Final investment advice on SpaceX

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Elon Musk's Rockets to Satellites to Chatbot Company is planning a stock market listing which could be worth as much as one point eight trillion . Standby for much discussion about the potential for operating data centers in space, as well as the Tesla Tycoon's long-standing obsession with colonizing Mars. How should investors think about these bold claims? That's the question we are going to tackle on the Big View this week. It's what we do at Reuters Breaking Views. We tap our best sources around the world for fresh insights into the biggest stories in finance, Business, and Economics. I'm your host, Peter Thar Larson . This week's guest is Adam Becker. Adam is the author of More Everything Forever, AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to control the fate of humanity. He's also the host of Dreaming Against the Machine, podcast which explores what he calls better, realistic, and equitable futures . But before we hear from Adam, I'm joined by Jeffrey Goldfog, Breaking View's Global Corporate Finance Editor. Welcome, Jeff. Hiya . So, Jeff, um, the SpaceX IPO is obviously a big moment for financial markets, and we at BravenViews have been busy trying to crunch the numbers to get a better sense of its prospects. Um, what what do you think of the interesting questions for investors on this? I mean, uh from a sanity check perspective, I think it's a matter of trying to understand uh the various businesses that are inside SpaceX from the real businesses, which are the Starlink satellite business, the rocket launching, reusable rockets, to the qu asi-real, which i is XAI, we don't really know what that becomes, to the literal and figurative moonshots, which are, you know, colonizing Mars and data centers in space, which I would add also just took an interesting step forward with Google. Apparently they're going to team up to try and figure that one out. Yeah. So so there's a lot to there. I think the way we summed it up was basically it's sort of 50% businesses and then 50% uh uh Elon Musk's imagination from a valuation point of view. Um so and tell me why why Adam Becker, what what makes him a good person to talk about all of this? You know, I I felt like as you mentioned in intro, we spend a lot of time crunching the financial part of this, right? But in this case, or of you know of SpaceX and many other companies . In this case, I I find myself a little bit confused, very ignorant about what the proposed business is. This is not just pie-in-the-sky stuff, right? We've read that Musk's compensation is tethered to colonizing Mars and to, you know, and to putting data centers in space. And so like I I don't have any idea like whether that's possible or not. I mean, you know, 20 years ago I would have laughed at the idea of self-driving cars or, you know, any any any of these other things. So it's really I I thought Adam as a as an astrophysicist and somebody who has has spent a lot of time looking at the bezos and the musks of this world and what they're trying to achieve, um really trying to get at the science of it. Like is this is this like remote, is this a five year thing? Is it a thousand year thing? Is it just total pie in the sky? And that's why that's why I reached out to Adam. I just thought he would really help us and invest ors maybe try and make some sense of of the science behind it rather than just saying, uh oh, Elon Musk, he's super smart and he's a billionaire, so he must know what he's doing, therefore I will buy SpaceX. You know, I just thought there was there was more to it. Yeah. No, and I think you're uh your conversation definitely does that. It's uh it's a great uh great conversation. So um so with no further ado, let's uh let's listen to your conversation with Adam. Uh welcome, Adam. Thanks for joining us here. Thanks for having me. This is fun. Ye ah. Um, gosh, I have so many bazillions of questions I want to ask you, but we're only gonna have time to cover um some of them. Uh, you know, this is a great opportunity to chat with you because the SpaceX I PO is like on the horizon now. Yeah. And um, you know, I think one of the problems with ventures like SpaceX is that all of us, and especially investors, get swept up in futuristic science that most of us don't really understand . Um, so how can we possibly know if this collection of businesses is worth two trillion dollars or ten trillion dollars or were nothing at all? And um so I wanted to kind of just start with you kind of write in your astrophysics wheelhouse. Yep. Um, because one of the big things that has come up, in fact, part of Elon Musk's uh uh compensation package is tied to his ability to develop data centers in space that um I think provide at least 100 terawatts of compute capacity. Yeah. So can you talk us through um like like what's he up against in trying to achieve that? Like what are the scientific Sure. So just to put that number 100 terawatts in context, uh I I believe I need to double check, but I believe that somewhere around a thousand times the total number or the total amount of data center capacity worldwide as of 2024 , uh, which is you know a lot. Uh so that's that's the scientific term. Yes, exactly. Yeah. That's that's the scientific term. That's a lot. Yeah. So yeah. But even putting one , you know, reasonably sized data center of the sort that we have here on Earth, even putting one of those in space, there's all sorts of challenges to doing that. That make it very, very difficult to imagine how you could do that in a way that would be reasonable and profitable. Um, the sort of my favorite one to start with is one that that sounds kind of counterintuitive. Uh, it's very difficult to bleed off excess heat in space, and data centers need to be kept cool . Heat is a real problem for them. This is why they use up so much water. And you'd think, well, space is very cold, so it'd be easy to get rid of the heat up there. But it turns out that's not true, because well, think about a thermos, right? Why does a thermos keep hot things hot and cold things cold? I it's it's because, you know, you've got these like the inner uh container and the outer container and between those two containers you have uh air or at a really good thermos uh a partial vacuum or maybe even like a pretty good vacuum. And that's because vacuum is the best insulator possible, like theoretically possible. Space is a vacuum. And so if you've got something hot up in space, it doesn't matter that space is cold. You're still going to have a lot of trouble bleeding off of the bleeding off that heat, getting it to radiate away, because the only way to get it to go away is to radiate it off. And that's difficult to achieve quickly. And so you would need a sort of powered radiator vein system for um uh you know a data center of any particular size in space. So by the way, this is so this assumes that we've already gotten the thing into space. That's right. Yeah, yeah. We haven't even gotten the parts up there. Yeah, we haven't even talked about that yet. I'm just trying to think about, you know, okay, how big is this thing gonna be? And so for a one oh man, I'd have to go look this up, but I believe for a one gigawatt data center , um you would need radi ator vans that are roughly a square mile in size, in area, or square kilometer, um -ish , you know, around there. Right. Um to put that into context, the International Space Station is the single biggest artificial object that humans have ever put into space and and putting that up there was incredibly expensive and time consuming. And it spans an area of less than a hundredth of that uh size. Okay. And that's including its solar pan els and everything. So we're talking about a lot of ambition. Yeah, something really, really big. And that's for a very small fraction of the amount of data center power that that SpaceX IPO document talks about. And that's just for getting, you know, the heat away. You've got to get this enormous thing up into orbit. That's very expensive. Uh once it's up there, it's gonna be exposed to more radiation than it is here on Earth, about twice as much in low Earth orbit. Radiation's really bad for computers. It flips bits and stuff like that, makes them unreliable. And so you're going to need to replace the components more for AI. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then you're going to need to replace those components more frequently. And uh good luck doing that. That's going to take a spacewalk, or you're just going to have to launch a new satellite . Amazing. So there's a lot more we can mine on that, but I want to move on to like maybe an easier problem to solve, which is uh colonization of Mars. Which seems to be he seems to have a big incentive um in his in his comp for doing that. Yep I think it's something about a permanent permanent human colony, whatever that means, um with at least a million people. Now I forget exactly how old Elon Musk is, but the I guess presumably this was something that would happen in his lifetime. Yeah, I believe he's not going to get compensated for it if it happens after again you kind of I know that you have some thoughts about the right. Maybe I'll cryogenically preserve itself into a trinity, but the um the um but there's obviously you you know you have you explained there's a a whole lot of challenges with that. I mean I think everyone intuitively knows there are challenges, but I like the fact that you kind of actually tick through some of the yeah some of the the things we need to be thinking about from a a a layperson's point of view. Yeah, yeah. What exactly does that entail? And uh you go through a lot of it in the book, but I wonder if you could hit on some some highlights on the challenges there. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the there are a lot of challenges. Uh the main ones are that the radiation level s are too high, the gravity is too low, there's essentially no air, and the dirt is made of poison. Uh it's just a radically inhospitable environment and we don't really have a way of making it more hospitable. Uh you know, we're we're talking about a place where if you were out on the surface on the warmest, sunniest day under the most atmosphere that Mars has to offer, like down at the bottom of a canyon near the equator at, you know, like in in the afternoon, the warmest part of the day. Um, and you didn't have a spacesuit, you would asphyxiate while your saliva boils off of your tongue. Because there's no oxygen and the air pressure is just that low. And you'd be cold. The hottest day on Mars is as as hot as you know, a pretty brisk day here on Earth. And the coldest temperatures on Mars are cold enough to liquefy uh, you know, things that are gases in air here uh on on Earth or solidify them. I mean, they've got entire ice cap made of carbon dioxide, uh, which is you know the gas that we breathe out. Um, but uh but yeah, I mean, and you could try to vaporize that. Musk has talked about trying to terraform Mars, make it more hospitable to humans by uh taking that ice cap and turning it into atmosphere, heating it up. First of all, doing that would be very, very difficult, but even if you did, that still wouldn't solve the problem for you. It wouldn't give Mars enough atmosphere. It wouldn't heat it up enough. Uh so and you've still got problems like the radiation on the surface, because you know, here on Earth, we're protected from a lot of solar and cosmic radiation uh by Earth's strong magnetic field and our thick atmosphere. Mars has neither of those things. And so to protect yourself from the radiation out there, you'd really have to live underground. Uh, and so you'd have to, you know, burrow underneath this dirt that is filled with toxic chemicals and will get stuck to everything. Uh, and then you'd just be living in a bunker underground. Um, and that would be your life on Mars, is you'd mostly be underground, except for you know rare, dangerous excursions to the surface. You go through one section of the book, which is like this super trippy kind of um notion of like just how far things are. Yeah. Right. Like to just remind us all, like talk through a little bit about the Mars, like a Mars expedition . Yeah. Like I mean, just launch you. I think you talk about like launching how many rockets we would have to launch just to like in sequence in sequence to even get everything there. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's really far away. I mean, one of one of the crazy things about Mars as opposed to say the moon, um, you know, if you've got an astronaut on the surface of the moon, um, you can have a real time conversation with them. Uh, because the the communication lag due to the speed of light for someone on the surface is something like one second-ish . Um, and so you can have you know a real conversation. Uh Mars, the minimum communication lag. So we're talking about something going as fast as possible, the speed as the speed of light, the minimum time that it takes for light to get to Mars when it's as close as it gets to Earth. Um something like 10 minutes. And so we're talking about a 20-minute lag for a real-time conversation. You say something, takes 10 minutes to get there and 10 minutes for the answer to get back. And that's the minimum distance. Maximum distance is something more like half an hour, or maybe even a little bit more. Um, so that's just for you know talking to people there. Then then how do you get people and supplies there? Well, the best way that we've got of doing that, you know, the best the best routes for sending rockets, you have to wait for Earth and Mars to be in the right relative positions, because again, Mars is not the moon. The moon orbits the Earth, it's always pretty much the same distance. Um, Mars orbits the sun like Earth does, and so you have to wait for the two planets to be in the right positions relative to each other. You only get those launch w indows, I think it's something like once every roughly 15 or 18 months. And then once you launch, it takes six to nine months to get there. And then once you're there, you have a choice. You can either stick around for about a month and then take a long, dangerous trip home, or you can take a less dangerous, somewhat shorter route, but you have to stick around for something like a year. And you're still talking about, you know, six to nine months on the way back. So we're talking about something that is, you know, maybe three years of your life, uh, with you know, a fair amount of radiation exposure risk the whole way there. And once you're there, and on the way back , all the problems of being in low gravity or no gravity, surface gravity at Mars is about a third of what it is on Earth. And of course, on your way there, no gravity. Um, and that does terrible things to bone density and muscle mass. Um and then if you want to actually have like a million people there, the number of rockets that you'd need to send just for the people, forget the supplies. You want to put a million people on Mars. Uh generously, generously, the rockets that Musk says will eventually work that they still haven't gotten to work. Starship. Right. Um , and even if you even if they get starship to work, that form of starship can't go to Mars. There's a future version of it that will supposedly be able to go there. And supposedly would be able to take uh uh something like a maximum of a hundred people in each launch. Now, that's not actually what the number would be, because you also have to bring all sorts of supplies and stuff to keep those people alive on the way to Mars. But let's just wave a magic wand and forget that. Let's just talk about getting a million people off of the surface of the Earth in the first place. So that's what? If you have 100 people per launch, we're talking 10,000 launches . Um, to put that into context, last year, I believe, was the number like the record for the most launches uh into space ever in any one calendar year, and it was less than 200 . Um right and also and yet yeah yeah sorry one last thing yeah I know I'm going on and on but one last thing even even if you get starship working reliable rockets , the the failure rate's usually around one percent . And so if you're launching a million people into space and you've got a failure rate of one percent, um, so that's gonna be what about ten thousand people dead for what? Just sacrifice for the for the cause. Exactly. Yeah. Um but uh and yet also all that said, and I and there's even more said, yes, you you have this. I would just want to read really briefly these two sentences from the book. You say, let's say that 50 years from now, Musk's vision has come true. Yeah. At least to some extent. There are people living on Mars. It's not a billion, it's not even a million, but a few hundred people live in what's intended to be a permanent habitat on Mars, that's probably not impossible, you said. Yeah. Yeah. Why so like I don't I don't know if that timeline is right, but I do think that if we poured enormous amounts of money and resources into it, we could probably build some sort of underground research base on Mars that would be like a more distant, more dangerous and far more expensive version of you know the Antarctic Polar Station. A place where nobody lives full-time, nobody raises a family down there. Um but you can As Elton John said. Yes, exactly. I mean, we don't we do not know what effect Martian gravity or the Martian environment would have on, say, pregnancy. Uh, something that you would need to figure out if you were going to have that many people living there. But like, you know, think about the Antarctic station in the polar night. That is a really inhospitable place . And it's difficult to find people who want to go there, who are suited to go there or qualified. Um , exactly. It's paradise compared to Mars, right? Because like, yeah, okay, it's cold and there's no sunshine for you know six months, but it's got oxygen. Uh, you know, you can breathe. Uh so yeah, no, we could I I mean, it might be that there is some reason that you can't build a base like that on Mars, but I if there is such a reason we don't know it. Uh you know, to to the best of our scientific and engineering knowledge, you could build a base like that on Mars. You have to solve a lot of challenges on the way to doing something like that. But they are probably solvable. The question, the the the two main questions are, well three. First, how long would that take? Second, how much would it cost? And third, why would we do that ? And the answers to all three of those are not really clear. Yes, there are scientific questions that you could address with a base like that, but uh you can address a lot of those questions with Mars rovers, something that we already have. Right. I mean, I guess the other so to broaden it out a little bit, like because I could imagine a lot of musk acolytes and people that are gonna invest in SpaceX , sort of saying to you, you're just the Roman Inquisition going after Galileo, right? Like you, you're just you're like like you people have called things impossible for millennia, right? Um yeah. So like how do you I mean again, I I I'm just wondering like because I think there's so much there's such a limited amount of knowledge, specific scientific knowledge um about these kinds of things how do you uh how do you even address that kind of um that kind of issue or question yeah I mean I guess my answer there is look, sure, I could be wrong. Absolutely. Of course. Anyone could be wrong. Uh all that I can do, all I think that any of us can do is take a look at the best scientific knowledge that we have at the time and use that to make inform ed estimates of what we think is possible and how difficult those things would be. Um, you know, the to to make the comparison to Galileo, um, Galileo was doing just that. He was using the best scientific instruments and scientific methods of his day, and came to a particular conclusion that you know, authorities in Italy at the time did not like and tried to suppress. I am not the Catholic Church. And also certainly if we want to take a look at, okay, you know who who has has great amounts of power and money and and reputational influence here that ain't me that's musk um but um right but yeah you know like the the uh the the Goliath in this situation is not me it's him but um but why do you think that uh why do you think I mean you address a lot of fill interesting philosophical questions in your writing and because although this is obviously all rooted in science, there is like there's obviously a massive human element on the stuff. Why do you think we all get swept up in and we'll talk about AI in a little bit too, but w why do we why do we get swept up in the promise, the hope, the the the futurism of all this and and then you know when it comes to finance at least willing to actually stake our money on it. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the short answer is I I don't complet ely know. Um, you know, this is something that I I still wonder about myself, because to me it seems fairly clear, you know, Musk's dreams of Mars are not going to happen. But I can give a more substantial answer than that, which is you know to say, okay, well, let's take a look at where these dreams come from, right? Because Elon Musk did not come up with the idea of colonizing Mars. That's an idea that's older than he is. And I think even he would agree with that, right? Um these ideas mostly come from science fiction , right? There's this idea. You're a Star Trek Star Wars kid. Absolutely. I I was raised on science fiction. I love science fiction. I was raised on a lot of the same science fiction that Musk himself says that he's read . Um now, whether his reading of that science fiction was really good, uh Jill Lepore has written some great stuff about how Musk has misunderstood science fiction, and I talk about that a bit in my book as well, but um he really does not seem to understand the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. But um let's let's leave that there. But uh but yeah, I mean you know, colonizing Mars, a base on Mars, a city on Mars. Uh, these are ideas that were really core features of uh science fiction out of the US and the UK in the mid-20th century, especially. And there were a bunch of reasons for that. Uh, right. Part of it is this sort of imperial idea from the UK or you know, manifest destiny idea from the US of eternal expansion, eternal frontier, and so you get uh Mars sort of being like the New West , uh, in and you get a lot of analogies to that, some of which get really explicit in pieces of science fiction from that era, like Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. And you also have this idea that it just, you know, um , it seems like Mars might be more habitable at the time because the science is not as advanced at that point. We don't know as much about Mars as we do now. There's all sorts of things that we didn't know. I mean, if you go back to that science fiction, you'll also see that another common feature uh from the era is uh cities on Venus . Because up until the 19 late 50s, early 60s, I think, we did not understand just how radically awful Venus is. We we didn't know that the surface of Venus was you know hot enough to melt lead. We just saw a planet roughly the same size as Earth, a little bit closer in, covered in clouds, and people thought, oh, maybe the surface is, you know, covered in jungles. I'm like, okay, that's not true, but I can understand why you might think it would be. Similarly, they thought that the surface of Mars had canals on it back in the early 20th century. And so there was this idea that maybe the solar system was teeming with life and we could go visit these other planets and be there without too much trouble. And so you get this combination of like this sort of expansionist philosophy and the you know relative lack of information about these places and it creates this fertile ground for uh you know this new genre science fiction. Uh, the problem is that we know more now. And we know that you can't do these things. And I will say to everyone's credit: no one seems to be talking about colonizing the surface of Venus. Uh so we've made some progress. Yeah, exactly. But I would argue that colonizing the surface of Mars is, you know, certainly less ridiculous, but still a pretty stupid idea. All right. Well, let's talk about something that's actually there is some reality in it so far is artificial intelligence, right? And um we have seen some development in that. Um but again that we reach this this point in AI and this singularity, which I guess is where the machines are smarter than we are, um to a certain extent. And then but yeah, something like that. And then um but there's also this this idea sort of embedded in AI right now, or the notion of AI, that it's like a forever growth thing. It's a Moore's law kind of like it just it keeps getting better, it keeps getting smarter and um but you know, you raised this idea of um this little thing called diminishing returns. And I I wonder um can you talk us through like the the juxtaposition of those two things. Sure, absolutely. So Moore's Law is this idea that you can just cram more and more transistors into the same size silicon chip uh as time goes on. You can double the number on a given ship uh in about 18 months or something like that. Uh and that was first postulated by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel in I think the late 60s, early 70s . And it turned out to be something that could be accomplished uh for about half a century. Uh, but Moore himself knew he said uh about 20 years ago, uh, you know, this can't go on forever. It's gonna have to stop sometime in the 2020s because at that point, you're talking about transistors on a silicon chip that are roughly the size of a silicon atom. And you can't have, you know, something made out of silicon that's appreciably smaller than a silicon atom. And now we're, you know, about halfway through the 2020s. And Gordon Moore was right. Moore's law, depending on who you ask and exactly how you formulate it, either has already ended, is ending right now, or is about to end . Uh and you know, we're we're staring that down. Uh and I think that in a lot of ways that hasn't really propagated out through the the indust ry and finance yet. People still think that it's just gonna continue, but it's it's not. And there's not some other technology that's gonna, you know, ride in on a white horse to save us uh from the end of Moore's Law. But to me, what's so interesting is Moore's Law was never a law of nature, right? I'm a physicist by training. Moore's Law isn't a law of nature, it's a decision. It was a choice made by Gordon Moore and and the heads of these other companies saying, okay, this is the business plan. We're going to try to shoot for this and we'll see if we can do it. And it and it worked for a long time. Um, and yes, there are physical constraints that allowed them to do it, but still it was a decision that they made. Um, and yet there are there are some people, uh uh Ray Kurzweil may be most famously among them, who took this and generalized it and promoted it to a law of nature and said, Oh, you know, no, this sort of exponential increase in progress, this is a general feature of life, technology, and everything. And we're just gonna keep having more and more and more uh technological progress at an exponential rate until we get to this place where the machines merge with us or become more um intelligent than we are and and we ascend to this higher plane of existence. Yada yada yada. And I, you know, there I go through this in the book. There are some very detailed arguments about why you can't do that. But the main thing, as you said, is diminishing returns, right? I mean, over that same 50-year period where you got this incredible, you know, miniaturization of silicon transistors, there was also an 18-fold increase in how much money had to be put in for each doubling. Um , and that's you know, that's a lot. And and also over the same time period, the cost of these chip fabrication facilities increased by quite a bit more than eighteenfold. And um and they got bigger and bigger, and the number of them around the world got smaller and smaller until now. You know, there's there's very few cutting-edge chip uh fabrication facilities. And for certain kinds of chips, there's just one. And then there's one other facility in a different part of the world that makes the one lithography machine that they need to make those chips. Uh and uh and it's just because these things are so big and it's so difficult to make these chips , that that kind of centralization ends up making sense from an economic perspective. But it also means that, you know, if we didn't hit this limit uh based on pure physics, we might have hit it based on economic s. Right, right. I mean, so another concept that you raise, I'm curious about tell me about engineers disease. Oh yeah. And how and how it applies to AI, sp basically everything that SpaceX is trying to do. Yeah, absolutely. So engineers disease is this term that was coined by someone on the internet, I think in a message board. Um uh Uh the basically the idea there is that if you have expertise in one field, especially a technical field like engineering, uh or or physics, the the field that I was trained in, uh and, I see this a lot there too. Um, there's a tendency after you work in that area long enough to think that you actually have expertise in many, if not all , fields. And that your knowledge can just be widely applied and you understand everything because there's really only one truly difficult thing to understand, and that's the field you're already an expert in, and everything else is easier than that. And uh and we see this in like the contempt that certain kinds of scientists and engineers have for, say, the humanities and the arts um but uh but we also see this in the dismissal of uh real human concerns uh that uh that show up around things like AI, space travel, and whatnot. So you know, there's this sense from um oh I'm gonna I'm gonna pick on someone other than Musk for a moment. Mark Andreessen uh has been running around making absolutely absurd claims way, way, way, way, way outside of any of his domains of knowledge. So like most recently, he said, Oh , um, I don't introspect. Great men of history have never introspected, introspection as an as an idea, uh didn't even really exist. No one introspected until about ye1ars00 ago when Sigmund Freud came up with the concept. Now, that's just false. That is just not true. There's no two ways about it. There's ample documentation that this is not correct. But Andreessen is suffering from engineer's disease. He believes that, you know, he has expertise in essentially everything. And so he understands everything. And so he doesn't really need to listen to what an expert in a particular area would say. And this is and this is also what we see from Musk, right? You know, Musk, I am not the first one to point out that, for example, vaporizing the Martian polar ice caps would not actually make Mars significantly more habitable. Uh, scientists have pointed this out to him for years, and his response is always to say, Well, they're wrong and I'm right, without really pointing to any kind of evidence. And this, I think, is a kind of engineer's disease. He believes that he knows better than the experts , not because he actually knows better than the experts, but because he thinks that he knows everything. And he very clearly does not. Well, I th and to me it's less that it's less the disease that the engineer has to me, but the fact that it it becomes like sort of an epidemic that spreads to other people because we think, oh well, he's look, he's rich, he's clearly smart, he's not like a dummy. Um he knows, you know, he's built scientific companies that seem to do smart things. He's like they launch rockets that can land in place. They he's put satellites up in the sky. Um so like you know, it's it's it's not the engineer's disease, it's kind of like the way it spreads or uh you know Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean there's a related disease about billionaires, both one that they're subject to and that the rest of us are subject to. The billionaires believe that because they're billionaires, they must be really, really smart about everything. And unfortunately, a lot of other people believe that too. They believe, oh, if he's a billionaire, he must know a lot about everything. Like, well, actually, lots of billionaires aren't even experts in the subjects that their own companies operate on. Uh, you know, I mean, we see this with the way that Musk talks about Mars. I think that if you went and asked, you know, people with real expertise on Mars, some of whom have worked at SpaceX, they would say, oh yeah, that's not going to happen . So what do you uh but bottom line, I want to try and wrap it up. Maybe maybe maybe we'll do another conversation another time because this is really fascinating. I know that you're not like you're not there to sort of financially model SpaceX, but um but like how would you kind of like what would you say to an investor who's like there is real business there, right? They are the satellite business is real, Starlink is real, the rocket launching is real, but there is like AI that's sort of you know questionable whether there's a business model, there's colonization of Mars and data centers in space all built into the thing. Like how would you advise an investor to properly think about this? Well IPO this is this is not investment advice and I am not uh I am not a financial advisor. Um but uh disclaimer to start. Yeah, exactly. Um I mean I would say this. Yes, I uh SpaceX does do some real things. I have problems with many of the things that they actually do, but they do offer real products that you know that you can buy that that do real stuff, like Star link . Um and the Rockets really do work and they really do, you know, many of them are reus able. And that really is an incredible feat of engineering, uh, credit where credit's due. Um the question is whether that justifies the valuation of the IPO, right? And um the reporting that I've seen on it, um , uh some of which uh I think you sent me, um, you know, even if you give really, really, really generous um , you know future forecasts to the exist ing and near future businesses of SpaceX , you still end up with a number that's about half of the valuation that that Muskie's going for at the IPO. Um I think that those estimates of future growth are way too generous. Um , but even if I'm wrong about that, half is not good. Uh and the other half is half is in this this this idea of whatever comes next. Exactly. And the and this idea of like, you know, putting a million people on Mars, putting enormous amounts of computing capacity into orbit. And those things are not going to happen, especially the Mars one. And I don't think that it's a good sign for the stability and health of a company to have a CEO who is constantly pontificating very, very publicly about how the ultimate goal of the company is to do a thing that is definitely not going to happen. And so given that and given those financial forecasts, I my my advice would be don't buy it . Seems like a good place to end. Yeah. Um, thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate the time. Yeah, this is fun. And um we'll we'll hopefully talk again soon. Yeah, that would be great . That's our show this week. Thanks to Adam and Jeff for that terrific conversation. And as always, thanks to you for tuning in. This podcast was produced by Oliver Tasich with the help of Mike Copeland and John Hodge here in the studio in London. 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