Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I have to imagine that part of the reason that was so high was this was the first technology SPAC that was happening, so they were pioneering a lot of stuff here which, of course, means lots of legal fees. Virgin gets $450 million in new cash to the balance sheet after transaction fees and the $274 million buying out insiders. The deal includes Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company, which (remember now) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Virgin Galactic as vertically integrated. It does not include Virgin Orbit; that’s a separate company. When the dust settles, Virgin Galactic, SPCE is now publicly traded at the end of the first day of trading worth about $2.3 billion on the public markets. The SPAC shareholders own 33% of the company, almost exactly a third, Virgin and the previous shareholders own 52.5%. Chamath and Social Capital, Hedosophia team owned 13.2%. Chamath is chairman of the board of the company. An untraditional match if there ever was one, but it works incredibly. As we sit here today—there's more news this morning—as of last week, the company was trading at over a $5 billion market cap. It works is a funny thing to say there, David. The speculation party has continued. I would say the merry-go-round, musical chairs, or whatever you want to call it, that's continued. Of course, we haven't really seen results yet. The cash did go to the balance sheets. The company gets to keep building toward its goal of launching, paying all of its expenses. It seems to be close to going to plan, but if you just want to look at it from an equity investment perspective, sure, the things doubled in market cap since the IPO which seems good for anyone who invested at that point. Yeah. That's probably just like tracking to market at this point at least for the tech market.…

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