Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
35 published records
01 / belief
“Ben, you mentioned a minute ago that I think over the life of SpaceX thus far, they've received just under $8 billion from the government.”
02 / belief
“Then component five, use the funds from these fat margins to fund their own, owned and operated businesses like Starlink or like the Mars stuff that I think we'll talk about here, basically, SpaceX themselves will be able to charge for those owned assets on an indefinite basis.”
03 / belief
“Elon puts a total of $100 million into SpaceX. I think he said at some point that that was enough for three or four.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don't know for sure. It feels like a compounding factor though, and it was both expensive and unsafe.”
05 / belief
“The Mars Phoenix lander was somewhere in 2008. That hadn't happened yet, but I think the rover had.”
06 / belief
“I think I remember, too, it was a more shiny, nice, idealized rocket than the one they're actually designing, but it had this SpaceX logo on it.”
07 / uncertainty
“A lot of the primary capital that they've raised recently has been for Starlink. I don't know.”
08 / belief
“Boy, I think there's actually a [...] post on the fact that this is not vertically-integrated, that they make the things that they view as differentiable to tightly-coupled, so CPUs, the OS.”
09 / belief
“I think the ISS, as they were pulling in the Dragon, said something like, Houston we've got ourselves a dragon here, something like that.”
10 / commitment
“I'm rooting for you but I'm not going to move out to California and do this. It ends up being a good thing for SpaceX that he did not do that, as we will see.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don't know what kind of multiple you want to apply to that or if we should figure out actually what the EBITDA margin is and do it that way.”
12 / commitment
“SpaceX is in this for the long haul. Come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.”
13 / belief
“Lastly, the thing that I want to point out, I think as of May 2019, Elon owned 54% of SpaceX.”
14 / commitment
“You can say many things about Elon but he's been quoted on so many occasions saying, if either Tesla or SpaceX goes bankrupt, I will personally go bankrupt, and that is as it should be.”
15 / uncertainty
“The initial price was $7 million. I don't know if they'd raised it by this point in time.”
16 / belief
“I think Elon probably didn't have a pie chart on his computer of segments in the TAM for sending stuff to space.”
17 / belief
“At this point in time, the only customer that trusts them, that Gwynne has been able to rustle up is I believe the Malaysian government to launch a communication satellite.”
18 / belief
“I think we’ll see the innovation compound now that we’re having all these CubeSats and things like that up there, much faster than we saw with only shipping a Hubble up once a decade.”
19 / belief
“We didn't really talk about Starlink at all in this episode thus far, but I think one of the reasons besides Starlink, providing satellite internet access being a big market and attractive in and of its own, that SpaceX decided to launch this division internally was to stimulate the smallsat market and demand for it.”
20 / belief
“Among much great content I've been consuming during quarantine from books—both fiction and nonfiction—to podcasts, to TV shows, to movies. I think The Last Dance takes the cake for me.”
21 / commitment
“I have Mike Griffin in my notes listeners. I won't tell you where or what his title was, but wow.”
22 / uncertainty
“I don't know for sure but this feels like it could be a case of disruptive innovation here.”
23 / belief
“We should also say—this I think is from the Ashlee Vance book as well—the way that Elon calculates these deadlines is he thinks about how long.”
24 / belief
“I think the missing puzzle piece that comes along, that lobbies for SpaceX to do that is not yet in place.”
25 / belief
“The ISS astronauts went in there, showed, waved to the camera, and held up the stuffed animal of a globe I think.”
26 / commitment
“Before our usual wrap up here, we have one more fun announcement. That is that David and I are going to be speaking at an aerospace industry conference in November called ASCEND.”
27 / evaluation
“It's also a private company which is nice because if you could tune out all the noise around Tesla stock and only focus on the more intrinsic stuff, I think there'd be a lot less narratives period, 90% less narrative around Tesla.”
28 / evaluation
“On the one hand, you think naively, they have so much fewer resources, but I think in many ways it's precisely because of that resource constraints and having to build this profitable business that they figured out how to disrupt the industry, and accomplished so much.”
29 / evaluation
“Again, really until recording this episode now, I'd obviously thought SpaceX and Tesla had very different situations but I think the Elon randomness factor in SpaceX is just so much less than in Tesla probably, (1) because he has Gwynne, but then also (2) because Tesla (I think) is in a very good place now, but six months ago, Tesla was not in a very good place and SpaceX is.”
30 / evaluation
“Classic Elon. I think probably for most people here too. We showed people we can do it.”
31 / evaluation
“Elon is absolutely not an eccentric billionaire who now decided to get into space because there's nothing else to do.”
32 / recommendation
“Mine is, I think there's some chance that this may have already been a carve-out because I've recommended this so many times to different people, but it’s a five-year-old talk by Michael Mauboussin.”
33 / evaluation
“The super interesting thing, Ben, as we're texting about this, all told over the life of SpaceX, I think Elon has only put in about $100 million into the company versus Bezos' Blue Origin puts in $1 billion a year and many other people that have entered into the space industry just became money pets.”
34 / evaluation
“They do have a network of suppliers. I think the number is 3000 suppliers and 1100 supply them products every week.”
35 / evaluation
“It'd be impossibly hard. It would take so much more capital, it would change your priorities, and what SpaceX really has done here, I don't think I realized this.”