Why IPO SpaceX now? Elon Musk says robots, power plants, and star power
00:01 Elon Musk I I've been asked for many years about taking SpaceX public. You know, we've been we've been positive cash flow for for quite a long time, I think, since since around 2014, 2015. And we've been self-funding. In fact, in our sort of private uh equity rounds, they actually have not been fundraising rounds. They've been liquidity rounds for investors and and employees because we we give everyone at the company stock. And SpaceX has actually bought back stock in most of our sort of funding events. So what's different about now is that, well, it's it's a number of things, but we we are embarking on a significant growth phase, like a capital growth phase where we're where are going to put uh in in orbit quite over 100,000 satellites just for communication. And these will be of the the version three and beyond versus version two and version one that are currently in in in orbit. Version version three is, depending on how you count it, 10 to 20 times more capable than the version two satellite. And there were three chips that the SpaceX chip design team taped out that are specific to this that are far beyond state of the art. 00:50 Elon Musk which means it's it's it's 100 times more bandwidth than than the SpaceX uh Starlink system currently offers, and also half the latency because the altitude will be about half altitude. I I think it will actually be the highest bandwidth, uh lowest latency means of communicating. Um and the future with AI and and robots is is actually going to require a lot more bandwidth than we currently use. Um because you can imagine like, what's the bandwidth of a human? It's uh peak bandwidth of a human is a few hundred bits per second, but but bandwidth of a computer can be a trillion bits a second. So the the appetite for bandwidth of AI compute, uh AI and robots is is going to be enormous. 01:34 Elon Musk And and then we're also doing the uh AI data centers in space, which is um another massive capital endeavor. But I I think I think it'll be the the primary means of by which uh AI can be expanded. It's it's it's increasingly difficult to build uh power plants on the ground. Um there are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard. So, if we want to say double the electricity um usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts, we um would have to build, you know, about twice as many power plants, which I don't think people are most communities are not super excited about that. 02:08 Elon Musk But actually if we go to space, we can go far beyond the electricity generation of earth. In fact, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but uh you you could you could actually increase harnessed uh energy by a factor of a million and still be using much less than a millionth of the sun's energy. So current human civilization uses much less than a trillionth of the sun's uh energy output, which is kind of humbling to think about. We're we're really a tiny, when you see the true size of Earth relative to the sun, we're a tiny dust mote in a in a vast darkness. And the sun is enormous. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system, and most of the remaining 0.2% is Jupiter. 02:47 Elon Musk You know, sometimes people ask me, I'm I'm sort of maybe going a little wide-ranging in this answer, but because you just asked me why you're going public now, you know. I'm like, I'm like talking about the sun's, you know, power output and I'm like, we go a bit of a long-winded answer here, you know, if I was an AI, you might tell me to, you know, okay. But also, but but but but it is important, like some of these things are kind of important because people sometimes wonder what's the future of energy generation? And the I I could say that it is absolutely solar power, or maybe a better word for solar power is star power. It's it's the power of a star. The the crazy thing is that if you if you burnt all mass in the solar system that was not the sun, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. 03:22 Elon Musk Because the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Even if you teleported two more Jupiters from another, somehow teleported two more Jupiters from another solar system and burnt them too, the sun would round up to 100%. It's so it's very much the sun. Like so you you could scale to a million times Earth's economy in space uh in terms of harnessed power, which is a good proxy for economic output. Um and still be much less than a millionth of the sun's energy, which is humbling really to think about how tiny we are. Um and this is just one star among many. So, I I guess the the the the TLDR it would be um we're embarking on a massive new growth phase and uh we need capital for that.
