Looking to SpaceX's 2026 IPO

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00:00It was a great conversation. NASA had 180 days starting just a few days ago to prepare a plan

00:05for this responsive national security space architecture. Ed, will they get there? I mean,

00:10will they have this plan in a couple of months? Yeah, I mean, Administrator Eisenman's path to

00:16the White House wasn't straightforward, right? He was nominated earlier in the year, then the

00:20president pulled it and then the president had a change of heart and eventually he was confirmed.

00:24But the reason that the private sector in particular backs him is he's highly competent.

00:31You know, he's a successful entrepreneur. He is himself an astronaut. He's ambitious and wants

00:36to get things done. The main tension in the interview you just played is that the priority

00:41of this administration and therefore NASA and this country is principally first the moon. Right now,

00:47the leading commercial player in space is SpaceX. And as you guys know, Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX,

00:52has much broader goals to get humankind to Mars. And it was always going to be where did Mr.

00:59Isaacman focus first? And now he has a lot of support, bipartisan support across the aisle

01:05and a strong staff, competent staff of people at NASA that think he'll get it done. Whether he does,

01:11we'll have to see, Bonnie. Yeah. I mean, how important is Trump's support of NASA in terms of

01:17the U.S. being a leader in space exploration and innovation?

01:22Yeah. I mean, this was why I posed that question about the relevance of NASA, right? At the end of

01:27the day, NASA has a budget and it delegates contracts to various private sector names. How can it be

01:34anything more than that? The president, you know, in choosing someone like Jared Eisenman, he's of a

01:40different character mold, skill set to prior NASA administrators. He's not a political animal,

01:46really, based on his career. People see that as the president having strong support for America's

01:53leadership in space from a national security standpoint. And there is a great fixation with

01:58the moon, right? The great tagline that Isaacman has at the moment is we're going to build a base

02:03on the moon, an American base on the moon and go from there. Yeah. I mean, we all know that

02:09contracts have been awarded to SpaceX and Blue Origin, Ed, but what other companies are out there

02:14that would be bidding for these kinds of contracts or smaller contracts from NASA?

02:18Yeah. I think that the main thing to completely reiterate is that the reason that the contracts

02:25get awarded such as they do is on competitive grounds anyway. And when the later part of that

02:32interview that just played, I made the point that when Transport Secretary Duffy was in an interim

02:39basis leading NASA, he almost opened up the field again. Existing contracts said, let's get some of

02:44these smaller players involved. Isaacman's response to that, and to answer your question, was all of the

02:50parties, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and any other smaller players that might come along, go into it knowing

02:55that only those that can deliver will win the contract. The main thing is right now, SpaceX completely

03:00dominates payload to orbit. Of course, you have the United Launch Alliance, which is a historic JV

03:05between Boeing and Northrop. Boeing has had many well-documented problems. In the startup space,

03:13Rocket Lab is also being name-checked by Isaacman, and they, at much smaller scale to SpaceX, but are

03:18continuing to ramp their launch cadence, becoming an option for America in strategic payload to orbit.

03:24Well, you talked about SpaceX's potential IPO. How do you even value a company like SpaceX,

03:31especially if you think about, given its mix of commercial launches, Starlink, also government

03:36contracts? Here's what I know. SpaceX is well underway with plans for an IPO, maybe June of 2026.

03:44They just closed their latest tender or secondary, where employees are allowed to sell shares to

03:49investors. The company doesn't raise any money, but you have to set a share price. That price was set

03:54at $421 a share. Valuation on that private transaction, $800 billion. My understanding is

04:01they want to raise $30 to $40 billion. You can do the math on how much of the company they would

04:06prepare to offer in an IPO. And the valuation is somewhere between $1 and $1.5 trillion. And it's

04:14this idea that in the future, there's a cap on revenue, at least, that you can get from launching

04:19stuff into space. Elon Musk always used to say that it was about $3 billion per annum, but actually,

04:25SpaceX managed to move beyond that. So that valuation, how do you value it? It's on Starlink,

04:30space-based internet, and the whole rationale behind this IPO, the whole point of raising all that money,

04:36SpaceX sees a market for data centers in space. They need the capital to buy the GPUs,

04:42where they're at on the design of a space-based data center, who knows? But that's the reporting

04:46we've got.

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