SpaceX nears lift-off
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Pushkin. The stock market listing of SpaceX is coming and the hype is real. Elon Musk reckons this thing, I don't know, cobbling together AI, satellites and all sorts of other stuff is worth, get this, $1.75 trillion. The bravado is quite something. Today on the show, we pick through some of the details of the SpaceX listing and ask seriously now, what the hell? This is Unhedged, the markets and finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I'm Katie Martin, a markets columnist at the FT in London, which is sweltering, I tell you, under a record-breaking heat wave. Stay hydrated, people. Joining me, back from his travels in New York, we have the big fella, Mr. Robert Armstrong. Rob, say hi.
Hi.
Or you could even say ciao, given that you've been on your travels.
Ciao, Bella.
Ciao.
But we also have, back on the show, Mr John Foley, head of Lex. John, hi. Hi, Casey. So, John, you've been digging through hundreds of pages of docs from SpaceX about its proposed listing. What is your favourite bit of these documents, please?
My favorite bit, Katie, is the dinosaurs. It's the bit that says that if we don't buy shares in SpaceX, then humans might go the same way as the dinosaurs.
Is that because Elon Musk is going to shoot a huge asteroid at anyone who fails to purchase shares? That's what it says. That's literally what it says.
Yeah.
No. No. What does it literally say? So the reason that Musk says that SpaceX is doing what it's doing now, it's in the section called Why This Matters Now, is that they want to make sure that humans don't have the same fate as the dinosaurs. And the way to ensure that is presumably to build colonies on Mars and start mining asteroids and putting data centers in space, which the dinosaurs did not do.
I think that is what killed the dinosaurs in the end is lack of data centers. Anyway, there's so much about this, but the offering document.
What are the details of SpaceX's upcoming IPO?
how the market is preparing for these massive IPOs. I don't even know where to begin. Where shall we begin with this?
Well, let's begin with the start, right? So SpaceX says that its mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
Hmm.
So, ambitious.
How that cashes out is, well, they have a space business, which we all know about. They do send things into space. And last year, for... billion of revenue doing that and a small loss. So the costs were 4.7, revenue for loss somewhere around $700 million. So one thing you're buying when you buy this at a valuation of one and three quarters trillion American dollars is a loss-making space business. Cool. That is not growing wildly fast, by the way. The revenue in that business in 2025 grew at under 10%. So that's something. Next business, John, what do we have? Connectivity. This is a real business and a very good business.
This is today the good bit, right? This is Starlink, which is the satellite communications business. And it's where most of the revenue and most of the profit, well, the only profit actually comes from at the moment at SpaceX. Yeah. But it is growing very rapidly. It's got about 10 million subscribers. It could have more than that. And the game there is putting satellites into space and hooking up people who maybe don't have access to broadband at the moment. The problem with this is that the further into emerging markets SpaceX gets with this, the lower the price it can charge. So its revenue per user is falling. And also satellites, and they don't really get into this, and it's hard to see this in the documents, but satellites depreciate very quickly.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:50
2
What are the details of SpaceX's upcoming IPO?
2:50–6:10
3
How does Elon Musk justify SpaceX's valuation?
6:10–19:12
4
What are the different business segments of SpaceX?
19:12–20:06
5
How is SpaceX's Starlink business performing?
20:06–21:26
6
What challenges does SpaceX face with its satellite business?
21:26–26:09