FYI - For Your Innovation

Elon Musk put a $1 trillion revenue number on SpaceX, and the sell side has been staring at its models ever since. "Roughly five times wrong relative to what Elon said 2028 revenue could be," says Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. "That's absurd."

ARK hosted the call after the calls: a live post-earnings breakdown of SpaceX and Tesla with buy side and sell side in the same room. Cathie Wood, Brett Winton, Tasha Keeney, Daniel Maguire and Sam Korus of ARK Invest are joined by Alex Potter of Piper Sandler, Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, and Aaron Burnett of Mach33.

The group works through the numbers that moved them most: 20 gigawatts of power and cooling lined up for terrestrial compute, one to two Starship launches per week, 2 million driverless miles in eight months, and a 75% full self-driving attach rate on new Tesla deliveries. They debate where the money for all of it comes from, why Pierre Ferragu believes the vision-only approach to autonomy has cleared proof of concept, how Starmind and orbital compute could change the cost curve, and whether the SpaceX and Tesla merger that Brett Winton puts at 90% odds within 18 months actually clears the Tesla shareholder base.

They close on the bear case. Debt markets, regulation, China, execution risk over decades, and the possibility that the merger never happens at all.

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp, joins Sam and Brett with data from 80,000 businesses and over $275 billion in annual spend. His latest research, “Cracks in the AI Thesis,” finds AI spend is extraordinarily concentrated, with 1% of businesses driving 80% of it, and that those heaviest adopters are now slowing their spend even as token volumes keep climbing. Brett pushes back hard: three months is not a trend, prices have halved over the same window, and the gap between the median firm at $15 per employee per month and the top 1% at $7,000 to $10,000 is the whole story. The debate runs from revenue quality and venture capital (VC) -backed concentration risk to where spend could actually land five years out.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why falling prices can make AI spend look like it is slowing while usage keeps rising
Whether concentration in VC-backed buyers is a revenue quality problem for the frontier labs
What the gap between the median firm and the top 1% could mean for competition and private equity

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett open the Anthropic S-1, maybe the most impressive twelve months of revenue growth in corporate history, and debate whether a major AI-enabled cyberattack would be good or bad for the frontier labs. Then Nick breaks down Meta’s $90 billion raise, the filing suggesting Zuckerberg could raise $700 billion before losing voting control, and why the math on monetizing Muse may require Meta to build a bank. Finally, Elon Musk is publicly warning of an extinction event for neoclouds with chips they cannot plug in, and the team asks who that warning is really for.

Key Points From This Episode:
What the Anthropic S-1 reveals about gross margins, research and development (R&D) efficiency, and the risk factors everyone is quoting
Why Meta’s consumer agent math may not reach Instagram-level Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) without owning payments
Why compute now rents above $50B per gigawatt, and what that squeeze likely does to the neoclouds

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Brett cover a week of exciting developments. Brett was at the Tesla Roadster unveil in person and argues the event was primarily marketing for a prospective SpaceX Tesla merger, pointing to the swapped order of the earnings calls, SpaceX executives quietly following Tesla accounts over the weekend, and the window a shareholder vote would require. Then to CoreWeave, whose bonds are trading at a fifteen percent yield after being raised at nine, with no visible softening in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) demand to explain it. Brett’s suspicion is that a leveraged fund is being liquidated rather than anything fundamental breaking. Plus Anthropic’s reported numbers, why growth decelerating to 340% may still be the most remarkable twelve months of business performance ever recorded, and the non-consensus case that the closed labs are pulling away rather than getting caught.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why Brett reads the Roadster unveil as potential merger marketing, and what a combined SpaceX Tesla could unlock for both shareholder bases
Why CoreWeave’s bonds are trading at 15% while GPU demand shows no sign of softening
Why having the frontier model is what lets you build the cheap one, and why trading down to open weight may be the expensive choice

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett open on OpenAI’s release of 722 mathematical proofs and the one subject conspicuously missing from it, cryptography. Brett argues the nearer term threat to crypto is AI rather than quantum computing, and that the danger sits not in the cryptographic primitives but in everything built around them, from self-custody hardware to the exchanges now holding enormous honeypots. He also suggests quantum-safe encryption may be the more vulnerable life raft, and that a scrambled bank ledger could be far more disruptive than stolen coins. Then SpaceX reportedly pays $8 billion for Nextel’s old spectrum and wins Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for 15,000 direct-to-cell satellites, turning a service that was going to clip a dollar off your phone bill into a bid for the entire bill. Plus why SpaceX collects far more per gigawatt of compute than the neoclouds can.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why AI, not quantum computing, may be the nearer term threat to crypto, and why quantum-safe encryption could be more vulnerable than assumed
How SpaceX plans to turn home Starlink dishes into cell towers, and why the cellular business likely depends on selling broadband first
Why SpaceX collects $30 to $40 billion per gigawatt on short term compute deals while the neoclouds settle for far less

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94