The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 102 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Maguire: NASA designs missions around outdated, high-cost launch assumptions
“NASA has been still designing missions with the constraints of 1020 years ago, which is when launch costs are in the limit infinity and there's very few slots per year, then like the economic rational thing is to spend close to infinite money, making sure that…”
Asparouhov: Rocket Lab is #2 in launch and Firefly is #3
“Like number two is obviously very much a rocket lab. Number three at this point is Firefly, right? And Firefly is actually getting to space on some regular basis. They just landed on the moon.”
Asparouhov: SpaceX holds 99% market share with ~50% gross margins
“SpaceX effectively represents 99% of the market and has like insane profit margins on their launch business. It's something on the order of like, you know, sort of 50%, you know, sort of gross margin is like the rough report numbers that I've seen publicly.”
Maguire: SpaceX is incentivized to foster independent LEO startups
“Look, I think SpaceX is deeply incentivized to have a giant ecosystem of lots of great independent companies in space, and I think especially in LEO.”
Hays: A SpaceX thruster-equipped Tesla Roadster has 10,000 potential buyers
“If Tesla comes out with a roadster that has a SpaceX, it's like basically Merlin engine on it. Some type of SpaceX engine, there's probably 10,000 buyers for that car.”
Hays: SpaceX is up 13% in five days, partly from SemiAnalysis report
“SpaceX is up 13% in the past five days, almost certainly in part due to semi-analysis.”
Late Stage Management Executives Plead Guilty in $528M Fraud Scheme
“In February and March, three sales executives connected to Late Stage, pleaded guilty to federal charges arising from a broader, five hundred and twenty-eight million dollar investment scheme. Prosecutors said the defendants marketed supposedly no fee pre IPO …”
SpaceX Launch Infrastructure Designed to Launch a Starship Every Hour
“The engineering that goes into this, just so, thinking so far ahead, like, I think this is designed to launch a starship every hour.”
Coogan: SpaceX's 10% to 30% day-one pop marks a successful IPO
“The IPO is successful, I would say. There's been a bunch of chatter back and forth. Bull cases, bear cases. But overall it's hard not to look at this as a success. The, you know, Bill Gurley doesn't want a crazy pop on day one, doesn't want it to go up a hundr…”
Coogan: SpaceX IPO priced at $135 and opened at $150
“SpaceX IPO priced at 135 dollars a share. Opened at one 50.”
Coogan: SpaceX hits $2.28 trillion market cap at $172 per share
“It's a 2.28 trillion dollar company now. 172 dollars a share.”
Shotwell: Over half of SpaceX employees bought nearly $1B in IPO stock
“So we're about 22,000 strong. I'm super proud that over half of us actually bought additional stock in this opening, totaling almost a billion dollars.”
Over 1,000 SpaceX Employees Organize to Negotiate Wealth Management Fees Pre-IPO
“Joe Weisenthal is reporting that on the eve of the IPO, SpaceX employees are organizing more than a thousand current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing. And access to sophisticated tax-…”
Coogan: SpaceX reported $18.67 billion in annual revenue in its S-1
“SpaceX reported its revenue last year at 18.67 billion, and Dan Primack had a post saying that the business was smaller than he expected.”
Coogan: Goldman Sachs won lead left role over Morgan Stanley for SpaceX IPO
“Incredible that Goldman beat out Morgan Stanley for the SpaceX IPO, left lead left. Given that Michael Grimes returned to Morgan Stanley in part for this deal, of course, Morgan Stanley is on the deal but that is it is a big win for Goldman that DJ SpaceX is a…”
Hays: D1 Capital set to generate roughly $20B from SpaceX investment
“They're set to generate roughly twenty billion in, in returns”
Hays: Fast QQQ Inclusion Was a Priority for SpaceX
“This would, I imagine get them allocated into QQQ really quickly. And I know that was a priority.”
Hays: SpaceX Targets June 11th NASDAQ IPO
“SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline targets June 11th, Pricing on the NASDAQ.”
SpaceX's rumored $1.75T valuation would surpass Tesla's $1.2T market cap
“It is a wild timeline that SpaceX, if it goes out at 1.75 trillion will be bigger than Tesla, which is sitting around 1.2 trillion these days.”
Hays: SpaceX Has Normalized Rocket Launches to the Point of Public Apathy
“SpaceX has normalized it to such a degree.”
Coogan: Routine SpaceX Starship lunar cargo flights are 3-5 years away
“Starship needs to be refueling in orbit, landing on the moon with and without crews, because you're probably going to need some humans up there, some robots and we need to start routine cargo flights to the moon. So this is straight up like three to five years…”
Coogan predicts routine Starship lunar cargo flights are 3-5 years away
“Starship needs to be refueling in orbit, landing on the moon with and without crews, because you're probably going to need some humans up there, some robots and we need to start routine cargo flights to the moon. So this is straight up, like, three to five yea…”
Hays: A 3% SpaceX float would beat Alibaba's US IPO record
“Even a tiny three percent float would comfortably eclipse the U.S. IPO record set by Alibaba's twenty five billion dollar float in 2014.”
Coogan: SpaceX operates 9,500 satellites serving over 9M Starlink users
“The rapid launch of 9500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only not over nine million users of the broadband internet service”
Coogan: Starlink has over 10,000 satellites in orbit
“Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe.”
Coogan: Blue Origin is the second company ever to land a rocket booster
“It's only the second company in history to land a rocket booster after SpaceX.”
Speculative Investing Is Necessary To Drive Innovations Like Tesla And SpaceX
“You need some speculation in the system. Like, we always say speculation is a dirty word or a bad word, but, you know, the original investors in SpaceX or in Tesla who probably thought the whole thing was insane were speculating. And you need some of that. You…”
Coogan: 2027 Starship Artemis moon mission timeline will be really hard
“In twenty-twenty-seven, a lander variant of Starship is supposed to be ready to carry astronauts on a NASA moon mission through the agency's Artemis exploration program. That's gonna be really hard, because I think they have to refuel in orbit, and then also m…”
SpaceX completes Starship Flight 10 test with Indian Ocean splashdown
“Flight 10 made it back, took off from Starbase, South Texas. The booster landed in the ocean in the, I think, the Gulf of America, technically. And the actual Starship executed a successful flip maneuver, deployed a mock payload of a bunch of Non-functional St…”
Coogan: Aerospace challenge is scaling industrial economics, not one-off technical feats
“The challenge now is not, can we get to the moon? It's the same thing with like, the challenge is not, can we build a flying car or can we build, we have helicopters. Can we build one humanoid robot or one self-driving car in San Francisco? It's like, can we a…”
Dixon: SpaceX uses stablecoins for cross-border treasury management on Starlink sales
“SpaceX has a program where they move, you know, they'll sell a Starlink in, I think it's like some, south of like Brazil or something, and then they'll immediately, you know, use stablecoins for so-called treasury management.”
Leading Freeform is more stressful than reporting directly to Elon Musk
“Truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face to face with Elon three times a week.”
Asparouhov: SpaceX and Palantir had to sue US government to win contracts
“Both SpaceX and Palantir In the 2010 through 12 time period. Basically to sue the government in order to win contracts.”
SpaceX runs two annual tender offers totaling over $1.5 billion
“SpaceX has raised ten billion dollars in primary over its, you know, 23 years of being around as a company. They've been running, you know, two tenders annually that, you know, total like more than a billion and a half dollars a year for a long time.”
Asparouhov: Falcon 9 had more issues recently than in prior five years
“Falcon nine has also had more issues over the past years or six months than like the prior, like five years combined.”
Maguire: SpaceX will drive dramatic launch cost drops within five years
“The launch costs plus a bit like mass to orbit over the next five years or so is gonna increase. The costs are gonna drop dramatically and mass orbit's gonna increase dramatically. Basically guaranteed SpaceX is driving this.”
Coogan: SpaceX Starship design will enable dozens of flights per day
“And you can imagine, you can see that at least structurally the design will enable like dozens of flights per day, like pretty easily.”
Coogan: Every founder and CEO should buy a Starlink for travel
“I do think that every founder, CEO should buy a Starlink and have it, because you cannot afford to not have good internet whenever you're traveling. Like, you're gonna be in some weird place, the internet's not gonna be good, you're gonna miss calls, and the c…”
Coogan: Starlink's manufacturing innovations will become universally adopted standard
“There's probably something in here that's a new way of thinking about how to mass manufacture that Will eventually be canonized and used everywhere and copy-pasted and that, that will be like the future of manufacturing and it will all be new.”
Falling launch costs will enable startups pursuing ideas off SpaceX's roadmap
“Launch is getting so cheap. Varda is one of the first movers, but there will be other companies that are doing things that are completely off of SpaceX's roadmap, but leverage the launch capabilities.”
Coogan: Category-winning startups often do not look like they fit the category
“And so it's like, there's all this, almost like this misclassification of like, the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category.”
Baker: SpaceX Offered Employee Secondary Liquidity Every Six Months for 10 Years
“If you're an employee, or even if you're an investor who has an SPV or you're directly on the cap table, you've had a chance to sell every six months for the last 10 years.”
Coogan: SpaceX leveraged excess launch capacity to create Starlink
“SpaceX built basically more launch capacity than there was demand for, but then Because there was space on every SpaceX rocket, and they were able to build them so, so efficiently, so affordably, they were able to put up a massive constellation of internet con…”
Coogan: US paid Russia up to $90M per seat before SpaceX Crew Dragon
“In 2002, a SpaceX capsule carried two astronauts to the space station from American soil. Closing a nine year gap in which the United States paid Russia as much as ninety million dollars a seat to hitch a ride.”
Coogan: Gwynne Shotwell earned $86M last year mainly in stock options
“Shotwell was paid eighty six million last year, mostly in the form of stock options.”
Starlink Deployed Over 650 Direct-to-Cell Satellites to Connect 12 Million Users
“Starlink has deployed more than 650 satellites dedicated to providing connections to cell phones as of the end of last year, connecting more than twelve million people, according to the company.”