The Ben Shapiro Show - Why The Left Is Panicking Over SpaceX

00:00:00.000 So, Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO is today.

00:00:03.000 It will be the biggest IPO in history.

00:00:04.000 And that's not a bad thing.

00:00:05.000 It's an amazing thing.

00:00:06.000 But you're going to hear from people like Jimmy Kimmel that it's immoral, terrible, even evil.

00:00:10.000 Why?

00:00:11.000 Well, because all of us human beings, we have within us a vicious quality envy.

00:00:15.000 It's a universal human emotion.

00:00:17.000 And envy is bad.

00:00:19.000 It's wrong.

00:00:19.000 God condemns it.

00:00:20.000 I will explain why the SpaceX IPO is awesome, why Elon Musk deserves his wealth, and why we're all better off when we have a system where a guy can be a trillionaire.

00:00:28.000 Let's dive in.

00:00:36.000 So, the SpaceX IPO is today.

00:00:39.000 It has been long awaited.

00:00:40.000 It will be the biggest IPO in all of human history.

00:00:43.000 Again, the pre market valuation is likely to be in the $1.77 trillion range, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:00:49.000 It's kind of an unusual IPO, initial public offering.

00:00:52.000 This is where a private company goes to the public markets to raise money, and then it uses that money in order to run the business, in order to spend.

00:00:59.000 That is what an IPO is for.

00:01:00.000 It's not just to make the founders rich, although the founders now have stock that is liquid, meaning that they could sell their stock theoretically.

00:01:07.000 Elon obviously is not in a position.

00:01:09.000 To be able to sell tons of stock, because if a founder of a major company sells a lot of his stock, that is a signal to the market he has no faith in his own company, and then the stock dies.

00:01:17.000 It's a problem for every founder from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk.

00:01:21.000 But what's unusual about this particular IPO is that it is actually widely available to retail investors, like the man on the street.

00:01:27.000 So typically, in any IPO, a certain percentage of the stock of the company is put on the public markets, and a huge percentage of that stock is already pre bought by institutional investors.

00:01:39.000 All the big companies that you hear about, the Goldman Sachs of the world, or institutional investors like sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East or whatever, usually only about 5% to 7% of an initial public offering is available to retail investors like the guy using Robinhood or something.

00:01:53.000 Today, it's 20%.

00:01:55.000 So that actually is pretty high.

00:01:56.000 Okay, but let's put aside the actual economics for a second of SpaceX.

00:02:00.000 We'll get to that in a moment.

00:02:02.000 The thing that really matters and the thing that I think could destroy the country, honestly, and the global economy is the thing that has always been a threat to humanity, and that is envy.

00:02:12.000 So, Jimmy Kimmel is just a beautiful example of this.

00:02:15.000 Jimmy Kimmel is a multimillionaire who works for billionaires who is upset about a trillionaire.

00:02:21.000 That is who Jimmy Kimmel is.

00:02:22.000 He's an obnoxious, non funny, woke pope of late night TV who's probably worth somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars.

00:02:30.000 And he is paid by people who are worth tens of billions of dollars to complain about a guy who built a company that will be worth 1.77 trillion dollars.

00:02:38.000 So, last night, he started railing about how Elon Musk is not grateful enough to Jimmy Kimmel or what?

00:02:47.000 Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner.

00:02:54.000 And he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire.

00:02:59.000 Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. 0.98

00:03:02.000 You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who's been stealing from us to me. 0.99

00:03:14.000 Now, this is just obnoxious trash. 0.99

00:03:15.000 It is not true. 0.98

00:03:16.000 Elon did not, in fact, grow up wealthy.

00:03:18.000 His dad was.

00:03:19.000 Kind of a mess.

00:03:20.000 And as far as the idea that Elon came to the United States wealthy, that is eminently untrue.

00:03:24.000 He was living in some of the worst apartments in America when he came here.

00:03:29.000 And then he didn't get a job at Netscape.

00:03:32.000 And then he ended up becoming this unbelievable success.

00:03:35.000 The notion that he is stealing from Americans by building several of the most successful companies in American history is totally crazy.

00:03:43.000 What has Jimmy Kimmel built ever?

00:03:46.000 But here's what's really going on.

00:03:48.000 Jimmy Kimmel doesn't like that Elon is really, really, really rich.

00:03:51.000 Rich.

00:03:51.000 That's what this is.

00:03:52.000 He does not like that Elon is rich.

00:03:53.000 That's all.

00:04:00.000 It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that.

00:04:02.000 I mean, we know a trillion is a number, but it's so large.

00:04:05.000 The same way we can't fathom it.

00:04:07.000 The same way we know Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid, right?

00:04:13.000 So let me try to illustrate it.

00:04:17.000 If you tried to count out loud to a trillion, you would be counting until the year 33,736.

00:04:25.000 A trillion dollars is 10 billion hundred dollar bills.

00:04:28.000 If you stack them up, the pile would be almost 700 miles high.

00:04:32.000 As tall as 123 Mount Everest.

00:04:34.000 With that kind of money, Elon could buy every NFL team, all of them, and he'd still have $773 billion left, which he could use to buy all 30 Major League Baseball teams, every NBA team, every Wendy's, every Target store, the Beatles' entire music catalog.

00:04:49.000 He could buy Nike, Macy's, and every Hyundai Elantra ever produced, and would still have $260 billion, $50 million left over.

00:05:00.000 Okay, so I'm just wondering Jimmy Kimmel, again, is worth probably $100 million.

00:05:06.000 If you counted to 100 million, it would take you somewhere between 20 and 30 years.

00:05:10.000 If you counted one number per second and stayed up all night, why the envy?

00:05:15.000 Why the rage?

00:05:16.000 Well, certainly there's something political to it.

00:05:18.000 I mean, Jimmy Kimmel was much nicer to Elon Musk back in, say, 2013 when he was having him on his show to talk about SpaceX.

00:05:29.000 You know, I want to go over some of your many accomplishments just for the audience in case they're not familiar with them.

00:05:34.000 In 1983, at age 12, You designed a video game and sold it to a computer magazine for $500.

00:05:40.000 1995.

00:05:41.000 Big money for a 12 year old.

00:05:42.000 You quit the graduates program at Stanford to found Zip2 in 1999.

00:05:47.000 You sold Zip2 to Compaq for $309 million.

00:05:50.000 You co founded PayPal in 2000.

00:05:55.000 You sold PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars.

00:05:59.000 You founded SpaceX.

00:06:01.000 You co founded Tesla Motors.

00:06:02.000 You helped create Solar City, the solar power company.

00:06:06.000 Well, it's great to meet you.

00:06:07.000 If you want to watch the launch, Why wouldn't you want to watch the launch of some SpaceX rockets on March 1st?

00:06:13.000 Go to spacex.com and take a look.

00:06:15.000 Elon Musk, everybody.

00:06:16.000 Thanks for being here.

00:06:18.000 And there's the audience cheering Elon Musk back in 2013, right about the time of the launch of SpaceX.

00:06:25.000 I mean, Barack Obama toured SpaceX with Elon in 2010, the Democratic president of the United States, and marveled at it.

00:06:34.000 And I think it's fair to say that this is the most advanced rocket in the world.

00:06:38.000 It's the only rocket that's designed in the 21st century.

00:06:42.000 And, uh, The patches you see there are exactly bonded on special thermal protection because the real big breakthrough that's needed.

00:06:50.000 Obama is the president standing alongside Elon as Elon explains his rockets.

00:06:53.000 And again, he's talking about reusable rockets.

00:06:59.000 This is back in 2010.

00:07:00.000 That was not achieved for full over a decade.

00:07:04.000 And it took enormous risk.

00:07:05.000 And Obama's just marveling at it.

00:07:07.000 And now we've gone from that, that inspirational view, to giant inflatable Elon Musk's in Times Square.

00:07:15.000 With no shirt on, all ugly and everything, saying SpaceX grok makes AI child, stop SpaceX child nudes, et cetera.

00:07:25.000 So, what's really going on here?

00:07:27.000 The answer is very simple.

00:07:28.000 The answer is just envy.

00:07:29.000 That's all.

00:07:31.000 Coming up, we'll get deeper into the question of envy why so many people don't understand basic economics in the United States, why Elon deserves the pay.

00:07:39.000 I mean, it is amazing.

00:07:40.000 The story of SpaceX is incredible because America is awesome.

00:07:44.000 And it's because America is awesome that we are very good at ceremonies like flyovers, parades, speeches.

00:07:49.000 We put giant flags on everything, and that's great.

00:07:51.000 But honoring veterans isn't just something that we should do for a few minutes on a holiday.

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00:08:56.000 So, there is a very interesting study from a journal called Frontiers in Psychology in 2021 talking about what are called the two faces of envy.

00:09:06.000 And the authors write Envy is like a wildfire destroying people.

00:09:10.000 We feel envy for a classmate who gets a good grade or a neighbor who buys an expensive car.

00:09:14.000 This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors like small stones in the heart, like ruining our peace of mind.

00:09:20.000 Scholars have defined envy as the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, and yearns for.

00:09:27.000 Envy is a painful emotion.

00:09:30.000 There are two kinds of envy.

00:09:31.000 One is useful and one is quite terrible.

00:09:33.000 One is benign envy.

00:09:34.000 In benign envy, the envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied.

00:09:39.000 Therefore, envy can increase personal effort, drive behavior to achieve the desired object, and to turn attention to the means of achieving it.

00:09:46.000 And then there is another type, malicious envy.

00:09:48.000 This is where the envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person's advantages.

00:09:55.000 Envy can increase Schadenfreude, behavior that leads to hostility and resentment, and can shift attention to the person being envied.

00:10:02.000 By the way, it also leads to violence.

00:10:04.000 There is literally a full commandment among the ten that is directly about envy.

00:10:11.000 The tenth commandment, the final one from Exodus 20 17.

00:10:11.000 You may remember it.

00:10:15.000 You shall not cover your neighbor's house, your neighbor's wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.

00:10:23.000 God takes time out to say envy is bad.

00:10:25.000 By the way, this is the only commandment that has to do with your feelings.

00:10:28.000 All the rest are behaviorally driven.

00:10:30.000 Don't steal, don't kill, don't blaspheme, respect your parents, and all of the rest.

00:10:30.000 Right?

00:10:34.000 This one is emotional.

00:10:35.000 Why did God reserve one commandment for the emotion of envy?

00:10:39.000 Because it turns out the entire history of humanity relies on whether we can actually master our envy.

00:10:45.000 This is the story of Cain and Abel.

00:10:47.000 The story of Cain and Abel is about envy.

00:10:50.000 Cain decides you sacrifice to God.

00:10:53.000 And Abel follows suit.

00:10:54.000 And God, for a reason we don't understand from the Bible, accepts Abel's sacrifice, but not Cain's.

00:10:59.000 And then God says the moral of the story in Genesis 4-7.

00:11:03.000 He says, surely if you do right, you will be uplifted.

00:11:05.000 But if you do not do right, sin crouches at your door.

00:11:08.000 Its urge is toward you, but you can be its master.

00:11:11.000 What is that sin?

00:11:12.000 It's envy.

00:11:13.000 And what does Cain do?

00:11:14.000 Instead of going to Abel and saying, What did you do right and I did wrong?

00:11:17.000 How can I do better?

00:11:18.000 He kills Abel. 0.61

00:11:20.000 Envy is destructive.

00:11:22.000 It is terrible.

00:11:24.000 Now, what's interesting here is when we get envious, because it's not sort of a universal timing thing.

00:11:28.000 Envy is a universal human emotion.

00:11:30.000 We feel it all the time.

00:11:31.000 But it tends to kick in for anyone who's just above you on the wealth index.

00:11:35.000 So if you make a hundred grand, you may be envious of the guy who makes 200 grand.

00:11:39.000 If you're worth a hundred million dollars the way Jimmy Kimmel is, You may be envious of the guy making a trillion dollars, but it's not every person who makes more than you.

00:11:46.000 There is a particular envy for people who take risks because, in our heart of hearts, we think we could have done that too.

00:11:53.000 We look at Elon, we say, I could have founded a space company.

00:11:56.000 He thought of it, but sure, I could have thought of it.

00:11:58.000 I could have taken the risk.

00:12:00.000 It's something that's within my purview.

00:12:02.000 It's really, really interesting to watch New Yorkers who just voted for a Democratic socialist like Zoran Momdani, who rips on Ken Griffin all day long, rooting for the Knicks this season.

00:12:12.000 The Knicks are super rich, really, really, really rich.

00:12:15.000 Carl Anthony Towns made 53 million bucks this year.

00:12:18.000 OG made 40 million bucks.

00:12:20.000 Jalen Brunson makes 35 million bucks a year.

00:12:23.000 That is a lot of money.

00:12:25.000 But you're not seeing jealousy or outrage in the stadium.

00:12:27.000 People aren't showing up and yelling at them about how they need to redistribute their income and pay more taxes and how many school teachers are out of a job.

00:12:34.000 And do we need more government sponsored grocery stores from CAT paying more tax?

00:12:40.000 So why aren't people so envious of these guys?

00:12:41.000 Well, the truth is that everyone sort of recognizes that these guys have unique talent given by God.

00:12:47.000 You're not seven foot, you're not 270 pounds, and you can't shoot the three.

00:12:51.000 But when it's a smart person who doesn't have overt talent, sort of alien-like physical qualities.

00:12:57.000 Then we get pretty jealous.

00:12:59.000 Why didn't we get what he has?

00:13:00.000 Why don't we all get to be Elon Musk rich?

00:13:03.000 He's not that much better than we are.

00:13:05.000 But here is the thing.

00:13:06.000 The reason that Elon is super rich, and I know a lot of people who are as bright as Elon.

00:13:10.000 I know a lot of very high IQ.

00:13:11.000 Elon has a very high IQ.

00:13:13.000 I know a lot of very high IQ people.

00:13:14.000 He's much richer than any of them.

00:13:15.000 Why?

00:13:16.000 Well, because he took risks, huge risks, unprecedented risks.

00:13:22.000 And that is good because risk is what creates innovation.

00:13:25.000 If you don't have people risking, you don't get better stuff.

00:13:28.000 If you don't have people putting up their house for mortgage in order to sponsor and subsidize them building a company, the company does not get built.

00:13:35.000 If you don't have people willing to put their own money where their mouth is, their own time, their own effort, where their mouth is, you do not get new things.

00:13:44.000 And we need new things.

00:13:45.000 And not only that, we need a system that allows you to keep what you make.

00:13:49.000 Why?

00:13:49.000 Well, because here's the thing for every single Elon Musk in any industry, there are 10,000 dudes who thought of it, risked it, and failed.

00:13:58.000 And so, what is the only thing that will keep people risking it and trying to do the thing that actually builds?

00:14:05.000 The only thing that incentivizes that is the possibility of making a lot of money.

00:14:09.000 That is the only thing, the thing that generates people willing to take the risks that actually make the world a better place is a system that allows you to keep what you make, to keep what you kill.

00:14:23.000 That is why the system must be maintained.

00:14:27.000 Risk taking is risky.

00:14:29.000 Take, for example, Blue Origin.

00:14:30.000 Okay, so Blue Origin is another company run by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos.

00:14:36.000 Blue Origin is a competitor to SpaceX.

00:14:38.000 This is a risky business.

00:14:40.000 It was just a couple of weeks ago that we watched a Blue Origin rocket explode on the ground.

00:14:46.000 I mean, you know how much money and time and effort were lost in this one millisecond?

00:14:53.000 Billions of dollars.

00:14:54.000 Billions, not millions, billions.

00:14:55.000 I mean, this is what it looks like when you risk because sometimes you fail.

00:15:00.000 You know how many videos there are of Elon Musk's rockets blowing up on the launch pad?

00:15:05.000 We've watched videos on the show of his reusable rockets failing.

00:15:11.000 This stuff happens.

00:15:13.000 You have to take the risks.

00:15:15.000 I mean, here's a picture from 2006 at rocket debris from Falcon 1's first flight.

00:15:23.000 A much younger Elon Musk looking at what it looks like.

00:15:25.000 I mean, to go from that to a $1.77 trillion IPO is an amazing feat.

00:15:30.000 That's a great thing.

00:15:31.000 It's a great thing.

00:15:32.000 Look at that.

00:15:33.000 That's what failure looks like.

00:15:34.000 And what success looks like is the IPO today.

00:15:37.000 How do you incentivize a person?

00:15:40.000 To keep looking failure in the face over and over and over and again, you have to have an American system, a free market system that rewards risk taking, that punishes failure and rewards success.

00:15:51.000 That is what you require.

00:15:52.000 I mean, people forget that Elon Musk risked pretty much his entire early fortune on SpaceX and Tesla.

00:16:00.000 He got about $180 million when PayPal was sold.

00:16:03.000 He poured about $100 million of that $180 million into SpaceX and Tesla.

00:16:10.000 Now, again, over time, he ended up with a stake of approximately 42% in SpaceX.

00:16:17.000 The company was almost bankrupt in 2008.

00:16:20.000 By late 2008, After the first three Falcon 1 launches, and you saw that picture of him just crouching, looking at the debris, SpaceX was running out of money.

00:16:29.000 They were down to basically their final weeks of capital, and Elon scraped together personal loans against his own assets to make payroll to keep the company from shutting down.

00:16:38.000 This is what risk takers do.

00:16:41.000 Again, he's got personal loans to fund both SpaceX and Tesla personally to prevent them from folding before they were commercially viable.

00:16:49.000 This is risk taking, and it's awesome, and it should be rewarded.

00:16:52.000 If you want cool stuff, you have to reward risk taking, it is necessary.

00:16:56.000 It is good.

00:16:57.000 Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Musk, talks about the fact that when Musk first decided that he wanted to send a mission to Mars, the first thing he realized is he had no clue about anything rocket related.

00:17:08.000 So he cold called an aerospace consultant named Jim Cantrell, and then he basically just learned up.

00:17:15.000 According to Isaacson, from Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed rocket propulsion elements, fundamentals of astrodynamics, and aerothermodynamics of gas turbine and rocket propulsion, along with several more seminal texts.

00:17:27.000 It wasn't that Elon started off as some sort of expert on space.

00:17:31.000 He knew pretty much nothing.

00:17:31.000 He was not.

00:17:34.000 It's that Elon is personally an incredible risk taker, not just about his money, but also about his time and his expertise.

00:17:40.000 He looked at something, thought, that's fascinating to me, I'm obsessed with it, and just launched himself into it.

00:17:46.000 Isaacson quotes another billionaire, Peter Thiel, saying, What I didn't appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially and technically.

00:17:55.000 That's what makes him a force of nature.

00:17:57.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to a bunch of people who just are envious of other people's wealth, but they're pretending that it's because they're altruistic, but really it's because they hate and don't understand free markets.

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00:19:12.000 Okay, so one of the things that you will see in modern American politics is pure envy, right?

00:19:18.000 They're people jealous of Elon because he took a risk, masquerading as altruism.

00:19:23.000 This is always and forever the socialist pitch.

00:19:25.000 You don't like people who are rich because they're richer than you.

00:19:28.000 You envy them, and therefore they must have stolen from you.

00:19:32.000 This is what malicious envy looks like. 0.67

00:19:35.000 So, Hassan Piker, who is truly a leech, the man has never created a thing.

00:19:39.000 He has not innovated a product. 0.81

00:19:41.000 He has not started a major company.

00:19:42.000 He does not employ very many people. 1.00

00:19:44.000 He's truly a useless Nepo baby of Cenkweger's. 1.00

00:19:49.000 And yet, he's touted as some sort of great thinker. 1.00

00:19:52.000 Well, he compares people like Elon to the Gilded Age.

00:19:55.000 He blames capitalism for people sleeping outside in the United States every night as though the natural condition of humanity is innovation and growth, as though wealth is the natural condition of humanity as opposed to abject poverty, which is the actual natural condition of humanity absent innovation.

00:20:12.000 By the way, perform a quick thought experiment, and you can see that the only thing that has changed in human history is free markets and innovation, private property.

00:20:19.000 That's the thing that changed.

00:20:21.000 Because here's the thought experiment.

00:20:22.000 Think of every single thing in Elon Musk's rockets.

00:20:26.000 Think of every single element.

00:20:28.000 Were any of those elements not present on planet Earth in the year 1000 BC or 10,000 BC or 100,000 BC?

00:20:38.000 Every element in your computer was present on planet Earth when Jesus was walking the earth.

00:20:45.000 Every single element.

00:20:46.000 What changed?

00:20:47.000 Innovation, private property, capitalism, rewards for risk taking.

00:20:51.000 That's what changed.

00:20:52.000 The reason Hassan Piker sits there.

00:20:54.000 In his well made suit and Cartier glasses is because those companies that make them exist thanks to private property and capitalism.

00:21:00.000 That is the reason.

00:21:02.000 But here is Hassan Piker masquerading.

00:21:04.000 He takes the envy and then he hides it behind a mask of, I just care about people.

00:21:07.000 No, you don't.

00:21:08.000 No, you don't.

00:21:09.000 You're just jealous. 0.99

00:21:10.000 You're just a jealous leech. 0.96

00:21:14.000 In the wealthiest nation on earth, 700,000 people sleep outside every single night. 0.99

00:21:20.000 I mean, that's preposterous, right?

00:21:24.000 And the solution to that is so simple, really.

00:21:27.000 If we were to just like retool our system a little bit, because we have all of the wealth, we have all of the potential, we have all of the opportunity to change this system to ensure that that doesn't happen because it's unbelievably inhumane.

00:21:41.000 And yet we don't do it because this is the way the system is designed.

00:21:46.000 This is the way capitalism has to continue.

00:21:51.000 And yet, in spite of the same wealth inequality, if not worse, that we're currently experiencing in comparison to the Gilded Age, Americans are sleepwalking in the direction of fascism.

00:22:04.000 That's what I want to avoid. 1.00

00:22:06.000 What a ridiculous person. 1.00

00:22:07.000 What a truly ridiculous person. 0.99

00:22:09.000 And I just want to point out here that even the so called Gilded Age, which again was a propaganda angle on one of the most innovative and creative times in American industrial history, it's what launched America into the forefront of the global economy, it is what generated America's leading wealth on planet Earth, the Gilded Age. 0.97

00:22:28.000 And all of the supposedly evil robber barons, people like JP Morgan or Rockefeller, these are people who coined industries.

00:22:37.000 Also, people who, by the way, saved the economy.

00:22:39.000 In 1907, the American economy nearly collapsed, and JP Morgan got all the bankers in a room.

00:22:43.000 There was no Federal Reserve at the time, and they backstopped the entire American economy.

00:22:48.000 But wealth creation helps people.

00:22:51.000 People are not sleeping homeless because SpaceX is successful.

00:22:56.000 You know, it is truly incredible, just baseline economic ignorance of folks.

00:23:01.000 Go back 500 years and everyone was sleeping homeless. 0.95

00:23:06.000 If you had a home, it was a trashy home.

00:23:09.000 It was a set of four walls. 0.71

00:23:10.000 Your animals slept inside with you.

00:23:11.000 There was no actual floor and you crapped in a bucket.

00:23:15.000 Things are a lot better now.

00:23:17.000 That is not because of Hassan Piker's predilections economically.

00:23:23.000 So let's talk about SpaceX specifically.

00:23:25.000 SpaceX is an amazing company.

00:23:27.000 Hey, man, this is not an advertisement for you to buy SpaceX stock.

00:23:30.000 I don't know if it's overvalued or undervalued.

00:23:33.000 I will say that ripping on SpaceX is an absurdity.

00:23:36.000 SpaceX has done amazing and continues to do amazing things.

00:23:41.000 SpaceX, as a company, is responsible for roughly 82% of all American space launches and over 84% of the global payload mass to orbit.

00:23:50.000 It controls America's sole domestic crewed ride to the ISS.

00:23:55.000 It has revenue from three places Starlink, which has 12 million active subscribers for direct to device internet, which, by the way, Starlink will have a salutary impact on global politics.

00:24:05.000 If Starlink had been widely available in the middle of the Iran war, it would have made a huge difference.

00:24:09.000 Iran shutting down the internet.

00:24:10.000 Has been a disaster area, and literally the only way anyone was getting any information from the outside was Starlink.

00:24:17.000 Its space launches, obviously.

00:24:19.000 SpaceX makes a lot of money off its space launches.

00:24:22.000 And the possibility of orbital AI data centers following its merger with XAI.

00:24:27.000 By the way, that is legitimately the coolest possibility.

00:24:29.000 You know how a lot of people these days have a lot of angst over land use with regard to data centers?

00:24:36.000 So the fix for that, innovation man, it's an amazing thing, risk taking, an amazing thing, is something called orbital AI data centers.

00:24:43.000 So what What is that?

00:24:44.000 That means that you literally launch pieces of data centers into space, and then they rely on solar energy because the sun's energy is constant in space, and the cold temperatures of space prevent overheating.

00:24:55.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, orbital data centers will feature swarms of satellites laden with AI chips.

00:25:00.000 They will need solar arrays to produce electricity to run the AI computing systems.

00:25:04.000 The satellites are expected to fly in an orbit that roughly travels over Earth's poles to maximize their exposure to sunlight.

00:25:11.000 It is amazing stuff.

00:25:13.000 SpaceX will mint today probably 4,000 millionaires, people.

00:25:18.000 Down to the janitor who actually owns stock in SpaceX.

00:25:22.000 Because one of the ways, when you have a startup company, to get people to work for you is to give them stock.

00:25:26.000 And somehow this is bad.

00:25:28.000 Somehow this is bad.

00:25:29.000 The idea is that America's economy has been hollowed out by innovation, but that's not true.

00:25:34.000 It is not even remotely true.

00:25:37.000 What an amazing video you just watched.

00:25:39.000 Wasn't that amazing?

00:25:40.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 12, 2026

Why The Left Is Panicking Over SpaceX

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