The big news of the week, it's inescapable, is a SpaceX IPO listing tomorrow. You're obviously very intimately familiar with it, having owned xAI, which got sold to SpaceX. What does it just mean to have this behemoth coming to market tomorrow?
Look, we are all excited. I think right now, most of us in venture and in tech have been waiting for some watershed moment IPO to hopefully get the markets back open. Looks like that is upon us. And generally speaking, I've been so excited about space tech for about five, six, seven years now. And to me, this feels like a milestone moment. This was an investment thesis that was unthinkable a decade ago for most investors. And I think now people are coming to grips with the fact that space technology is really here. What would have been science fiction to us maybe ten years ago is now science fact, and I think we're only going to see an acceleration of that.
Okay, but is it all a fact? When we start talking about a $29 trillion TAM and 10 million people on Mars. I mean, you own space companies yourself. Is this the way you need to think, or is a little bit of it a fantasy?
Oh, it's so... these numbers are big. The projections, the ambitions are big. I do think, though, when we think about what we are capable of as a species, space has been something that has mystified us, excited us for a very long time, especially in modern history and modern technology. This was a frontier we really believed for a long time, and I did growing up, it was only a place for governments to build and innovate. NASA, putting a man on the moon, all that stuff was never something the private sector could do. But what we're seeing now here is undeniable. The private sector's been able to accomplish a lot, and I think it's only going to accelerate. And I do think the overall market is potentially that big. When we're talking about human ambition, there is no limit to that. When we talk about the opportunities in space as low Earth orbit alone just becomes more accessible, we're unlocking pharmaceuticals, we're unlocking biotech. That's going to help us here back at home. And that's the stuff that gets me fired up as an investor. That's what gets me fired up as an American. I want to see that innovation come and help us live better lives here on planet Earth.
So is having SpaceX as a public company a good thing for your space investments? Because it shows there's a pathway for public markets, or is it a bad thing because so much money is going to get funneled into this IPO that maybe it leaves less room for some of the other space companies?
Well, the good news is where I like to invest is still so early. Very few of these companies, like Stoke or Astro Forger, are thinking about going public quite yet. They're still thinking about building and shipping and launching. I do think you're going to have undeniably a whole fleet of newly minted millionaires, multimillionaires, as well as investors. So not just the early employees, but also the investors who believed in space tech who are now going to have capital to put into the next wave. And I think we've seen that play out in tech before, and this will be no exception. And I do think that all continues to accelerate all of us in building the space economy that we're hoping for.
Building a space economy, though, is something that certainly takes time. And I just wonder if there is room for disappointment. I mean, I don't mean to harp on the crazy numbers, but is there a fear that it gets too overhyped? A SpaceX IPO is just too large, and there's some disappointment, and it sets the project back to humanity what you're talking about. It sets it back in some time.
I do think it is important to have this tempered expectation. On the one hand, folks have to balance one, what I think is a very important, almost unbridled ambition for human progress, which is a very important and noble and great quest. And at the same time, the realistic expectations. Everyone should obviously do their diligence, do their own underwriting, all that important stuff before making any kind of stock decision.
Thank you for the legal disclaimer.
Yep, compliance is happy with me. But at the end of the day, I do think what we're talking about here is creating very real value. I know even you think about anecdotally, the difference a person has once they've taken a United flight with Starlink. There's a very, very different feeling about how you interact with technology when you've experienced just a little fraction of what the space economy can do.
And I do think as we start to unlock pharmaceuticals and biotech that could really only be done in zero G, we're talking about saving lives, improving quality of life, things that I know provide a real economic value, but at the same time, live that Star Trek future I think a lot of us grew up wanting. So be exuberant, be excited, but at the same time, obviously, be thoughtful in how you're underwriting this stuff.
I mean, it's not just obviously SpaceX. It's IPO. And we also have OpenAI filing. Anthropic does as well. And these are companies that have had a lot of VC backing. In fact, so much so we were talking about this on stage. 65% of VC money has gone to just 0.05% of companies. Is something broken that those are the statistics we're faced with right now?
