Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Anyway, they stair stepped-up into where they are now, whereas Virgin from the get go was like, hey, we're going to go from this prototype and go all the way to commercially viable. They haven't actually changed the design in 16 years. It was like a big heavy lift to start with. All of these things aren't heavy lifts but I do wonder if I'm more stair-stepped strategy would have been more appropriate here. I think probably the bigger thing is what you said, Ben, just the capitalization and the amount of funding that SpaceX had was an order of magnitude bigger. Yeah. This is a great segue to the playbook. This is our first playbook item. Another structural way to look at this, Virgin Galactic is chasing a market that doesn't yet exist of space tourism, whereas SpaceX was serving a market that totally existed, which is governments that want to get things into space and are willing to pay a lot for it. Of course, there was revenue financing available, whereas Virgin Galactic needed to demonstrate they could do it before people would pay. Of course, notwithstanding the $80 million that they have raised in revenue capital. Since those are preorders, I imagine they can't quite use that. I think you have to be very careful in how you spend that $80 million. Yeah, I do think that. I think they have restricted cash there. Okay, playbook, let's do it.…

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