Twitter ad revenue decline
X's (formerly Twitter) advertising revenue is now $1.8 billion — roughly half of the $3.5B it generated before Elon bought it.
Snapshot · My First Million
The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet
Explore episode
Jun 12, 2026
Where this was said
Starship
At 24:41 · chapter starts 17:39
Shaan introduces the concept that anchors SpaceX's entire long-term valuation case: space-based data centers [1] — 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 . The premise is simultaneously wild and logical — solar-powered satellites have a free energy source, space's natural radiative cooling eliminates expensive cooling infrastructure, and land-based data center construction is bottlenecked not by engineering or capital but by regulatory red tape. Shaan illustrates this with dark humor: it's easier to solve the engineering problem of building a data center in orbit than to get Alameda County to approve one in your backyard. Sam riffs on the historical parallel to the American Revolution — when land gets too regulated, expansion into the frontier follows. The central Elon thesis, Shaan explains, is that the entire future economy is a pipeline from solar photons to AI tokens, and whoever can deliver those tokens at the lowest cost will be the energy empire of the next century. If Starship works and space-based compute proves viable, SpaceX is positioned to be the sole provider of the infrastructure the world will run on.
Starship: The Most Consequential Rocket Never Proven to Work
Starship can carry 7–10 times more payload than Falcon 9. Elon wants to launch it like an airport — multiple times per day. The problem: it doesn't reliably work yet. Betting against him has historically been the most expensive mistake in technology.
Twitter/X: The Party Guest Nobody Invited
X's ad business is $1.8 billion — half of what Twitter earned when Elon bought it. Grok has 100 million users to ChatGPT's 1 billion. But the failure funded Colossus, the world's largest GPU cluster, now rented to Google and Anthropic for $1B/month each.
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