was $7.7 billion for AI CapEx. Just fascinating how different this company is even than the name SpaceX. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm reminded of what Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks in a way, because when you're doing an IPO, you have to sell your company. Now, it really shouldn't be. Well, actually, it really should be a reflection of what you want to do, what you want to accomplish. But in practicality, it tends to be. this is why you should buy it right now.
And AI is where the money is, as Willie Sutton said. We'll see where they go. You're right, though. The thing that strikes me is that Grok is, shall we say, a very incomplete product. I mean, the thing that really stuck out to me of staying on the AI is that even without the R&D expense, and of course, R&D expense is a huge expense for these hyperscalers, but even without R&D,
Grok didn't make enough revenue in the first quarter to cover it's just general expenses and the cost of doing business. So backing it out, I mean, it is a less than a billion dollar quarter of revenue in a time when Anthropic and Google and others are catching on. Look, here's the thing, and we can talk about lots of different parts of this.
I think Starlink is fascinating, but just like back in 2010 with the Tesla IPO, I don't think that anyone is going to be interested in this for what it is today. And I don't think that this S-1 should be taken, I mean, take it seriously, not literally, I guess.
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Chapter 3: How does AI influence SpaceX's business model?
It's a tedious expression used about politics.
Let's stick on that Starlink piece because, John, I thought these numbers were fascinating. This is from the connectivity section. The number of Starlink subscribers more than doubled in the past year to 10.3 million. So that's a very significant number. ARPU or average revenue per user did drop to $66 per month.
I have seen that they at least some people reporting they're raising prices over even just in the past month. But this is the segment that is also profitable segment income from operations, $1.2 billion in the last three months and $4.4 billion in the past year. So that's actually seems like a pretty good business, John.
Yeah, I really wish that it was being spun out into its own publicly traded company because it would be something I'd be very interested in owning. You look at the growth rate. I mean, you look at the subscriber rate and then the drop in average revenue per user. Yeah. But that combination still leaves it with 30 percent greater than 30 percent revenue growth year over year.
That's a really good growth rate. And the operating margin on this is pretty good as well. There are some economies here with vertical integration, but an operating margin that is quite attractive. And so this would be an attractive business on a standalone basis. Now you lump it in in the bigger company. I think that there's some question marks there.
And if it was a standalone business, right, it would probably be going public at a exorbitant valuation as well. But Starlink is the star of the show.
Yeah, I agree 100%. It's hard to show. I actually think it works better inside a big company because I think some of what they're getting at cost, you wouldn't want to pay the market rate for.
You're saying for the launches?
Yeah, for the launch and maintenance. Like, you know, the total addressable market is just... You know, all the numbers are fun. You know, the total one's basically U.S. GDP, but that I think it's 1.6 trillion in Starlink is what they said, right? Yep. Guys, just and I mean, this is current day, not future, but global telecom connectivity revenue in 2025.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of SpaceX's capital expenditures?
You know, that's the business model here. You're not building a satellite capable of looping around Pluto or something. So there is going to be a constant, constant cost. If you bring the unit economics down, that makes it a real difficult thing. Especially, look, Amazon's doing this. ASTS is doing this. There are legacy providers who do this.
And all, by the way, the nature of physics, it is always going to be second best if you do have a cell tower. So it is going to be for most things, for most large markets, a complimentary, not a replacement product.
I love Starlink and I love the potential here, but I'll be honest, if it was a standalone, I don't think I'd buy it because even that, I think it's, there are question marks here, period.
John, I want to touch on the AI piece because that is, according to SpaceX, the biggest total addressable market for them. And this is something that is going to capture investors' attention as SpaceX goes public. But it's really, there's a lot of questions about what the business model is even going to be here.
We've seen over the past just few weeks that Colossus One, which was, this was the big data center that they built in Memphis, that Jensen Wong just was, oh my gosh, only Elon Musk can build a data center this fast. Then it turns out it's very, very low utilization because people just aren't using Grok. So they decide to lease out this data center to Anthropic.
Now, that turns into positive revenue, potentially positive free cash flow. The reports are it's about $1.2 billion worth of revenue per month. That's going to be starting to come in this month, and I think it ramps up next month. But is that the business? Is this just another Neo cloud or is this are you buying Grok? I'm a little bit confused about what the AI business is actually going to be.
Yeah, I mean, well, you look at it, you project forward, this Anthropic deal is just brand new here. You project forward $15 billion in annual revenue from that. You look at what the AI component of SpaceX generated last year in 2025. We're basically at an $18 billion AI business here at a run rate of $18 billion. You look at what SpaceX, the space part of it did last year,
did about just less than 16 billion in annual revenue. So right now, if you look at a run rate perspective, about 55% AI, 45% space, that's really interesting, especially when you're looking at where's management's vision focused, where's it spending its money? I mean, and what are investors signing up for when they buy this IPO?
I think they, again, to go back, I think that they want space, but we need to recognize that it is getting AI. Look, grok aside, I think it is a good idea if you have unused capacity and you have somebody willing to pay you $1.25 billion a month, sell it.
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