Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss. The critical crossroads. That shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company and Neurolink. I'm your host, Will Walden. Open AI now carries a higher valuation in secondary markets than SpaceX. That shift forces the question upon us all. Why are investors putting more weight on a chatbot company than the most successful private space company in history?
Are they taking down Elon? Employees selling their shares and Open AI have priced the company at more than $90 billion. Actual buyers are willing to pay this. That puts Open AI paper worth above SpaceX, which has recently been trading closer to 80 billion, down from a peak of 150 billion ish now. The difference comes from how each company makes money. SpaceX earns revenue through launches and Starlink subscriptions, and both demand huge amounts of capital and long
project timelines. Open AI generates cash by running software at scale. Jet, GBT plus subscriptions, enterprise integrations and it's API business are high margin streams that turn models into recurring revenue on a second to second basis. The opening eye expects more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, a number that seemed
unrealistic just two years ago. Now, that growth fuels investor belief that the company can keep compounding revenue without needing the kind of infrastructure build out this space launches require. The speed of adoption also matters. ChatGPT became one of the fastest apps to reach 100 million users, creating cultural pull that SpaceX has just never had. SpaceX has installed, though it's continuing to dominate the launch market and expand Starlink into global broadband
coverage. Evaluation depends on where investors see the strongest future gains. Right now, AI is the future. Rockets deliver contracts though, and AI and software delivers those growth curves up and to the right. I want to make a quick statement here. I've been sick for a little while now, last two ish weeks, 2-3 weeks. So I apologize if my shows haven't been up to date.
So when he reached out to me, somebody meant to comment and they said, you know, hey, we're I wanted the newest news and I'm thinking like I can't even talk. How am I supposed to do this? I have about 1000 episodes and through those episodes I've only been sick a few times. I've been doing this for six or seven years now and during that whole time I rarely went back into the archives to put something out just because one thing or another happens. Life happens.
So I do apologize for that and I hope you will continue to listen to the show. Now, if you're a long time subscriber or follower of the show, I really do appreciate you, but I need your help. If you like the show and you like what I do with it, please take a second and give us a five star rating on whatever podcast app you're on right now. You don't know how much this helps. If you want me to keep doing this show, please do that.
If we can get 25 star reviews in the next few days, that would Jack us right to some crazy amount of of spread, spread of the knowledge that we have of Elon. And we're going to continue doing this for a very long time. Been doing it for seven years now. I'm not going to stop. So I need your help though. Five star review, please. I appreciate you. Now let's get back into some Elon news because open AI is, you know, they're coming after him.
We know how Elon and Open AI don't really get along either. So the Microsoft partnership further pushes Open AI's edge and by embedding opening eyes models into Windows often and at Office and Azure, Microsoft has given its distribution that no competitor can even match. It's on every desktop computer basically. SpaceX doesn't have that kind of consumer facing pipeline. They work with NASA and private companies that launch satellites and people too.
It's contracts with NASA and the Pentagon secure cash flow, but they don't create mass market lock in the way the ChatGPT does. Like I said before, ChatGPT people sign up every second. People don't launch rockets every second and they don't get contracts every second. They do get big contracts of SpaceX for millions or billions of dollars, but nothing like open AI and chap TPT which can get that money much faster and up and to the right.
Unlike SpaceX, which has to wait for wait for these contracts and fight for these contracts now. Elon Musk's connection adds another layer of irony here. He Co founded Open AI before leaving in 2018 after a dispute over its direction. Now the company that he helped launch has eclipse SpaceX and valuation. His response has been to build XAI in its crock chatbot inside of X. But that product is far behind Open AI in market traction.
The way investors allocate capital shows a broader shift to space infrastructure is long term intangible. It's things you can actually go up and touch a rocket. AI software is immediate and it's scalable. You build more data centers. Investors prefer businesses that can grow without hardware bottlenecks. Spacex's Starship, it takes years for them to get a Starship off the ground while used to. And now they do it every 3-4 months and hopefully they want to do it every few days.
But right now it's a hardware bottleneck, and Open AI shares now command more than those of SpaceX in private markets because of this. The comparison also shows how narratives shape this value. SpaceX put satellites in orbit and lands rockets vertically, but it operates largely behind the scenes in secrecy. Except for when you're on Hwy. 4 and you can watch Starship being built at Starbase.
Open the eye through ChatGPT has become part of daily life for students, developers, enterprises, business people. Everybody uses ChatGPT. If you don't use ChatGPT, you're one of the few. Now that visibility translate into more demand for its shares too, and also more money for open AI. SpaceX is still one of the most important private companies in the world. They're going to fly us to Mars. That's going to be the most important feat in all of human history.
Open AI will just be a chat bot at that point. Open the Eye has reached a point where it's influence, revenue growth and investor appetite have given it the crown as the most valuable US startup. What do you think Elon thinks about this? Let me know in the comments. Now. 2025 software built to protect the predict the next word is worth more to investors than rockets that will potentially lead humanity to a habitat on another planet.
Think about that for a moment. What's more important to you? What's more important to humanity? A chat bot, open AI with AGI or landing people on Mars? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for listening everybody. Like I said before, I'm a little bit, as you can tell, a little stuffy and have had a horrific 3 weeks of sickness so I appreciate you sticking around and it will get better from now on. Take care, everybody. Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly.
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