Quote · My First Million
The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet
Where this was said
a wonderful business at a silly price?
At 31:15 · chapter starts 28:06
Shaan walks through his analytical process: he fed SpaceX's S-1 data to Claude with instructions to think like Charlie Munger — circle of competence, incentives, moat, 'price is what you pay, value is what you get' [1] — Shaan Puri "It's a wonderful business at a silly price. It's a great business. You can admire it from afar. You didn't need to own it." 31:15 . The conclusion was swift: wonderful business, silly price. At 100x revenue, the traditional rational framework says you can admire SpaceX from afar without owning it. Sam counters that traditional frameworks don't apply to an Elon company, coining the phrase 'price-to-Elon ratio.' Shaan then lays out what you'd need to believe to be a bull: Starlink growing from $11B to $30–50B in revenue over 5 years, Starship achieving reliable operations, space data centers becoming a real business, and SpaceX being the sole low-cost provider of AI inference compute [2] — Shaan Puri "Building a data center in space is easier than getting local government approval to build one on land. Elon's thesis: solar-powered, space-…" 14:35 . He uses the Saudi Arabia analogy — Saudi Arabia got rich by owning the lowest-cost energy, and if compute is the new energy, the question is who owns the cheapest compute. At the moment, only SpaceX is positioned to answer that from orbit.
Shaan ran SpaceX through an AI prompt styled as Charlie Munger. The verdict: wonderful business, silly price. You can admire it from afar. You don't need to own it. But the bulls don't care about price-to-earnings — they care about the price-to-Elon ratio.
SpaceX reported $18 billion in revenue while losing $2.5 billion, and burned $8 billion in cash in the past year.
SpaceX has an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, while Cursor currently generates $3–4 billion in annual revenue.
After 20 years and enormous capital raises, Elon Musk still owns 42% of SpaceX and controls 85% of the voting power.
