SpaceX

“And that's why, you know, we were able to be successful with entities like Tesla or SpaceX. Companies that most people would find as not working well for venture, but the way that we thought about it and how we, you know, got involved in the companies at early…”

“We stay sector agnostic and instead look just at the individuals, and in doing that, that's enabled Founders Fund, and this is far before my time, to be at the ground floor of some very important companies. SpaceX is you know, a grand example of that.”

“SpaceX with all of its grand and glory was started as effectively almost as like a Hollywood ask moonshot project to just like take a photo of a plant on Mars, and Elon was going to find some Russian rockets to just send a bunch of stuff to Mars, cameras, take…”

“I remember hearing Elon Musk talk about what it was like for him when Tesla was something like four hundred and forty five million dollars in debt. And the first three launches of SpaceX had blown up”

“The industry as a whole pattern matches very strongly on exactly what successes have existed previously. So for example, for today, it's really easy to raise money for a rocket company because SpaceX is a success, but that doesn't strongly translate over into …”

“Tiny does also invest in businesses, including the likes of Superhuman, SpaceX, Pitch, and Buffer, to name a few.”

“At the 10 year mark was some of the greatest gains. If you look at, okay, at the 10 year mark, where it was Tesla, where it was SpaceX. And there were many, many billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of value creation still to come.”

“There are no patents at SpaceX.”

“So we invested in two, exactly two space companies, Planet and SpaceX. They raised 1.1 billion dollars in 2015, and that alone was double all venture capital in the space sector combined forever, meaning prior.”

“I think I was also early in synthetic biology, but I was probably just right on electric vehicles, probably just right on space with both SpaceX and Planet Labs and smallsats in general. And with what I call seller agriculture again, like growing meat in a bat…”

“And when I looked at national security, it was a very interesting space where the only two unicorns in the last 30 years in defense, Palantir and SpaceX, were both founded by people who had just sold their company for billions of dollars.”

“So my first check was into SpaceX.”

“SpaceX probably wins this for me. I mean, it will probably be the investment that defines my career. We've been invested since 2008 back before there ever been a successful rocket launch. And we've just continued to build that position over time. And, you know…”

“And I think even Founders Fund, you know, I mean, back, back in Founders Fund too, I mean, SpaceX was a, basically a forty million dollar position out of a two hundred million dollar fund, and it was a rocket company.”

“I will often ask people that I'm interviewing, what other companies would you interview at? What other companies are you inspired by? Now, no offense, but if they say something like IBM, which I've definitely had, they're not going to be a fit for Coinbase. If…”

“There was a chance to invest in SpaceX, but, like, I didn't have a hundred grand, and that was the smallest check. And I, I'm just like, hey, like, I probably should have borrowed that money, but, like, I didn't have it.”

“And that's when I met Sean Parker and we became friends and he. Said, Hey, why don't you check out what we're doing at Founders Fund? And I came in and that's when we were considering a little investment in a company called SpaceX and, you know, said, this is …”

“There is nothing more than, more important than empowered engineers. And if you look, you know, if you look at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, Stripe, Apple, that's the foundation of every one of those companies, empowered engineers.”

“That post, like, inspired some young people to go work at SpaceX and work in that industry, so I'm very happy about that”

“I don't expect Stripe or SpaceX to go out next year, and Databricks alone won't be enough to crack open the IPO windows.”

“There is a capital advantage to having a billionaire as a co-founder. At Palantir and SpaceX, certainly, it took a really, really long time To get momentum on the business side of things. And so you needed to be able to raise money through a drought.”

“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”

“So there's been more than a hundred spin-outs now from SpaceX, more than a hundred. They've raised more than ten billion dollars, and the vast majority of them are in Los Angeles.”

“Technology doesn't get better by itself, by the way. We could look at, you know, here's a good analogy, we could look at AI today the same way that Before SpaceX, people looked at the Space Shuttle. Like, hey, we had the Space Shuttle, then we retired it, and …”

“So I think I was one of the first couple people that, that Elon Musk pitched SpaceX to. And I literally kind of laughed at him, thinking, because, by the way, to my defense, his pitch was, I'm going to be the first person to send life to Mars because I'm going…”

“I think what a lot of people forget is that Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, Facebook Meta. I think all these companies are very similar.”

“It works in the world of like small SaaS businesses where you're trying to make a marginal improvement on a, you know Small, you know, industry, if you're doing workflow software for plumbers, I'm sure that is a, like, reasonable approach. I don't think that E…”

“Probably SpaceX. Invested a lot in SpaceX very, very early.”

“Elon has a conviction that he, what he believes is true is absolutely true even when all of the evidence is against his belief, right? And so that allows him to do, I can see that we can colonize Mars, and here we go. Right? And that creates, you know, SpaceX,…”

“I don't have to squint too hard to see a world where they're the most valuable company in the world.”

“I've been in private markets for 10 years. I've never seen institutional demand be so concentrated towards one company stock.”

“He had some available back in twenty-fourteen at like a, you know, six billion dollar valuation, so we put some money in at that valuation.”

“So I think SpaceX will be a 10 trillion dollar company. It's just getting started.”

“The thing that people forget about SpaceX is that there's an amazing management team there that is not Elon Musk.”

“Very few companies in B to have the same level of untrammeled, competitive free space that something like SpaceX does. That's the negative on B to B, but the positive on B to B is there's been two to 300 SaaS winners”

“You know, the best example of all is maybe SpaceX today. It's a private company has had zero liquidity issues. So there is a secondary market always open.”

“We're talking about going from talking about 30 to fifty billion dollar outcomes to multi-trillion dollar outcomes in the form of SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic.”

“It all boils, the deciding between does this strategy work or not, is other companies that compound from a hundred billion to four hundred billion in the private markets before they go public. And right now there's two. There's SpaceX, There's open AI.”

“There's, like, basically three existing markets in space tech. There's rockets, right? Like, getting things up and down, which obviously SpaceX dominates. There's taking pictures from space and That's actually, like, pretty big market, like, forty billion doll…”

“If there's not four exits, Above sixty five billion in the next five or seven years, then the people who bought Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, OpenAI and Antropic are screwed. So I don't think they're screwed. So I think there's going to be, this trend is going t…”

“The only person who can sprint their way through a half a trillionaire in the next couple of years is obviously Elon, because he has private stocks and our ability as the ability of the private markup, private, sorry, the private market to markup investments i…”

“Gwen Shotwell appears to be one of the most amazing managers ever down there at SpaceX. Seems to be. I mean, you know, sending rockets up and most of the time having them work and building an amazing business. That's just been stunning management.”

“The truth is SpaceX, it's just such an amazing achievement that even if your, what was your largest customer, interestingly, is now no longer your largest customer because Starling is such a big business.”

“The truth is, SpaceX, it's just Such an amazing achievement that even if one of your biggest customers doesn't much like you, they still got to do business with you. That's not quite as true for Tesla.”

“It's the definition of a great, I mean, definition of a great business is when your customers can hate you and still do business with you.”

“In a power law world, the longer you let things cook in the private markets, the bigger one or two of the outcomes will be, and things have been cooking in the private market for, I mean, yes, I think SpaceX is almost 20 years old, they've been cooking a long …”

“I think for the very best companies, private markets behave like public markets. There's a secondary market, you can liquidate, so your shareholders can take liquidity, employees can take liquidity, you have access to credit, you can do M&A, your stocks value,…”

“Giving people access to SpaceX and Stripe, you're not gonna regret it. It'll, it'll do right by them. You'll feel proud of it. What you don't want to do is, Take retail and put it into you know, the bottom quartile of the venture capital funds that lose money …”

“They have also 10% of SpaceX.”

“One of like the first investment that that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in, was SpaceX at a hundred and fifty billion dollars.”

“Doing fifteen billion dollars, growing plus or -30%. This year, that's a pretty hefty valuation. I mean, that's, you know, north of 40 times run rate for a company this year growing 30.”

“I think the biggest advantage is the avoidance of volatility in your stock price and sort of employee management. And so, you know, I think You know, if you can kind of steadily grow or control your stock price in the private markets, even if it's a slight dis…”

“You can't run the numbers on SpaceX and come up with that 1.5 trillion. You just can't.”

“The company's doing 15, sixteen billion this year, 20, 25.”

“There's no doubt in a world where one investment might return 50 to a hundred Billion dollars. Everyone else has to feel just a teeny tiny tad irrelevant compared to that return for founders fund and good on them. It's a 20 year compounder at 50% plus or minus…”

“Tesla had to IPO. Now it was a different time. It really barely had any revenue, but same guy running them. It IPO'd at 1.7 billion, which seemed very expensive. 1.7 billion. The sister company will IPO at 1.7 trillion or one trillion.”

“Owning almost 10% of SpaceX, owning, ah, perhaps 14% of Anthropic, depending on dilution, right? Now, and obviously, now this is the greatest in circular investment of all, owning the vast majority of Waymo, which is going to blow up. But those three are, like…”

“Founders Fund, deploying three billion in under 12 months, but deploying it into Stripe, SpaceX, and Anduril.”

“I think we see four IPOs backloaded next year. SpaceX goes out first. Canva comes out of nowhere second. Databricks does it in the back half of the year because it's just time. Anthropic does it at the end of the year. OpenAI probably should have gone first, b…”

“You simply can't make this kind of math work without getting those top exits. And you don't have to get in at the A, but, you know, you don't have to do the A of SpaceX, but you better show up on the cap table before they hit total, because that's a trillion d…”

“By the way, that might change in twenty-twenty-six, in big way, in a big way, because there are a host of a host of huge, unprecedented size IPOs in the works now. You know, companies like SpaceX, and Stripe, and Databricks, and, you know, and others. So there…”

“Last few hours, or 24 hours, SpaceX has completed the acquisition of XAI, valuing the combined private company at 1.25 trillion, as Elon moves to pair the businesses together.”

“My mental model is on SpaceX and Tesla. About 80% of the value is the Elon premium and 20% of the value is the actual business is worth.”

“My understanding is your SpaceX is 80, nineteen billion growing 30% profitable. Allegedly. Again, we haven't seen the data and the other company is not doing, you know, it's some four million in revenue.”

“If you're a small, if a small venture fund, I think it's super possible in today's world. You don't actually have to be in, you don't have to catch the seed of SpaceX. You'd really like to because those are the only, the platform companies generate liquidity. …”

“The existing business is eighteen billion growing 20%, so it's not obvious that it's worth a hundred times trailing revenues for 20%.”

“You've got to believe that the next round for this, Antropic, and SpaceX are all public offerings.”

“Founders Fund are closing in on six billion dollars of new funds. They invested the last 3.3 in 11 months in amazing businesses like SpaceX and Stripe and Anduril.”

“Polymarket said the probability of SpaceX being worth two trillion dollars on the IPO went up to 50, 60%, right? From a lower number, right?”

“I am significantly more skeptical That six months from now, people are going to attribute another 400 billion of value to a statement that I'm going to build a fab.”

“I think Elon, what Elon said Publicly on X, it ain't going to be two trillion. Maybe he'll change his mind. He said two trillion was too high. So whatever his number is, I think he's going to get it on IPO day. He's going to will it into existence. The underwr…”

“The big three, SpaceX plus OpenAI plus Anthropic, their value at IPO will exceed every other IPO for the last 20 years combined.”

“SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI in that order.”

“There is a lot more fucking differentiation in putting rockets in the sky than there is making forking an open source IDE and running it on top of Claude code.”

“If I'm writing, like, mission-critical software for self-driving cars or a NASA or SpaceX mission, I think there's always going to be a need for some kind of IDE.”

“I felt this morning, I put the literally the lowest amount possible in the VC product, so I am now an individual investor in Anthropix, SpaceX, and OpenAI, and even as we speak, I'm adding the logos to our website, right?”

“For context, the total SpaceX revenue run rates around twenty billion.”

“I'm comfortable in saying it'll be below, okay, I'll tell you what, I'll take, I'm comfortable below three. I mean, I'll totally take that bet.”

“I'm going to take this bet that it's going to trade up three X, In twenty-twenty-six, just based on GameStoppers driving it up.”

“Elon's putting 30% of the, you know, this massive IPO, the largest in history so far, into retail.”

“I think Starlink will be the vast portion of the value. The value, I don't think data centers in space will be a meaningful percentage of revenue.”

“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”

“This is the best Venture capital deal ever in terms of absolute return.”

“I think the IPO nominally will be a dud. I don't think it will trade up dramatically.”

“Who will make, I think, over ten billion dollars from their SpaceX. To clarify, I know you think the entire Midwest is the same, Harry, but I think it's Ontario teachers.”

“SpaceX. Why? It's an N of one company. Like, Anthropic and OpenAI can claim they do whatever each other does. But SpaceX is the only company building space infrastructure for connectivity.”

“I would personally probably take the under in six months, not because I don't think that the company is going to be valued extremely well... But if I had to go over under, I'd go under from six months from now.”

“If you look at the poly market Calci odds on a Tesla SpaceX merger, again, you know, not, not that those markets are so big that they're that indicative, but I think the probability that they have on there is something like 70% in the next two years or somethi…”

“I mean, statistically, more than 50%, yes, because in a world where this doesn't get solved for four or five months, there's so many other problems that our heads are gonna hurt, right? So you have to say, if a problem, in a world where it does get solved, the…”

“I think if SpaceX performs well, the OpenAI Anthropic IPOs will also go very well. I think if SpaceX performs poorly, then those are going to have a hard time.”

“I think the Lightspeed Growth Fund is phenomenal. I mean, Again, they've done Anthropic, they've done XAI, they've done SpaceX, they've done amazing, amazing investments over the past, you know I mean, over the history of the firm, but really over the past fou…”

“Two companies Have done the same thing, which is buy a load of compute to build proprietary assets, fail to build those assets, and then bring that, and then decide instead to sell that compute to others, and both of them have had a very positive market recept…”

“And I think in, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX, we're seeing that already. Like these are the Metas and the Googles of our era, highly likely.”

“SpaceX closes the sixty billion dollar all stock takeover of cursor, minting thousand X returns for the likes of Alipartovia Neo. Open AI startup fund is a mega winner who invested six to eight million dollars very early, which Rory, I thought of you when you …”

“Credits to Sean when he brought in the SpaceX investment, We vote on companies. I think someone voted a one. Yeah. I've seen fours, of course. I've seen threes. Never seen a two. I didn't even know we could do one. I didn't even know it was on the scale. But w…”

“I think that there's a real serious chance that if we let SpaceX Be worth two or three trillion, then NVIDIA probably is worth 10. And so I think that the answer's likely yes.”

“It's going to be a very hard story to become Model independent, or rather stay model independent when you're attached to a model lab. So they're going to want to push Grok, the models, the products are going to become increasingly oriented around Grok, and tha…”