My interview on Bloomberg TV @technology discussing South Korea's #tech / #startup landscape on April 12, 2017. Starts from 33:18 to 39:18. youtube.com/watch?time_conti… #VentureCapital #Startups

me with the SpaceX cafeteria lady after she becomes a billionaire from the IPO

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day. 400 of them are now worth over $100 million. These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries. Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000. Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous." The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before. Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

Great excerpt from @FortuneMagazine's Term Sheet: "SpaceX’s first employee, Tom Mueller, thinks the historic IPO is just the beginning" The guy who built SpaceX’s engines has thoughts on its IPO. Tom Mueller was employee No. 1 at SpaceX. He built the engines behind the Falcon 9 rocket that rewrote the economics of getting to orbit. Now, he runs Impulse Space, valued at $4.26 billion, which designs and manufactures space vehicles that move satellites from one orbit to another. So, when SpaceX filed for its IPO, Mueller had more skin in the game than most. His reaction when the S-1 dropped? “Finally.” For years, Musk was vocally hostile to the idea of taking SpaceX public. He’d lived through the whiplash of Tesla’s public market journey and made no secret of his preference for the freedom of staying private. But SpaceX’s ambitions have outgrown its balance sheet. The company is targeting 555.6 million shares at $135 each—a $75 billion raise that would be the largest IPO in history. At that price, the company is valued at roughly $1.75 trillion. Mueller told me that valuation “seems incredible”—and he meant it somewhat literally. SpaceX posted $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue with a $4.9 billion net loss, driven by nearly doubled capital expenditures of $20.7 billion, much of it going into AI development.  “You’ve got to understand what Elon’s selling,” he told me. The valuation is actually a bet on compute and data centers moving to space and that Musk has the vertically-integrated stack to make that happen: Musk has cheap rockets to get hardware into orbit, Starlink has already proven you can run serious computing power in space (the satellite internet business alone generated $11.39 billion in 2025 revenue). And between xAI’s Grok, Tesla’s robotics, and X, he’s sitting on more data to train AI models than almost anyone on the planet. “He has all the pieces,” Mueller said.  Doubting that thesis, Mueller explained, requires you to ignore SpaceX’s entire track record: Falcon 1, Falcon 9, crewed missions to the ISS, Starlink itself—every single one of those had a chorus of naysayers. “Are we still betting against Elon?” he said.  As for the trajectory of how the stock will perform, Mueller compared it to riding Tesla from IPO through years of delays before the stock eventually took off. His prediction: a high opening, a “valley of death” when schedule slips become public-market problems, and then—probably—a recovery. The difference, of course, is that being late is a lot more forgiving when you don’t have quarterly earnings calls.  The way Mueller sees it, SpaceX going public doesn’t just validate the space sector. It accelerates the timeline toward what he’s been working toward since he was a kid watching Star Trek: a true space economy, then megastructures built from lunar and asteroid resources, then outward. Next, Impulse is launching spacecraft Helios with a 2027 target. “I’m going long,” he said—and he wasn’t talking about the stock. #SpaceX #IPO #spacetech #datacenters #AIDatacenters

Looking forward to taking our exciting partnership with Nvidia to the next-level

SpaceX market cap tops $2 trillion after shares of Elon Musk's rocket company gain 23% on debut cnb.cx/49ZX6oW

SpaceX officially prices shares at $135 in the largest IPO ever techcrunch.com/2026/06/11/sp… via @techcrunch

This is not investment advice @zincfiveinc batteries: proprietary, patented nickel-zinc platform delivers superior safety, higher power density, a smaller footprint, and lower total cost of ownership, without the tradeoffs associated with lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries Proud of my $SPKL SPAC team! Great job Jim Rhee, @bernardmoon, and @SparkLabsGlobal! stocks.apple.com/ATh5t1JCbTp…

Awesome work by Jim Rhee, CEO of Spark I Acquisition Corp, Kurtis Jang (COO), and others! Looking forward to helping @zincfiveinc grow🚀 "Data Center Battery Maker ZincFive to Merge With SparkLabs SPAC" bloomberg.com/news/articles/… docs.google.com/document/d/1… (non-paywall link) #energy #battery #datacenters #AI #AIdatacenters #startups #venturecapital

Introducing “Comeback City: A Love Letter to San Francisco.” Proud to call this place home.

Best NBA game in a while.... and for the Spurs.. #NBA #nbaplayoffs #Knicks #Spurs

Any founder dissuaded by an investor saying "Apple/Google will do this" or now "the labs will do this" should also introspect on their level of commitment to the idea. That said, if you're directly in their tracks, ensure that (1) the market is big enough for more than one company to win in, and (2) your velocity advantage outpaces their distribution advantage.

Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Tech 25 #brainstormtech #fortune #Anthropic #claudecode #AI #aspen

SpaceX was less than 10 people back then. We didn’t even have office furniture.

you're telling me anthropic & google are paying spacex ~$26b a year for compute?!! this is more than half the run rate of openai & anthropic just from compute deals & that doesn't even factor in the rocket launches at all. elon accidentally ended up owning a significant portion of three of the scarcest assets in ai.. power, chips, & physical deployment capability. the best lesson here is that if you’re selling picks & shovels during a gold rush, you don’t necessarily need to find the gold. you just need everyone else to keep digging. & also non software elon is pretty much unstoppable, like prime michael jordan type thing.

Looking forward to speaking at @superai_conf in Singapore! #AI #conference #singapore

BREAKING: Top 100 guard Jalen Browm has committed to Wisconsin, he tells me for @Rivals. Brown is the highest ranked commit for the #Badgers since Sam Dekker in 2012. "I’m ready for all the pressure or anything that comes with that. I want to make my home state proud and bring championships.” on3.com/sites/badger-blitz/n… #Badgers

My New FAVORITE Jordan vs Lebron GOAT Debate Video youtu.be/4Rb0l2khKKE?si=fitb… via @YouTube #NBA #GOAT #MJ #bulls #Lakers #Cavs

Meet America’s ‘Disillusioned’: the 32% feeling betrayed and rejecting the establishment—and they’re not who you think fortune.com/2026/06/02/disil…

"Beyond the Sky: Jeffrey Yan turned down $100 million, airdropped billions to strangers, and can’t travel without a bodyguard. The story of how he built Hyperliquid" colossus.com/article/beyond-… #crypto #startup #hyperliquid