The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 30, 2026


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ SpaceX

Topics
SpaceX IPO
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
SpaceX Space Shuttle Grok
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1450 Britain's Liminal Moment

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

156.73

Word count

4,071

Sentence count

91

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Elon Musk has become a trillionaire in a short period of time. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? And is SpaceX a good company? In this episode of Brokonomics I discuss the SpaceX IPO and whether it's a good stock to invest in.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.
00:00:24 Now, dark times in the news.
00:00:28 We just had the time recording.
00:00:30 We just had the Rape Inquiry published.
00:00:33 And I thought about going through that.
00:00:35 It's a bit grim.
00:00:36 And you've got to find some positive stuff, haven't you?
00:00:41 And I kind of want to return a bit to the knitting,
00:00:43 get a bit more back to the economics and finance,
00:00:47 because people grumble when I stray too long from that.
00:00:49 So I thought, let's talk about the SpaceX IPO,
00:00:53 which I think is a good news story potentially for humanity. It's a stock that I do like
00:00:58 and maybe you might be interested in my thoughts on SpaceX whether that is a good investment
00:01:05 and whether it's a good company. My answer to the second one is most definitely yes
00:01:10 I'm just a little bit more tactical on the first one. So a bit of background on SpaceX well of
00:01:16 course, it's an Elon Musk story, isn't it? And I'm a bit of an Elon Musk fan girl because he
00:01:23 seems to be able to create enormous amounts of value. Several trillion dollar companies. I mean,
00:01:28 creating one trillion dollar company in your lifetime is a remarkable thing, but creating
00:01:31 whatever it is now, five or six, is quite something else. And the leftists, they attack
00:01:38 Musk all the time, don't they? Because he's just become a trillionaire. And the leftists really
00:01:43 don't like that. So let's just remind ourselves how Musk found himself in this situation in the
00:01:48 first place. So back in all the way in 1995, he created Zip2. And Zip2, it was basically Google
00:01:55 Maps before Google Maps existed. And he sold that to Compaq, I believe, for about $300 million.
00:02:04 Now, he did have some investor money in that, and some other people who are working with him,
00:02:08 like his brother and a few others. He personally took away from that $22 million. So he then took
00:02:15 that $22 million and he rolled it over into what was originally called X, but became PayPal.
00:02:24 Went into PayPal and they built that up, a whole bunch of them, the PayPal mafia.
00:02:29 they built that up to 1.5 billion valuation sold it to ebay that was back in 22 no 2002 that was
00:02:39 now his share of that was 180 million so he's got 180 million and what does he do with it does he
00:02:46 retire to the beach no um which of course every lefty would have done every lefty would have made
00:02:52 some you know token activism with that and then basically sorted themselves out on a beach for
00:02:58 rest of their lives no he used that to launch uh spacex and tesla and solar city which then
00:03:04 rolled into tesla now he put a hundred million into early spacex and his original vision for
00:03:15 spacex was just that he is genuinely concerned that if humanity is stuck on earth all it takes
00:03:22 like one asteroid or you know gamma ray burst or whatever the hell it is to wipe us out and we're
00:03:28 just done so he genuinely believes that getting to mars is absolutely crucial for the species and
00:03:34 so he was willing to take of his 180 million 100 million drop it in spacex and his original
00:03:41 ambition was actually something called mars erases and what he wanted to do was get a rocket to mars
00:03:49 and autonomously deploy a greenhouse that would kind of land,
00:03:58 open itself up, grow crops, and have a webcam.
00:04:01 And the idea is that after that, you would be able to connect to this webcam
00:04:09 and see plants growing on Mars.
00:04:12 and the idea was is that would encourage nasa to take exploration to mars more seriously
00:04:20 build public support get political support it would start the ball rolling through a mars colony
00:04:25 and he was willing to spend a hundred million on that which again no bloody leftist who was
00:04:31 criticizing him now for being a trillionaire would have done and he's the spacex ipo that
00:04:37 pushed him up into trillionaire status.
00:04:41 So off he goes to Russia to try and buy a nuclear weapon.
00:04:45 I say a nuclear weapon because they had loads of former nuclear weapons,
00:04:51 which were actually basically rockets.
00:04:53 And they took the nuke out and they were selling the rockets.
00:04:56 And he went off to Russia to have a look at these nucleus nukes, these rockets.
00:05:01 And he came to the conclusion, actually, this doesn't look so hard.
00:05:05 I'm going to do it myself.
00:05:07 So there is, in 2002, he's founded SpaceX, he's put $100 million into it,
00:05:11 and he starts building rockets.
00:05:13 Now, even though he's got $100 million of his money,
00:05:16 rockets are quite expensive.
00:05:18 And he could basically afford to build and launch four of them.
00:05:23 And if they weren't working by number four, that was it.
00:05:27 That was $100 million up in smoke.
00:05:29 I mean, quite literally up in smoke.
00:05:31 I mean, little bits would come raining back down.
00:05:34 And so he started with Falcon 1.
00:05:37 and Falcon 1, the first launch of Falcon 1, exploded, and so did the second one.
00:05:45 But the third one exploded, and he had enough money left for one more Falcon 1 launch,
00:05:53 and if this didn't work, he was done.
00:05:57 He had one final attempt, and it worked.
00:06:00 uh falcon one launch four worked and it was the first time a privately funded space orbit had
00:06:10 been achieved now at that point uh he's proved he's got something he's proved he can get into
00:06:17 orbit um nasa desperately needed um american-based launch capability because even by this time
00:06:26 early 2000s they were they were starting to get heavily dependent on the russians for basically
00:06:31 everything into launch because they had scaled back nasa so far and so nasa gave him a contract
00:06:37 for i think 1.6 billion and that set up um spacex to to do early launch so it went from an eccentric
00:06:46 millionaires um or centimillionaire attempt to um you know inspire people to go to mars
00:06:54 to something which NASA wanted to invest in,
00:06:58 and so SpaceX was up and running.
00:07:02 So that's how SpaceX came about.
00:07:03 And you might be broadly familiar with SpaceX
00:07:07 because, you know, obviously,
00:07:09 well, I've done a couple of segments on it over the years,
00:07:12 but you do need to update your VU.
00:07:15 So picking what SpaceX used to look like
00:07:17 in, say, 2001, five years ago,
00:07:19 its core mission was still make humanity interplanetary,
00:07:23 and mars was the long-term objective but the business was basically launch which was um
00:07:30 important because there was a real dearth of non-russian launch capability and so we had
00:07:37 revenues back then of like two to three billion and that was coming from the u.s government and
00:07:42 nasa and military stuff which again obviously the military stuff if you're launching a military
00:07:48 satellite you don't really want to do it on a Russian rocket and there was also commercial
00:07:53 satellite in there as well and um you know SpaceX back then the the launch costs were coming down
00:08:02 but they were still very high I mean put it this way right do you remember the space shuttle 0.98
00:08:08 the the squatty older people will know what I mean by the space shuttle but younger people just look
00:08:14 Space Shuttle. It's like this stumpy little plane thing that NASA used to use for going up into
00:08:21 space. To get a kilogram of mass into space cost 50 grand for one kilogram. So to get one Dan into
00:08:34 space will cost you five million. And what SpaceX was able to do by iterating from Falcon 1 to
00:08:40 to falcon 2 and so on eventually you get up to falcon 9 which is the thing that's running at
00:08:44 the moment the cost per kilogram for falcon 9 is two and a half grand down from 50 grand
00:08:50 so it is a huge reduction and he did it by thinking why don't we make rockets reusable
00:08:58 um you know think about how much a plane journey would cost if the plane could only be used for
00:09:07 one leg and then and then you had to throw the plane away and and use a new plane so he wanted
00:09:12 to make rockets reusable and by falcon 9 he's done that thus thus the launch costs come down
00:09:19 significantly you spend you still spend quite a lot on fuel but but reusability helps a great deal
00:09:25 so five years ago yep launch very interesting business very viable dragon the crew capsule
00:09:34 thing so this is for transporting crew up to the international international space station and it
00:09:41 proved that spacex was reliable enough to fly humans up and down uh and that was again very
00:09:46 important because you know for many years at this point the americans who maintained a presence on
00:09:53 the international space agency the space station uh were reliant on getting all their people up
00:09:59 there via russia uh which of course they are a little bit belligerent to so um dragon capsule
00:10:08 they had that um starlink the early starlink was around five years ago and it was emergent
00:10:15 satellite internet business i bought one of those um i don't actually use it because regular
00:10:21 broadband is like half the price but i've got it in the shed just in case i ever need to break it
00:10:25 out. And it's low orbit, low latency satellites. So it goes up, it launches a bunch of these
00:10:33 satellites, launches more. And it gives you a telecommunication network that you can access
00:10:39 the internet through. And if you live remotely, it's basically your only choice. It's the only
00:10:45 way of getting internet in Ukraine, for example, at the moment. Very handy for people who live in 1.00
00:10:51 the countryside one of the places it would be most handy is if you lived in south africa because
00:10:56 telecoms and even the power is so extraordinarily unreliable but unfortunately in south africa that
00:11:05 is one of the few that is like basically one of the only countries in the world where you can't
00:11:09 get spacex uh reason being is because they would only let it operate in south africa if it was a
00:11:16 black majority owned business and even though musk is himself an african-american um he's not
00:11:24 got enough melanin and so it's banned in in south africa but you know a picture picture living
00:11:30 anywhere um unreliable or rural you know star links for you you can also put it on planes and
00:11:36 cruise ships and all that kind of stuff and five years ago they had the plan for starship now
00:11:42 starship is the next quantum leap up from falcon it's a much bigger rocket and they were spending
00:11:48 huge amounts of r and d on it but it's a lot bigger can carry a lot more and therefore your
00:11:52 cost per kilogram of getting mass into orbit comes down quite a lot valuation of this business over
00:11:59 the years i think in 2018 it was valued about 30 billion by 2020 about 45 billion 2021 which i'm
00:12:09 talking about here 100 billion and i actually got the opportunity to invest in 2021 um back at the
00:12:16 100 billion valuation and i didn't take it because it would have meant tying up money for god knows
00:12:22 how long because you had no idea when the ipo was going to be and it would have meant taking money
00:12:28 out of my other really high conviction stocks like microstrategy and tesla i probably would
00:12:36 have done better putting my money in spacex but it came with big unknowns i couldn't realize it
00:12:40 i would have had to take my money out of a tax-free account which i could never then get back in again
00:12:44 at that sort of size so i don't feel too bad about not doing that um but it was it was really
00:12:51 very difficult to get into spacex before the ipo you had to because i was active in the tesla
00:12:55 community the online investing investing community i i could have i could have got in but decided not
00:13:00 to pursue it back then you know 2001 it was it was you know profitable-ish lots of money on r&d
00:13:06 lots of capital spend lots of ambition starship was was pure ambition and investment um and and
00:13:14 the company was really valued on future potential not current earnings although it easily proved
00:13:20 that it was worth is easily worth 100 billion in 2021 given what it's done but it had this fly
00:13:26 Which is it does these launches, makes the launches cheaper, more satellites go up, more Starlink revenue, more cash flows, more Starship development, cheaper launch, and so on.
00:13:41 All right. What has changed fundamentally since 2001? What are the key upgrades since your mental model of SpaceX from whatever it probably is? You're probably stuck five years behind on this. I mean, I know I was before I properly looked at it recently after last having a look at it back then.
00:14:03 it's now got a near monopoly on launch these days 80 of the mass that goes into orbit
00:14:09 is spacex 80 bloody percent right and bear in mind the russia hasn't cut back they're still
00:14:17 doing as much as they were before but now they're now they're um very much secondary
00:14:22 so they are completely dominating the launch business all the commercial military satellites
00:14:29 all of that as well as starlink that goes up that all goes through them it started out with this
00:14:35 concept of a global telecom network and now it's it's well beyond con it's a mature it's a maturing
00:14:40 business it's got 10 million subscribers it's accessible in basically all of the countries
00:14:46 i don't think it works at the polls yet and it doesn't work in south africa but apart from that
00:14:50 it's got pretty much everything got 10 000 satellites um the tech is there i don't think
00:14:55 the consumer device is available yet for a direct to phone connectivity um so it probably won't be
00:15:03 that much longer before you can have a starlink phone um which you can just use anywhere unless
00:15:09 you're in south africa or the poles and i think that is coming soon it's just you need more
00:15:14 satellites to do the polar orbit and as long as you can see the sky and it should penetrate most
00:15:20 roofs the frequencies they use should penetrate i don't know how it's going to work in like an
00:15:25 underground car park or something or mine but other than that you should be quite good starship
00:15:31 is coming along nicely they've done about 12 12 test flights at this point and you know they're
00:15:38 targeting putting proper payload on it um in about now i think second half of this year which we're
00:15:46 basically in the ai business that is that is a entirely new business line from what you may have
00:15:54 thought that SpaceX is doing. So they're building out at the moment a gigawatt of compute
00:16:02 infrastructure. And that infrastructure is tied in with Grok and the X ecosystem, X as in Twitter.
00:16:10 And the AI infrastructure story is kind of pivotal to the prospects of this business at this point.
00:16:17 and it's an explicit roadmap item for them um and i will talk about that more in just a moment but
00:16:25 you know the real upgrade is launch satellite business existed in five say five years ago
00:16:33 and now you've got launch you've got telecoms you've got mobile networks you've got ai
00:16:38 infrastructure ai models uh cloud compute um defense infrastructure i suppose they had a bit
00:16:45 that before and orbital industry and this is where it starts to get really interesting you see
00:16:50 actually let's do a quick a quick run through of the vehicles actually that that might be worth
00:16:56 touching so falcon one we talked about small um it was a liquid fueled launcher you know went up in
00:17:04 2008 it was basically a proof of concept but it wasn't reusable falcon nine that was a real
00:17:11 breakthrough medium lift rocket most of it is reusable you get about 23 tons on it and it's
00:17:21 about two and a half grand to get a kilogram into space so you know we went from costing
00:17:28 five million dollars to get a dan into space you can now get a dan into space for the price of a
00:17:34 new toyota which is nice should anyone ever want to inject me into space
00:17:41 dragon capsule bolts on top of the falcon 9
00:17:44 falcon heavy you sometimes hear that referred to that's basically
00:17:49 three falcon 9 boosters strapped together more thrust more lift heavier loads therefore lower
00:17:55 cost per kilogram into space that gets the um cost per critic per kilogram down to about one
00:18:04 thousand four hundred dollars so you can now get a down into space for the price of a second hand
00:18:09 toyota um starship one uh like i said i think i think that they've done 12 launches um
00:18:18 mostly reusable they're having issues with the heat shield because the heat shield for whatever
00:18:25 reason tends to burn up on re-entry if they can get that sussed it they should get to the cycle
00:18:33 of a of an airplane which is flight land inspect do another flight potentially the same starship
00:18:42 could be doing a a new flight every day that's something like the ambition um but what they're
00:18:48 what they're sort of really targeting is starship version three they talk about that a lot a lot in
00:18:54 the ipo deck i put the ipo deck in the reading uh links if you want to take a look at it 100 tons
00:18:59 capacity in that 100 tons of capacity and hopefully fully reusable possibly swapping
00:19:09 in and out a heat shield now that is going to get you down to something like 200 kilograms
00:19:16 No, it's $200 per kilogram, which is just an absolutely extraordinary drop in launch cost.
00:19:27 You're now getting a Dan into space for $2,000.
00:19:31 For a month's wages, you could put me in space.
00:19:36 Just extraordinary turnaround from the days of the NASA shuttles.
00:19:42 you know you're very close to a 99 reduction in in launch costs there and they're even starting
00:19:49 to speculate about a starship four which would be high throughput that one would be 200 metric tons
00:19:57 you're taking up at any one time i mean that is a proper space freight train at this point
00:20:03 and the cost that you're looking at per kilogram is in like the tens of dollars
00:20:09 extraordinarily cheap extraordinarily cheap to get mass into orbit and what this unlocks
00:20:18 is space industrialization an episode of brokonomics people really liked was the
00:20:24 industrializing space episode with grant donahue good trap and um we talked about the the job of
00:20:32 industrializing space and just the sheer scale that you get into when you're looking at
00:20:38 industrializing space now you might think oh why would you want to do that why can't you just do
00:20:43 it all on earth it's it's it's because of the scale the scale of everything once you get into
00:20:48 space is just ginormous and what spacex reminds me of the most is the railway companies in early
00:20:58 continental america you had this vast continent bloody difficult to do anything with it apart
00:21:04 from the east coast because if you were going to go anywhere you needed to fit it onto the back of 0.99
00:21:09 a wagon and okay yes you might get shot at by indians but i mean just the logistics of trying 0.99
00:21:15 to move any sort of industrial bolt we couldn't do industrial bolt moving anything by a wagon 0.75
00:21:21 across the u.s continental size land mass um the railways were an absolute game changer there was
00:21:29 lots of railway companies but we're kind of in the situation now where there's effectively one
00:21:34 railway company uh but it's not railways it's it's rockets and it gives us access to space
00:21:40 and and the american railways i mean they took a east close east coast sliver of civilization and
00:21:50 allowed it to just spread out and industrialize the entire continent um dramatically increased the
00:21:57 capacity of the US economy to grow, dramatically increase the US economy over time,
00:22:05 the scale of this increase could be quite a bit larger. I mean, before I go on to fully talk about
00:22:11 the case of industrializing space, let's just talk about why you put compute. Why do you put AI in
00:22:17 there? Why do you want to run AI into space, right? So think about it from an Earth perspective.
00:22:23 what does ai on earth need well it needs chips lots and lots of chips and you still need those
00:22:30 if you're in space but then think about the rest of the list power and that is a massive limiting
00:22:37 factor you can't get power anymore there's just no power i mean okay there is in china because
00:22:44 they're expanding their electrical output but in the rest of the world in the rest of the rest of
00:22:50 well, there's just no bloody power. And we're getting very close to the point where chips are
00:22:55 going to start being delivered that cannot be turned on because there's no power.
00:23:01 What else is there? Cooling. You need the land itself. You need permits. You need permissions,
00:23:08 regulatory approval, state approval, bureaucrats all over it. You need substations. You need 0.81
00:23:13 turbines you need transmission lines uh batteries any cooling you need a lot of cooling if you're
00:23:21 going to do this on earth utility connections all of that is really expensive and and with
00:23:27 the regulatory stuff it's really really slow so you might think okay well yeah but surely that's
00:23:35 all no it's not it's it's not easier to do that than it is to put it into space because in space
00:23:42 talk about the big the big limiting factor which is which is power
00:23:46 in space there's no night so you don't need batteries there's no clouds there's no seasons
00:23:56 there's no atmosphere limiting uh what's coming in there's no weather you don't need to take your
00:24:01 solar panels and glass the hell out i mean you use a little bit of glass but only a little 0.60
00:24:06 you don't glass the hell out of them to protect them from bird shit and weather and hailstones
00:24:11 and all the rest of it and i mean even not taking into that account a solar panel in space generates 0.88
00:24:18 about five times more power than a solar panel on earth because of no weather and all the rest of it
00:24:22 and you don't have night and you don't have um weather to deal with um and and that's before
00:24:31 you get into things like bloody um cooling as well don't ever you don't have to worry about any
00:24:37 of that um it's it's just you get more power more simply but the big one is the permitting disappears
00:24:45 um you know a lot of these big ai companies they're trying to build their own nuclear power
00:24:52 stations at this point and it's going to take them 10 years to do it 10 years if they're lucky
00:25:00 It would take you 25 years if you did it in this country.
00:25:03 So Hinkley Sea, 25-year project,
00:25:06 because the bureaucrats and the regulations just slow everything down,
00:25:12 not to mention acquiring the land in the first place
00:25:15 and dealing with the local objections
00:25:16 and getting the grid connection on all the rest of it.
00:25:20 Cooling is a lot easier.
00:25:22 I mean, you still need radiators because you need to radiate the heat out,
00:25:26 but you only need to radiate it straight out into space,
00:25:28 and then you're done.
00:25:29 so the vast amount of energy that you spend on earth-based data centers just cooling them it's
00:25:38 a huge proportion of the cost that's all gone if you enjoyed that content and of course you did
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