Jason: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's the All-In Podcast. David Sacks couldn't make it this week, but we have the trio. David Friedberg is here, your Sultan of Science, Jim Polatia. SpaceX filed confidentially to go public on April 1st, targeting a 1.75 trillion with a T valuation. When SpaceX goes public, if it's at that $1.75 trillion dollar valuation, so weird to say trillion dollar valuation for an IPO, they would be the eighth largest company in the world, right behind TSMC and Saudi Aramco. They're both worth $1.7. At the taping of this podcast, Tesla is number 10 with $1.37 trillion valuation. Hey, if you were to combine those two, as many people are speculating, will happen at some point and you can buy the stock ticker E, that would be a $3.1 trillion company, and that would make them the fourth largest company ahead of Microsoft. They're aiming to raise 75 billion, which would be the by far the biggest raise ever in an IPO. Expected to go out in June. I think they were trying to hit the 420 date because that would have been even more hilarious, but they're not going to be able to do that.

Jason: SpaceX recently acquired X.AI for 250 billion. That includes X and Twitter and the XAI large language model AI company. Starlink, generating between 50 and 80% of SpaceX's revenue. We'll have all those details shortly. Um and it'll be close to $20 billion a year according to reports. Launch of rockets is the other 40% of the business, 5 billion in 2024 according to reports. Total revenue 2025 15 to 16 billion with 8 billion in profit according to Reuters. So let's stop there and we're going to talk about all the other IPOs that could be coming. Chamath, I think people really want to know and you may have mentioned this on an earlier episode. What are the chances that Tesla after if this IPO goes well that Tesla and SpaceX could wind up being the same company? We saw they're collaborating on a fab.

Chamath: 100% is what you're putting it on. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Let me let me be clear. 99.999%.

Jason: Okay. What will that mean when if those two companies or when those two companies merge?

Chamath: One of the great things that happened in my career was there was a point where you know how like you grind at a level and then you know you just get exposed to things at a different level and then you grind for years and you get exposed to things at yet another level. In one of those steps, I was very fortunate to be introduced by Thomas Lefant actually to the head of Wachtell Lipton. This is a law firm and his name is Ed Herlihy and he said this is the most important well-known well-run powerful law firm in America. Then I looked at the transactions and they're just in the middle of everything. And now, you know, my lawyer, Raj Narayanan, who does everything for me, one of the senior partners at Wachtell, I can attest are incredible. And they said to me in the middle of all of this stuff when I was doing a bunch of deals, they said, "Just get ready to pay a tax." And I said, "What does that mean?" They said the way that the American capital markets are set up is both that you can be incredibly creative and do incredible things, but and we talked about this a little bit last week, there's a bunch of tort that allows folks to hang around the hoop and get paid no matter what. You see this in all IPOs. Shareholder lawsuits abound and they try to create a class out of it. And the reason they do that is that there's DNO insurance that then will pay out some number of millions of dollars. The attorneys take 40 or 50% and then these plaintiffs get a few bucks. You saw how egregious this tort manipulation was when this guy with 10 shares sued Elon's comp package at Tesla and won. And what was that really? That was the trial lawyers trying to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting a scene. Why am I bringing this up? If you take the the Raj and Ed example of this, this SpaceX IPO is going to set up a couple of things. The first is there's going to be the natural noise in the market and Elon will have to sort through all of the little ticky tacky things. But the most important positive thing that will happen from the IPO is a validated external mark-to-market valuation of SpaceX. and the market every day in real time gives you a valid mark-to-market assessment of the value of Tesla. And this allows you to put these two things together to minimize these losses. And I think that that's what Elon really needs. It'll make his life tremendously simpler from a governance perspective. It'll make the companies and this quibbling about his time a non-issue because again nobody talks about Zuck or Satya or Sundar or Jensen allocating time across various projects inside of Meta or Google or Microsoft or Nvidia. nor should they really make this claim from Elon because as you're seeing there's actually an enormous overlap and commonality to the various things that he is doing. He's building the robots but they're used inside of SpaceX. He's building a terrafab they're used inside of Tesla. He's building XAI they're used across both. So I think we need to do this. It'll minimize the shareholder noise because it'll give less room to somebody that says, "Hey, he set evaluation out of thin air."

Jason: Well, but dollars to donuts, these things are going to merge and it speaks to the singularity that's going on right now. You know, you had a car company, you had a space company. Okay, that was a pretty How do those two things overlap? And it's like AI data centers in space. Where do you get chips from? and then actually going to raw materials inside of one factory going out the other and having discussed it with Elon many times when he learned you know at Tesla or SpaceX about advanced materials informed different products at the different companies and now you just you'll have all of that in one place and then you think about the brain trust that he built at those two companies plus boring company plus Neuralink if they're all in there all this cross-disciplinary learning is going to compound and compound and compound. Elon knows more about factories than probably anybody like some people in China who have you know Foxconn knows a lot about factories you know so there are some people who know as much or or probably even a little bit more about some aspects of it but that's a true advantage of bringing those two teams together.

Jason: Friedberg my question for you very acutely with your NASA hat and uh you know your your background today is 20 years ago He he started trying to get to space with SpaceX and here we go. There's more rockets going off in a month now than there are days in the month for for the entire country and he's got rockets going up every 2 or 3 days. You can just basically hop on a SpaceX flight and get to space. Maybe you could just use your vision there to tell the audience what could things look like in another 20 years if SpaceX continues at this cadence or even, you know, goes faster because of AI.

Friedberg: Well, this week's a pretty important milestone for that point because we just launched Artemis 2 yesterday, which is man's returning to the moon. So, the United States shipped this rocket with four astronauts on board. They're going to do an orbit around the Earth, head to the moon, come back around, and come back to Earth in anticipation of landing on the moon in about 2 years. And getting to the moon, I think, is going to be very important. Not just because there's this important social milestone and race happening on right now with China, but I think the moon could end up being kind of the next industrial frontier for humanity. And the reason is if you can get to the moon, the moon has an extraordinary abundance of material that we can mine, process, and manufacture into goods. And ultimately the cost to ship those goods back to the earth is zero. It will cost less to move goods, manufactured goods, processed ore, uh, precious metals from the moon to a specific point on Earth. It will cost less to do that than to ship it using any other terrestrial conventional method, whether that's a boat, an airplane, or a railroad. And the reason is that on the moon, you can take advantage of the low gravity. It's about 1/6 the gravity and the complete lack of an atmosphere, meaning that it's frictionless to move material off of the moon and very low energy to move it off of the moon. You do not need to use a rocket propellant with high energy like we have to do to move things off of the Earth. In fact, the design for moving material off of the moon is to use what's called a mass driver, which is like a a train track, like a rail, like an electric rail. You kind of see these in, you know, high-speed trains that work on kind of magnetic levitation. And you could put a package on that rail and use electricity to accelerate that package to 100 g force, shoot it back to the Earth, or theoretically shoot it to Mars, and it will go to the exact point on the Earth you want it to go to, re-enters the atmosphere, and lands with a a simple parachute where you want it to go. So we could run continuous mining, continuous manufacturing processes on the moon at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to do it here on Earth. The biggest limiting factor getting people to the moon. And that is largely solved or will be solved in the next few years by robotics.

Friedberg: So I think that there's this pretty profound intersection with what's going on in robotics with this moment for space industrialization and moving to the moon. So, you know, Tesla, I think 20 years from now is actually a more interesting story, whether they're the same independent company or the same company. I think we're going to look back one day and have this kind of laughing observation that Tesla started out as an electric car company. 100% ended up becoming an autonomous car company. And the autonomous competency is what led to the robotics revolution. and the robotics revolution. Even if the socialists ban robotics on Earth and tell us no robots allowed, they're taking all the jobs, you could ship all those robots to the moon and they could get to work and create an entirely new manufacturing frontier for our civilization, for humanity. That frontier can manufacture precious metals and other goods and ship them back. You could manufacture semiconductors on the moon. All that's missing is the robots. So moving the robots to the moon or setting up the materials for robots to build themselves on the moon is kind of the first phase of this transition, you know, asking about 20 years from now. And then the next phase is building this all out. So look, I mean, I think that this may not be and it certainly won't be limited to just SpaceX. But SpaceX is demonstrating its capacity at being effectively the railroads. You know, what the railroads were to the west and to the frontier in the west, you know, in the last generation. SpaceX will be to the moon and ultimately to Mars. And there's going to be an extraordinary abundance of production that's going to come out of the moon. The moon has everything by the way and I'll say one more thing about SpaceX. SpaceX has also created and this is going to be a big part of the valuation analysis that many are doing. They've created a backup to the internet. You know the internet is fundamentally limited by all of the nodes on the network and the connectivity amongst all those nodes. And that connectivity is largely driven by copper and fiber optic cable. So in space with the number of satellites going up with Starlink and to actually deploy data centers that can output data on those nodes on that network, SpaceX has largely built a backup internet. And that backup internet can coincide with the Earth's internet, but it creates this extraterrestrial communication network that gives us theoretically the ability to think about, hey, if governments collapse, if there's civilizational upheaval, etc., etc., etc., this becomes, I think, a fundamentally kind of important technology infrastructure that's going to exist in parallel.

Jason: Yeah. And it can't be understated what lowering the cost per kilogram to get to space has done to entrepreneurs around the company. There's multiple entrepreneurs who are now doing asteroid mining or VA doing experimentation in space and I have a I've been doing some latestage stuff with my syndicate and one of the interesting companies we syndicated we we did zipline which is a great company but we also did this company called VAS vast space uh Jed is the founder he he created uh Ripple and uh and and some other crypto projects and he put a lot of his money hundreds of millions of dollars into this company vast case and they're designing a space station. How did they do it? Well, they just bought carriage on SpaceX rockets and they paid in advance. They have their slot and now they're doing this massive innovation to make modular space station components. And the thesis is, hey, what if Google or Amazon want to have a space station in space? You know, it's completely possible they may want that.

Chamath: Here's what I'll say. I think sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. There are all of these ways that so many people will end up with participation into SpaceX. I think we all owe Elon an enormous thanks. I think that this is going to unleash just an unbelievably large economy of things that we have no idea about. And when I see this thing, what it reminds me is that we have an very rudimentary capability in space. What does that mean? If you take, if you catch a ride on Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, basically it's dropping you off at 550 km. I think you have a different problem if you're trying to get to geo. But even if you get dropped off at 500 or 550, how do you get to your actual orbital plane? Right? So meaning if you think of Elon as like the big container ships that go from China to America once it gets to Long Beach, you need FedEx. There's an entire infrastructure there that's going to get all of this logistics built last mile. There's a huge garbage collection problem that's getting built up. We still haven't technically solved how to do garbage collection in space. There's nets, there's magnetic plates. All of that is getting fixed. Then there's going to be an explosion in actual power generation.

Friedberg: But on the moon, there's everything else. There's aluminum, there's silicon, there's palladium, there's platinum, there's gold, there's everything you possibly need. So, I think as we do the calculus on all of this, we'll end up realizing that the moon is probably the best frontier. I did the math on this. It's like 500 square meters of solar panels will let you run a 4 km mass driver to ship material back to the earth every 10 to 15 minutes. One ton of material every 10 to 15 minutes. And then for a heat shield for re-entry to the earth you just use moon rock. You only need about 15 cm of moon rock at the front of the package and then that'll burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere and the package, you know, kind of parachutes down and lands where you want it to land in your industrial shipyard or whatever.

Jason: Hey, 2026 could be an alltime record for IPOs. Looks like it will be Anthropic, OpenAI, Data Bricks. I mean these are all nine and possibly 10 figure IPOs in terms of the valuations. Long tale of other companies uh Stripe, Cerebrus, Canva, Discord, lots of people waiting. Here's your Poly Market. SpaceX 94% obviously that looks like it's uh we just talked about that for 20 minutes. Anthropic 41% and people were saying 70% in February, OpenAI 38%, data bricks 32%. What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs? We're talking about trillions of dollars of companies, Chamath. We go from a mag 7 to a MAG 17.

Chamath: I think that we have a bit of a risk problem. And I think this is why it makes so much sense for Elon to get out first. If you think about appetite as equivalent to like a person at a Thanksgiving dinner, when you first come in and you see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. And I think in a moment like that, you want to be the one that is consumed first. And I think the risk increases when you are at the tail end because the risk is that the diners will run out of space. I think the big tactical event risk is that we have a lot of these really important financial moments tied to this concept of AGI, ASI. If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none. If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are now raising hundreds of billions of dollars needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly. SpaceX is going to get out. They're going to do great and then maybe the next one does good to great, then the next one will do good and then the appetite runs out because you just can't absorb incrementally trillions of dollars of new demand.

Jason: Today is day 34 of the Iran War. Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night for a brisk 18 minutes. All right, the costs here are mounting. Uh war is a very serious business. 13 American service members have tragically died. Over 200 have been injured. On the other side of the ledger, 3,500 Iranians have died, including 1,600 civilians and over 200 children. And we now have 50,000 troops deployed to the Middle East. Chances of a ground invasion are increasing. War has cost $70 billion so far. Pentagon has asked Congress for another $200 billion. This isn't cheap.

Chamath: I think two things. And the president kind of alluded to one that I think is very important, which is if you are not energy independent, you are at risk. So if the Ukraine Russian conflict didn't show Europe, then this should show not just Europe, but the rest of the world. You need to be in control of your own energy infrastructure and energy independence. The United States has energy independence. It's an incredible situation. Germany is restarting nuclear. Italy just reintroduced effectively what's called investment tax credits. And then the second, the Middle Eastern states, specifically the UAE and Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait, they are our most important financing and banking partner in the future. And I think we need to see a conclusive end to this war because they need to be in a position to monetize these critical assets.

Friedberg: Fertilizer is made up of three elements: N for nitrogen, P for phosphorus, and K for potassium. The N in fertilizer is nitrogen. That's what really drives agricultural productivity. That nitrogen is primarily made where natural gas is produced and processed. About 35% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer goes through the straight of Hormuz. When the war started, China shut down exports of their nitrogen fertilizer. It reached over $700 a ton in the last two days. It's a real critical global food supply crisis yet again similar to Ukraine. The whole world has like less than 30 days of food of calories stored up. Another output of that gas production is helium. A third of the world's helium coming out of Qatar is not making it out. And so, we're now going to have a helium supply shock that's going to affect the world. Helium is a critical input to medical equipment (MRI), to manufacturing equipment.

Chamath: The scheduled eventuality of a quantum chip, a functional chip, is probably now in the next five to seven years if I had to guess. And I think that because that event horizon has moved in these next 5 to seven years for those that follow Bitcoin and care about it. My only advice on this topic is that the leaders of the Bitcoin ecosystem need to organize themselves and need to make sure that they have an answer to the question of is this stuff quantum resistant? Because if the answer is no, they are a very visible and obvious honeypot. A non-state actor's incentive will first be to drain the obvious honeypots and then tell everybody that it's broken so that then everything goes to sh, all the prices go to zero.

Friedberg: Yeah, there's a lot that's changed. The primary mechanism of modern encryption standards uh relates to factoring primes of an integer. There was an algorithm that was theorized by a guy named Peter Shore back in 1994 called Shore's algorithm. And then in 2023, there was another computer scientist named Oded Regev who published another paper that showed a faster different approach to Shor's algorithm. It was an improvement that basically reduced the number of quantum operations required to factor a large integer significantly—down from 28 million to 500,000.

Chamath: I have an incredible EA (executive assistant). My EAs averaged around 188 to 200k a year. And then Jason was like, "Try this thing called Athena." We have these really well-trained folks. They're like geniuses that work in the Philippines. It's 3,000 a month. His name is Lei. Lei's fabulous. He's a math grad, math and computer science in the Philippines. Have not looked back. Go Athena. Jason: R.J. is my guy, too. And he is also very technical. All right, everybody. We're here at the end of the show. Besties are gone. Love you boys. Bye now.