Early SpaceX investor: If you look at the company’s history, they have always delivered

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]For more on SpaceX's future as a publicly traded company, let's bring in Justin Fishner-Wolfson, founding managing partner of 137 Ventures. He first invested in SpaceX back in 2008.

[00:00:12]Justin, thanks for taking the time. I know that you see this as a high-conviction investment for us. I can imagine you feel that way having invested in 2008 and reading about the potential valuation in an IPO.

[00:00:25]What makes this such a high-conviction investment for you? It believe you think it's kind of more than just rockets.

[00:00:34]Sure. Well, thank you for having me here.

[00:00:38]I mean, we've been excited about this business for almost 20 years now. And as you mentioned, we think this is a lot more than just a launch business. They even leveraged that launch business to build Starlink, which is the largest constellation anyone's ever operated in space before. They've got almost 10,000 satellites, which is a crazy number really when you think about it.

[00:01:00]And they've done that to provide internet service. They're doing that to provide direct service to cell phones. And then now they're talking about, you know, building data centers and what that can do to support, you know, AI. And And we're really excited about what this company can build over the next 20 years cuz really it's as exciting as the last 20 have been. I think when you look at the the rate that they're they're building products and businesses, it's accelerating. So, in many respects, the next 20 years should be even crazier than the last 20.

[00:01:31]Why do you think they're going public now? I I ask this because when the S-1 went public, there was obviously a very large TAM that they included. I think it was $28.5 trillion for their potential actionable market that they are looking to tap. But the historical financials themselves didn't seem to support, at least using kind of traditional methods, upwards of a $1.25 trillion dollar valuation, which is what they recently announced in the combination with XAI.

[00:02:02]And I'm just curious how you fill in the gap there for investors.

[00:02:07]I think we're going to find out what the company prices at, you know, really the day before the IPO cuz that's how these things work.

[00:02:14]But when I was looking through the S-1, I mean, I think it was pretty startling just to see that the deal with that profit created a business that didn't exist for them in the last, you know, a couple of months and it was now a 15 billion dollar a year revenue line. So, you know, when I say that they're moving really quickly, I think that's an example of how they created an entire new business line.

[00:02:38]And and that's incredible impact to the business.

[00:02:41]So, renting out computing capacity is the exciting part of the business to you at this point?

[00:02:46]I mean, I think there are lots of exciting parts of the business. Starlink is a huge business and I think there's a lot of opportunities for them to continue to expand that globally.

[00:02:55]Um, I think they already operate in like 160 countries. So, it's having an incredible impact both on the consumer side and on the, you know, on the government side. So, you know, right now I think Starlink is the major driver of the business, but there are incredible opportunities that they can build on top of that.

[00:03:12]How do you expect the the IPO itself to go? Um, I ask this because we've never seen an IPO of this size before. Presumably, it will be the largest ever IPO worldwide, especially the largest ever listed in the UI in the US. Um, you know, how how do you see this all playing out?

[00:03:32]I mean, I've got to agree with you there. I think they've executed on this incredibly well. There are a lot of people who touch this process, whether or not it's the bankers or, you know, all like there's a few firms that kind of like handle stock transfers.

[00:03:43]I imagine this is going to be, you know, hard on everyone in the process and a lot of work, but I would imagine it will go relatively smoothly.

[00:03:51]And I how are you thinking about the time frame and I guess some of the challenges toward realizing this idea of having, you know, data centers in space.

[00:04:01]Obviously, we're not talking about putting buildings in space, but you know, having that type of you know, AI-linked computing capacity in space in these satellites. You know, we had Jeff Bezos saying maybe two to three years is a little bit ambitious, but in terms of the engineering challenges and all the rest, how do you see that playing out?

[00:04:20]I mean, I do think these are ambitious goals, right? That is that is really what this company is built to tackle.

[00:04:26]Whether or not they deliver it in two to three years almost isn't the point. If you look at the history of the business, they've always delivered, right? No one thought that they could build a reusable rocket with Falcon 9.

[00:04:38]And then I remember there were people, you know, publicly saying two weeks before they landed the booster that it would never work. And then they landed the booster two weeks later. So, this this company is incredibly adept at tackling those sorts of technical challenges. And if you think about it, they're already operating the largest constellation of satellites. Those satellites have communications, that's primarily their purpose, but they obviously have some compute on them. And when you put data centers in space, you solve a bunch of, you know, very challenging problems, right? You have access to infinite power. You have cooling in space. They've already built a communications network with with Starlink to get the data back to Earth.

[00:05:18]And when you really think about it, it's a lot easier to transmit bits than it is to transmit power. And so, I think there's a lot of advantages to doing that, but as you point out, it's a hard problem. This is a company that's really good at solving really hard problems.