Chamath Just Explained SpaceX’s $2 Trillion Future

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]In a recent All-Ind podcast, Chamat laid out the case for SpaceX being valued at $2 trillion. Chamat says there's a very specific strategy Elon follows and it creates a flywheel that is hard to beat.

[00:00:10]Finally, okay, let's talk SpaceX. And Chamat from All-In podcast was interviewed and he talks about a very specific flywheel that he believes Elon follows as his strategy. It's very interesting.

[00:00:24]>> If I'm asking myself, how do I underwrite SpaceX at 2 trillion? Here's the basic math that I would do. Last year it did 1819 billion. It'll probably do 25 to 30 this year. Okay. So, I'm buying this thing at a fairly costly premium, right? So, what am I buying?

[00:00:43]I'm buying probably the most important internet infrastructure project that's happened since the internet itself.

[00:00:49]That's going to scale to hundreds of millions of users. And the reason that's going to scale to hundreds of millions of users is it's just very useful and it's just going to become cheaper and cheaper. So, that's number one. I'm buying a delivery infrastructure I think over time GDP plus 10 GDP plus 15 kind of a grower. So good business valuable business but it's the underlying platform that allows everything else to happen. And then I'm buying an AI business which will be at the top level the apps but at the bottom layer all the compute capability. So I suspect what happens is next year it's probably 40 45 billion and then the year after that it probably doubles again. So then I'm buying it at 20 times revenue. And you would say, why can you buy a company like this on revenue versus earnings and cash flow? And I think the reason is because what the revenue does is it gives him the operating leverage to go and invest in all of these other businesses that ultimately consolidate his differentiation and his competitive mode because what he creates is a capital moat that then accelerates a technology mode that then accelerates an execution and a learning mode. And that flywheel when it starts to spin very quickly and you would say, "Hey, hold on a second. It's probably spinning quickly now." I would say we're at the beginning of the beginning. He still has all these disparate assets. I still don't like the fact that Tesla's over here. And as I've told you, that will get merged in. And now you have this incredible corpus of physical capability, movement of all kinds, X, Y, and Z, right? That thing will look very cheap, I think, in a few years. And he has this one thing that nobody else, if you look at the big CEOs, who steps on stage where you're always curious, okay, what has he got up his sleeve? The Steve Jobs. Oh, and one more thing. He's the guy. Whether you like him or you hate him, he's the guy. And there's a premium that is welld deserved that comes with that.

[00:02:39]>> Wow. There's so much here. You and I, God, I could spend hours talking to you about this. This is exciting.

[00:02:46]Curious what you >> It's hard to really state it. It's hard to really state it much better than what Chamat stated. He thinks of these industries in multi-deade long horizons. He's not thinking of what I need to do this year. And actually, this is one of the reasons I think Elon frustrates us on these earnings calls because the last thing he's doing is thinking in 90-day increments. The thing he's doing the most is thinking in multi-year increments. And I know that frustrates people, but if you rewind the clock back 5 years and all the investments that have been made in infrastructure, in the compute, in what now you have Teslas that in large scale now we're over a million Teslas where people are paying a subscription for the car to drive itself to use Tesla AI services. So now we have a million of about a denominator of about four or five million vehicles that are capable of receiving this download using it and that's just going to continue to grow.

[00:03:51]And Chimat talked about the Starlink example and that's going to grow as costs come down. But it's also there's also this thing of it provides internet in places that you physically can't get internet today and that's a huge portion of the global population. So as that cost, it's going to grow massively. So the flywheel is real and you've got to be a visionary that thinks in multi kind of again a multi-year, multi-deade horizon. I think that's one of the reasons Elon creates these master plans so people can see how he's thinking and connect all these things together. So when you step back and you watch these fintech shows on CNBC or Fox or Yahoo or Bloomberg and they're like, "Oh, Tesla did this in this quarter." That's fine.

[00:04:38]We don't know what he's doing. BYD is selling more cars. But if you really step back and you look at the vision, investors are thinking a different way than what these fintech shows are preaching and investors are thinking.

[00:04:53]Investors are looking at the master plan. and they're looking at what this guy does over a multi-year horizon.

[00:04:58]They're not necessarily looking at every 90-day increment of earnings. They are.

[00:05:03]There's no question about it. We do a show on earnings every 90-day Herbert.

[00:05:07]So, people are definitely looking at, but the investors, they're waiting, they're m the waiting, when I say waiting, not waiting like waiting in line, but the waiting of where they're putting their dollars is actually more of on the long-term plan than on the short-term horizon. And in all of his companies, that's what he's creating.

[00:05:26]And now it's getting back to the point where if you step back further and further, all of a sudden the lines between these companies are beginning to blur. And it's why are they different companies? And I think that's what we're about to step into.

[00:05:40]>> Yeah. His strategy is so big in scale. I don't know if anybody's ever done it.

[00:05:46]Maybe you could say that the Rockefellers of the world did this as well because that's what they did, right? They they they saw when it was time for Rockefeller, everybody was building these oil and they were trying to capture the oil. But he saw transportation and no one else had. He bought all the railroads and then it distribution and then when he controlled distribution all the other oil companies had to buckle and sell to him then he had the hu and then he was able to lower cost like just control the industry. That seems to be Elon's strategy as well here. So revenue it gives him the operating leverage to go and invest in all these other businesses that ultimately consolidate his differentiator and his competitive mode that he what because what he creates is a capital mode. So this money that build that accelerates a technology mode that then accelerates an execution and learning mode and then you just can't beat that flywheel. Can you speak a little bit to this flywheel because I think it's just so brilliant.

[00:06:43]>> I mean it really goes back to him thinking and executing on a multi-year horizon and the connect the connectivity the the connective tissue between these things uh they're linked if you think about the supercharging network and all the upfront investment that was involved in building that over so many years or a US battery supply chain and building that yes it started with Panasonic cells but over time the plan was okay we're going to start with we're going to start with level zero of the as we're going to do the pack assembly here and then we're going to after pack assembly now we're going to start doing cell assembly here and then now we're going to develop our own batteries with 4680s this is going to be with with so much electrification of things and now we're seeing huge battery installations now for AI data centers we're going to talk about in a bit that he is thinking again on a multi-deade horizon and He's figuring out what the bottleneck is well in advance of other people and he's making the big decision when the big decision needs to be made. And sometimes the timing doesn't always land perfectly and sometimes what's obvious doesn't always happen.

[00:08:05]like it I think it was obvious to him that more cars in the US should be electrified in 2026 than there are today. They're 5 to 7% of sales now are electric vehicles. He probably thought that was going to be quadruple that or more and if not higher. So there are some things I think that are catching him offguard.

[00:08:28]But if you look back and you step back, you double click out one more say okay if it's not the US then it's globally.

[00:08:34]globally, it's been the right it's been the right decision. So, the other thing I think people should keep in mind is when you're taking this many big swings at some of the biggest things in the world, things that haven't been invented, things that need to play out over a decade horizon or more, you're going to have some misses. And the misses will involve either complete miss or it's going to be a timing thing. But you have to step back and you have to think, wow, is he really nailed a lot of these with whether it's the making EVs cool and then now making them high volume and then the Chinese copying it now what he's doing with Starlink and internet connectivity and what he's doing with SpaceX and now all these companies that are trying to copy and do rapid deployments he's history will look back very kindly on what he's doing today and our current political landscape and he's made himself very political as well, but it'll be to still be this reality distortion field around it. And and on the one hand, there'll be like they'll over accentuate things that maybe shouldn't be over accentuated, but mostly there's this distortion created around him of things not going well.

[00:09:49]Like the way these rocket launches are described, even though SpaceX has a plan for that launch, it gets described in a certain way by the anyway. So, but the further you step back, just like the comment I made about his companies and the lines being blurred, the further you step back, you'll realize that maybe the greatest innovator and business person of all time.

[00:10:08]>> Yeah. One of the questions I wish he would answer for me is like sometimes this idea that he would you would have this he would say something like here's the product and business we're in, but then there's an actual real strategy behind it and at current at the right timing it shows itself. and and I always wanted to know did he plan that ahead of time or was he lucky and probably a little bit of both but he most often he planned it ahead of time. Starlink V3 massive capacity leap with this success of SpaceX 12th launch the Starship now they can launch these V3s and these V3 Starlinks is huge jump 10.7 times jump in capability than the old V2s more bandwidth more capacity more user serve more global connectivity so this is going to be a big jump and this is the V3 look much larger and better download capacity and not just 96 G gigabytes but a,000 gigabyte 10 times more. And then Elon said this, there will also ultimately be over 100,000 V3s, V4s, V5 satellites for Starlink broadband and direct to cell phone connectivity. If growth continues, Starlink will one day carry the majority of internet traffic. At that point, it is the internet and everything else just connects to Starlink. Look at that prediction he's making. It is going to replace the internet that we have now.

[00:11:37]>> Yeah. This is gets to the cost of connectivity and the capability of connectivity today. If you want to go from 500 megabits to 1 gigabit to your home, somebody's got to drill fiber into the ground and then route it to some location. in some location then needs to be controlled and then there's central base stations need to be built and that needs to connect to somewhere else and then there's all this money and people involved and here this is everything's very centralized satellite production these things go up into orbit and then everything else from there is you just going and buying a terminal to connect to it so I've talked about this on axe for a number of years. I don't know why the cellular operators aren't a little bit more concerned. I know they're trying to partner with Elon on some of this as well, but this is this could be very not only internet traffic, but all of communication traffic could be could be flowing here through this here at some point too. So, [clears throat] the performance continues to improve, the latency continues to improve, the bandwidth, the down link speed. I th the this is this is turning into from a oh this is a nice backup thing to have in case your internet goes out or if you're going on a trip and you want this connectivity it's a great thing now it could turn into this why isn't this the primary thing so it's remarkable >> I think he almost knew way ahead of time 10 20 years ago that one day there will be robots everywhere there will be autonomous transportation everywhere he wants to have connectivity everywhere then of course he looks at it and says Okay. The first principles is it has to go from the satellite down >> in order to get the cost down. You need to have a reusable rocket [laughter] and you have to have all this. And all these people that came out, all these these people that know absolutely nothing, by the way, that came out and said, "Oh, Spacebased data centers is another Elon thing that and all of a sudden the real the real operators, the real the people that are actually going to do it or fund it, Sundar Pachchai, Jeff Bezos, multiple people are like, "No, this is going to happen. It's just a matter of schedule." Elon's doing an Elon [clears throat] time schedule where he's trying to get there as quickly as possible and motivate his teams and but we're like this is going to happen. So now all this other ch like carrot Swisser like all these people just I don't get it. It's just let me like these people that aren't in the arena.

[00:14:14]It's just a it's a fascinating thing of I don't know just wanting to cr you can be critical. There's a number of things to be critical of, but it's just interesting to as you're a watcher of this, whether you're an investor or you just like watching tech, watch what the real people do, the real capital allocators do and what they say versus people that are more emotional that are just on the outskirts. I I was surprised at Sam Alman's him questioning this, but at the same time he's actually the word is he's got a number of people that are actually looking into this and >> of course.

[00:14:50]>> Yeah.

[00:14:50]>> Yeah. All right. So Elon knew and he's communicated one of the issues with AI data centers is energy will be one of the major bottlenecks and