Transcription
Let's hear from Peter Diamandis, early SpaceX investor, serial entrepreneur, lifelong space nerd, and friend of Alon Musk.
"Starship 12 flight test mission V3. Your reaction to to how that went?"
"Uh, well, listen, the fact that it was a brand new vehicle, brand new engines, uh, the most, you know, advanced engineering ever built by humans, uh, it was incredible success. uh you know what people have to realize is that you can't test a rocket uh a little bit at a time. You have to test the entire system. And the fact that the launch took off with its uh version three of its engines and the entire vehicle uh the largest most powerful uh you know engineering system ever launched by humans. Uh it was great. We're going to see Starship making incremental flights, getting uh better and better until the time where the entire vehicle is reflyable, refuelable on orbit, and becomes a platform to go to the moon, go to Mars, go beyond."
Peter is spot on. Starship flight 12, test flight 12, massive success. And you never really know how it's going to go until you actually put this thing, at least attempt to put this thing into space. By the way, little bit of context. This went to air prior to the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket explosion, a massive setback for Blue Origin. We all know the long-term goal of Starship is a colony on Mars with a million plus inhabitants, a self-sustaining colony on Mars, which will be an extremely expensive endeavor. But over the next few years, most SpaceX investors would do well to pay attention to the progress of Starship, specifically as it relates to data centers in space. It could be 10 years before a second company and this is optimistically has comparable launch capacity cost and cadence to where SpaceX is today. SpaceX could essentially have a free run at the next 10 plus years to launch a staggering amount of compute into space. Why Starship is also its capability and payload to orbit for first Starlink and then orbital data center. I wrote the at the beginning of the week about how clear the S1 was about the limitation of SpaceX's current access to compute and how much it's going to need in the future. You then had an exchange with Elon Musk, I think in the last 24 hours, right? Um or 48 hours about that exact issue. What was the point you were trying to relay to Elon there?"
"Uh the point is that uh he's not just built this is not just a rocket company, right? This is a vertically integrated satellite network, global broadband, sovereign communications, AI compute and ultimately offplanet infrastructure. You know, uh he is building a hyperscaler uh and not just an AI system. So his ability to succeed as a company uh goes beyond just the you know Grock as an AI system. He's providing the infrastructure for uh a large number of the frontier labs out there, you know. And what people need to realize about this company is it's the it isn't just a little bit ahead of the entire launch industry on planet Earth. It's orders of magnitude ahead uh beyond anything else. And everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, is in near infinite quantities in space. And so what we're buying is the next, you know, the global economy, you know, 2.0 and 3.0 as we look at buying into into SpaceX."
"Go global."
Peter's point about SpaceX being quote orders of magnitude ahead of the rest of the launch industry is accurate, extremely visible. I mean, you can't not notice if you're paying attention to the amount of orbital payload that SpaceX is deploying versus the rest of the world doing roughly 10 times as much as the entire rest of the planet combined. And that's before Starship, which is progressing nicely. Starship is going to massively increase not just the amount of mass to orbit, but also the cadence, the frequency with which they are able to launch. And as Peter points out, SpaceX essentially opening a new frontier. Orbital AI compute will be one part of that. But opening up space in general, space really is the final frontier. And unlocking access to this new frontier, the final frontier, extremely expensive, extremely challenging, a very long-term project. The only other company I'm aware of will enough resource to in theory have a shot outside of SpaceX would be Blue Origin, who as we are aware roughly 10 years behind. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say SpaceX is probably going to be first and far and away the biggest provider of orbital AI compute at any meaningful scale. They're going to have a major hand in building out a moon base. Likewise, Mars. And all of this will be extremely expensive, requiring SpaceX, the company, to bring in truly, wait for it, astronomical revenues and profits to fund this buildout in orbit, on the moon, and Mars. What I'm really getting at here is that in order for SpaceX to achieve their long-term goal, they need to must become one of, if not the most valuable companies in our solar system.
Peter, cuz I know you can, and we're pleased that you do. There's a lot of hand ringing and almost people feeling that at every turn the US uses China as the excuse as to why we need less regulation, why we need to go full throttle, why we need to win quote unquote. How much you seeing a space race US China and how much has SpaceX managed to dominate there visav not just US competition?"
"You know, we humans love competition and it drives us forward. And so if you think about this, you know, it was the US versus the Soviets and the Russians in the in the uh you know, 50 years ago. We're doing that same thing again. Um but this time it's beyond just a political race. It's an economic race again. Uh we're building out uh huge revenue engines as we're going forward. uh whether it's going to be mining the moon for resources or mining the asteroids for resources, we're also going to be building out a level of global uh compute infrastructure in Earth orbit. Uh and again, no one was talking about this a year ago. And today,"
"it's funny because it's true. This was not a conversation happening anywhere on Earth a year ago. And now everyone, and I mean everyone, is talking about orbital data centers. Interestingly enough, the only people who are skeptical of this, it won't work, it's impossible, the physics won't allow it, blah blah blah, are not people leading large AI companies, Google thinks it will work. Nvidia's CEO says it'll work. The only skeptics are people that don't seem to have any involvement in the AI world. Reddit moderators, unemployed neck beards, internet trolls. The bottom line is that everyone in this space, in this world, is completely on board. strongly believe the future of AI will be to do training and inference in space to massively scale up capacity and lower costs and again I come back to the overarching point here there's only one company on earth today that will be capable of deploying enormous amounts of compute to space every major hyperscaler is uh we see anthropic buying into XAI's uh or space XAI's data centers on Earth but they're also going to need the comput that's going to be given from orbit."
He's right. And again, I'd like to put this on the record. My prediction is not just that companies will be paying SpaceX AI to access the AI compute. I believe these companies will be so desperate they will help to finance SpaceX's own buildout of AI compute and then pay for the privilege to access it at a later point. This includes not just Earthbased, but also orbital AI comput. Imagine what a crazy prediction this is. a company, a competitor, another AI company goes to you, SpaceX AI, says, "Hey, um, can we give you billions, tens of billions of dollars for you to go build some AI compute, and then we'll pay you per month to access some of that compute we also help pay for, please." This sounds absurd until you realize that there's no company with the capability of building AI comput even close to as quickly as SpaceX AI. So, these companies, given the money, in theory, will get a massive return. it will be worth their while. But when it comes to orbital AI compute, there's no alternative to using SpaceX. So why not throw them a lot of money? Why not say, "Look, whatever we can do to help speed this up and scale this, we will. Can we get to be first in line for access to a large portion of your orbital AI compute if we help pay for it?" That's how wild things are getting.
You're a man who's driven by trying to solve the world's most pressing problems. You're also a man who happened to have got into SpaceX and and Google and other key companies very early. We're at this moment where people are questioning how it helps them. How is this being democratized in some way? How are we solving the world's greatest problems for everyone, not just the few? Peter, how are you thinking about that? Particularly when we look at a listing of a company that is already so valuable. Is there much left on the table in terms of democratization and buying of shares by retail investors?"
"Sure. So, let's hit the point you made first about solving the world's biggest problems. The single most powerful thing we humans have is our intelligence. And we're about to see human intelligence increased by not just 10 or 100fold, a millionfold, a billionfold. Right? It's the ability for us to to discover breakthroughs across physics and chemistry and biology and material sciences. All of these things are going to be driven by the use of these AI systems. And so I don't think people understand how uh how rapidly the economy is going to grow on the back of AI. Uh we're going to be uh solving aging as a fundamental, right? What is it worth if you can add 30 healthy years and then those extra 30 healthy years on your life buy you the next 50 healthy years or 100 healthy years? What is that worth individuals when we get to"
"by the way in terms of buying a couple of decades to buy even more decades he's essentially talking about longevity escape velocity if you live long enough to benefit from the tailwinds of massive improvements in health longevity regenerative medicine genetic reprogramming in theory there is a point in time where you can live long enough to live forever which would be really helpful if you just for example happen to be currently in the process of executing on some goals that will ultimately require many, many, many decades to achieve and you want to stick around to make sure that they have the highest probability of success. And make no mistake, AI is going to be a massive contributor to huge breakthroughs and progress around human longevity. And should go without saying, but the opportunity here is absolutely crazy. room temperature superconducting when we get to new uh ways of growing food, you know, twice as fast, five times faster, healthier. We're heading towards a world of abundance across everything, food, water, energy, healthcare, education, all of these elements. You know, when I interviewed Elon on my Moonshots podcast at the beginning of this year and then again in March, what he talked about uh and I believe this is we're going to see double and then tripledigit GDP growth. And this is happening not because we're working harder or we humans are smarter. It's on the back of AI and humanoid robotics. One of the things he said was that we're entering a world where AI and robots are going to create so much, so much product, so much availability that we could not want enough. Now, this sounds like, you know, a technoutopian vision, but we have to realize that all of the progress that we've seen in humanity, we're living lives today that are godlike compared to our parents and grandparents."
"Yes."
"Let me jump on something you just said. Thank you. You you spoke January 6th with Elon at length and then again in March and what you just said about robots. There is broad speculation right now about the prospect of a post IPO SpaceX merging with Tesla."
"Oh yeah, here we go. A topic that just won't go away. Surely it's simply a matter of time. Now whether or not investors at least Tesla investors approve this is another matter. But surely this will at least get put to Tesla investors. It's the most obvious union of all time."
On January 30th, January 30th, I reported they'd held talks prior to the XAI transaction. You say 100%. I mean, what are you learning from those two conversations? What do you know about how real that is? Why it makes sense?"
"It makes sense because it consolidates Elon's control today as as reported in the IPO in the S1. you know, there's super voting rights that he has and of course his inside uh uh owners uh I think it's like, you know, 80 plus percent voting control. Uh he doesn't have that in Tesla. Uh and by combining the companies, I think he'll have that. he'll have the ability to operate uh across all of this infrastructure and you know the a fleet of cyber cabs all of the Tesla vehicles out there uh that have compute capability on them have power on them as well. We're creating a global infrastructure on the ground and in space. So it just consolidates control. It makes his ability to implement his vision a lot more efficient. So, you know, I put it as not a matter of if and only a matter of when those two companies come together."
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