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00:00 Speaker A
Elon Musk is on a different mission with SpaceX as he sets his sights back on the moon. Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian joins now. All right.
00:06 Speaker A
So big picture, why, why’s Musk making this pivot? Why from Mars to the moon? Is this IPO timing? Is this, you know, this is just what’s realistic right now? What’s going on?
00:15 Pras Subramanian
I mean, I think it’s a combination, like you said, let’s start with the realism part, right? So Mars, as audacious as it was, getting out there in theory is completely unrealistic anytime soon, right? So you combine that with
00:36 Pras Subramanian
the IPO, right? That’s sort of how I I framed the the story I wrote is that that why would you do it now? IPO coming up. Um investors want clarity, they want a sure thing. Uh maybe you go small here and the moon base is not a small thing, but at least you can get there in a couple days time.
00:54 Pras Subramanian
And look, NASA is already planning the Artemis missions, right? The new ones that are coming up, you’re going to go to the moon, uh later in in March, as early as March in terms of like doing a mission around the moon with with with humans, not landing just quite yet, but we’re already doing it again. So it’s not that far of a stretch to for investors to look at and say, hey, moon is actually kind of doable here.
01:08 Speaker A
So what how does how does the moon strategy by the way? How has it fit into the broader Musk strategy? because there’s talk about the orbital data centers and XAI. How does it all stitch together?
01:19 Pras Subramanian
So Musk is saying that if you have a moon base, so you construct that thing, you make that moon base and you can actually make stuff like radiators and solar cells out there for these orbital data centers. I guess there’s a lot of silicon in the moon sand is so he says, right? So you can make these out there in the moon base.
01:34 Pras Subramanian
launch these satellites and I think that he calls the mass driver, which is basically a thing that just shoots stuff into the into the into orbit. And because it’s you’re in a low gravity situation, you don’t need a rocket. You can just launch it with this mass driver. Uh launch these data centers and satellites and whatever you want out into space to Earth, to Mars, I’m sorry, Earth and and the moon, maybe Mars, I don’t know, but um that’s sort of what he’s saying there.
01:54 Pras Subramanian
The XAI part, like that’s a little tricky, but maybe, you know, you can use that to harness, you know, design, planning, uh strategy, things like that on the moon with XAI. I’m just trying to say, you know, how the all the Musconomy works together and maybe that’s the component there for moon.
02:07 Speaker A
Inside SpaceX, Pras, now, what should we fo what will investors focus on? What’s making money?
02:11 Pras Subramanian
So, I’m just looking at the numbers here. This is not official because they’re not public, but uh SpaceX made 15 to 16 billion in revenue, 8 billion of that in profit. So, what are you looking at here? It’s launching payload. Launching into space is very expensive and and SpaceX has 90% of the of the market for that.
02:24 Pras Subramanian
So they have that business and they have Starlink, which uh supposedly is the most profitable business, the most revenue generating is Starlink satellite internet service. Um there’s talk of this Starlink phone, right, that could be happening. So, I think we’re going to hear more and more about that as the IPO sort of chatter heats up.
02:38 Speaker A
All right, yeah, just Musk comments by the way on Mars, building a city there 20 plus years out. There’s your timeline, Pras.
02:44 Pras Subramanian
I want to say one quick thing. Yeah. You can only launch to Mars apparently once every 26 months when the the planets align. That’s what Musk says, whereas with the with the moon every 10 days.
02:54 Speaker A
Yeah, there you go. It’s math.
02:57 Speaker A
Thank you Pras, I appreciate it.