But I see no evidence in the data that mothers working is bad for the kids. As a matter of fact, I see oftentimes the opposite. What's bad is when women are so economically strained, or the pay is so shitty, or they don't have access to child care such that they don't have the option to work and add to the economy or develop their own skills such that if they get divorced later in life, they're totally economically [__]. So I see a lot of infrastructure investments around child care being very accretive to the economy and unlocking and unleashing this incredible workforce that participates because the majority of sandwich generation emotional labor or logistical labor, let's be honest, it falls to women.
In today's office hours, we talk about a surprising spike in unemployment for young women, the $1.7 trillion bet on SpaceX, and how to reconnect with old friends. Question number one. Our first question comes from Cheddarben on Reddit. They say, "Hey, I was looking at the BLS report. That's, I believe, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics report, and women, specifically women aged 25 to 34, had a very large unemployment jump year-on-year compared to any other group 25 plus. I'd like to hear your take on this data point. I haven't heard anybody speaking about it."
Okay. So, what does the BLS data say? Women 25 to 34 had an employment rate or an unemployment rate of 5.3% in January 2026, up from 4.5% in January 2025. That's an 80 basis point or 8/10 of a percentage point jump, the largest year-over-year increase of any of the 25-plus age group for women. By comparison, men 25 to 34 rose only 0.3% over the same period, from 4.3 to 4.6. Women in other age groups moved modestly or even improved. Women 35 to 44, the unemployment rate actually ticked down there. The stress is concentrated in this cohort specifically, and for women specifically, the most recent data in February 2026 shows it pull back to 4.7%, which suggests January may have been a one-month spike rather than a sustained acceleration. The year-over-year trend is still real, but March data will be important to watch.
Federal layoffs hit early career women hardest. With federal employment, they have a probationary period, and those in their first year or recently promoted are disproportionately affected, and those tend to be disproportionately women. In some agencies, over 60% of probationary workers are women. That's exactly the career stage of a 25 to 34-year-old. So some of this, quite frankly, is DOGE. That's the government, the largest employer in the US, has shed over 307,000 jobs in 2025. That's eight times more than 2024. And that has been especially hard on women and especially hard on young women in this cohort.
Also, return-to-office mandates affected women disproportionately. Women aged 25 to 44 with children under five saw labor force participation fall nearly 3 percentage points between January and June of 2025 as remote flexibility disappeared. The 25 to 34 group is most likely to have toddlers, not school-age kids, making that inflexibility hardest to absorb. And then finally, child care has collapsed. Federal child care subsidies ended in September of 2024, forcing center closures and tuition hikes. Roughly 20% of child care workers are immigrants, a population also disrupted by deportations in 2025. For many women in this age group, the math of working simply stopped adding up.
So just a couple observations or some nuance or takeaways from this data set. The first is that a lot of our, when we cut government spending, a lot of it, I believe we're cutting the wrong stuff a lot of times, and that is government spending should have a return on investment, and sometimes that return is social. Right, spending money, well, I was going to say spending money on the homeless doesn't have an economic return. You supposedly in San Francisco it costs $80,000 in social services or $80,000 per homeless person, and you'd think, well, it's probably less expensive than to build, you know, just to build low-income housing for people in addition.
I think that we probably need a gestalt or zeitgeist amongst corporate America. I think work from home is terrible for young people, but I do think work from home or remote work is an unlock for caregivers. And that is so many people are in the sandwich generation now, taking care of both parents and children. That I think a general viewpoint or a general approach for corporations should be that they should make accommodations or make a real effort to provide remote work opportunities and capabilities for people who are caregivers.
In the '90s, when I was starting my firms, I didn't do it because I was a moral person or wanted to improve the world. But I used to have, I had a lot of single women, not single women, I had a lot of mothers working for me, and they were really talented, certified, great education. But the ability to work from home two days a week and just come in Monday, Wednesday, Friday was a huge unlock for them and a differentiator because Nestle or Levi Strauss or Clarks wouldn't let them do that. You had to be in the office every day. So providing remote work capability for people is, I think, a good investment.
Investment in universal child care. One of the most secretive things for our economy was civil rights protections or protections for women in the workplace such that women could go to work and we could maintain our economic dominance. If we hadn't provided those sorts of protections, we'd be a second-rate economic power to China. So I think actually a really solid investment in the United States would be universal child care such that it made sense economically for women to go to work. It has all sorts of second-order positive effects. The daughters of women who work are more likely to make money later in life because they see their moms working. And that's not to say that being at home isn't great for the kids.
But I see no evidence in the data that mothers working is bad for the kids. As a matter of fact, I see oftentimes the opposite. What's bad is when women are so economically strained, or the pay is so shitty, or they don't have access to child care such that they don't have the option to work and add to the economy or develop their own skills such that if they get divorced later in life, they're totally economically [__]. So I see a lot of infrastructure investments around child care being very accretive to the economy and unlocking and unleashing this incredible workforce that participates because the majority of sandwich generation emotional labor or logistical labor, let's be honest, it falls to women.
And as evolved as we'd like to think we are, there's still that burden disproportionately falls to women. So making an investment in an infrastructure around child care, ensuring a certain level of minimum wage, encouraging corporations to have remote work, I think is just not only the right thing to do, I think it's a smart thing to do for our economy.
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Question number two comes from Jimmy, who emailed us. "Hey, longtime listener of the pod. I've always felt that emotions should be left out of investing, and it seems like you take a similar approach. With that in mind, here's a big IPO coming up this summer that I'm curious about. Do you plan on investing in SpaceX when it goes public?"
Okay, so just some data. SpaceX is targeting a June-July 2026 IPO, raising $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion valuation, according to Bloomberg. It's going to be the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion raise in 2019. From our Prof G Markets newsletter, SpaceX generated $8 billion in profits in 2025 off of roughly $16 billion in revenues, and analysts expect sales to increase 25% this year. A $2 trillion valuation would imply a 125 times price-to-sales multiple, not price-earnings, price-to-sales.
So, no, I'm not planning to invest. I think SpaceX has the largest moats of any business in the world right now. I think they're responsible for 80 to 90% of the launch capacity right now. Two-thirds of the low-Earth satellites are controlled by SpaceX. And its Falcon Heavy rocket can put material into space for one-fifth the cost, or sometimes one-sixth, of its closest competitor. It's just an incredible company with incredible moats. It is absolutely not worth this valuation.
The only way I would invest is if I had access to the IPO and then I trade it out on the first trade, which I will not get access to the IPO because the investment banks, I don't know. I just don't see getting on the friends and family list of SpaceX. So, if you were to get into the IPO somehow, I think you'd want out after the first trade because as amazing as this company is, it is not anywhere near worth, nor can I think of a company worth 125 times price-to-sales.
So, my prediction will be this will get a tick up at the IPO because people will be excited about it, and then one to three years later it'll be trading at half what it went out at, maybe even less. It just doesn't make any sense. To give you a sense for just how crazy this valuation is, when Google went public, it was growing 240% a year and it was trading at 10 times sales. This company is growing at 20% a year and trading at 120 times sales. So when Google went public, it had 10 times the growth and was trading at one-tenth the price-to-sales of SpaceX, which just gives you a sense for how outrageous this valuation is.
And the definition, or a definition of intelligence, is the ability to hold two thoughts in your mind at once. And is this an incredible company with some of the biggest moats in the history of business? Yes. Or is it overvalued? Yes. And we can hold both those thoughts in our mind at the same time. Art on this is my colleague at NYU Stern, Aswath Damodaran, and his take is the following: They made the decision already that SpaceX is a great buy. Now they're looking for some way that they can justify that. And this pricing sounds like post-hoc rationalization. In other words, investors have already decided they want SpaceX and are now working backwards to justify the price.
Not a lot of obvious comparables here, which is the problem in itself. Wall Street can't agree on what to compare SpaceX to. They're cycling through Boeing, AT&T, Palantir, GE Vernova, none of which actually fit. When bankers can't find a peer, it usually means the valuation has no anchor. And this one doesn't appear to have an anchor. There are some red flags here. IPOs on average underperformed the broader market in the one to three years after the listing.
SpaceX's valuation went from $350 billion in May of 2025 to $800 billion in December of 2025 to $1.4 trillion in February 2026. And it's targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation at the IPO, roughly 5x in under a year. Saudi Aramco, the previous record IPO, popped on day one and then spent years trading below its IPO price. Plus, Musk has advertised retail access, reserving 30% for retail investors. You know, sounds like he's a man of the people, but it could be read as selling to the most emotionally invested buyers, fans, not analysts.
So, in sum, yes, I want to give people a chance to invest. I think it's because he thinks they're the only ones stupid enough to buy at this valuation. So, no, I will not be investing in SpaceX. We'll be right back after a quick break.
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Welcome back. Question number three.
