Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook's Weekly - May 3 - Uncorking the AST SpaceMobile Production Line

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Kook's Weekly - May 3 - Uncorking the AST SpaceMobile Production Line · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

0:06
This is the AST Space Mobile podcast and.
0:10
We just basically turn your phone be seamless regardless of
0:14
where you are. We don't want the user even to
0:16
know that it's connected by satellite, satellite.
0:21
Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
0:27
Good evening everyone, thanks for joining this time I can
0:29
actually see people join and I'm just trying to fix my microphone
0:34
off. So shocking to see people still
0:39
joining after all the people on the Internet saying that.
0:43
And Pan man, myself and Katsi are scammers, pumpers and retail
0:47
predators. So you know, with that as a
0:49
preface, anything you read on the Internet, assume it's true.
0:53
And then, you know, let the people who are sharing their
0:58
diligence, their opinions, their research, you know, fight for
1:03
themselves. And so I know, you know, it's
1:07
kind of blows my mind at this point for someone who's been
1:10
sharing all of their research, which I believe all my stuff is
1:13
cited. I get that I'm a little bit of a
1:16
cartoon, certainly a little bit loose on my shit posts and
1:19
things like that. But I think a lot of you know me
1:22
at that point and you can see, you know, my research and the
1:24
grind of really kind of undertaking for the past five
1:28
years, you know, along with Catsy and Pin Man, you know, and
1:32
then you know, other other people obviously, like Tanner
1:35
and Kevin and you know, a lot of people on this phone.
1:39
And so always makes me wonder why the vitriol toward this, You
1:43
know, why why don't these bears in shorts sort of just do their
1:47
thing, leave it alone? Like, why is there such catnip
1:50
to this name? And it really reminds me a lot
1:53
of how Tesla evolved. There's just this hatred and
1:57
this desire to see this really deterministic entrepreneur fail
2:03
in Elon Musk. And there's, there's just
2:06
something about it. People really don't like these
2:08
sort of visionary founders. And I'm trying to think of an
2:13
exception where that visionary founder actually really failed
2:17
'cause they'll point to the Trevors of the world.
2:19
But there was never any substance to that.
2:21
You never really had the bona fide validation.
2:24
Now the bears will say, you know, Nikola had GM validating
2:29
it, but we all kind of know that was bullshit research.
2:31
GM just didn't do any and we we know and it's verifiable that
2:37
the many, many partners, not just one of AST space mobile
2:41
have done incredible amount of work.
2:42
We don't have to take their word on it.
2:45
We can see it all in the testing and the third party validation
2:48
and things like that. So I, I find it remarkable and
2:51
it really comes out in force when the stock is crappy.
2:54
Last week was really hard. I certainly take a toll, unlike
3:00
a proper pumper. What I don't do is, you know, be
3:03
like, buy the dip guys. It's going to be OK.
3:05
I have real sense of gallow humor.
3:07
It's just the way I'm wired. I think it really drives the
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unpan man crazy. He's like usually like kook,
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you're like dark humor is scaring people.
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And I'm like, bro, it's who I am.
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There's darkness in my heart. And you know, and Pan man can
3:22
be, you know, the like happy Baker, whatever.
3:25
That's his persona. It's actually like how he is as
3:27
a person. He's very pleasant, nice
3:28
individual. I'm a little bit more of a gloom
3:35
doom Gallo. The world is falling.
3:37
I like to embrace the darkness. And so when the when the stock
3:40
is trading terribly, I don't fight it.
3:42
I let it enter my soul and course through my body like a
3:46
virus, waiting for my immune response to trap that virus and
3:50
kill it brutally and totally. And so last week was one of
3:54
those days where I just let my emotional gate open and let it
3:58
come in. And it sucked.
4:02
Last week sucked. You can see the burnout.
4:04
You can see everyone fighting and crashing out.
4:07
And usually that happens at times at the bottom.
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So this this decline has been somewhat vexing, but kind of
4:14
actually on schedule in my experience with ASTS.
4:17
We'll have these awesome runs up to 130 high 5.
4:20
You know, I'm like Tanner, bro, why don't you like move in, man?
4:23
We'll start a fraternity and that's always the top.
4:26
And you know, classic, that's what happened.
4:28
And and then you get the decline.
4:30
And then usually it's like, OK, this is going to be short
4:33
because look at all these events.
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And that's when bottoms don't form because there's still hope.
4:38
And then we have all the TA guys come.
4:41
All of a sudden I'm like, please reform trader, show me the way.
4:45
And unfortunately, like all of his triangles, there's always a
4:48
story. And he's always the first to
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admit these stories can change. And he's looking for narratives
4:54
that didn't take hold. He's not predicting the future
4:56
and he never, never is saying he is.
4:58
He's looking for probabilities around risk return.
5:03
And then you can see how it shifts.
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And I find the TA so interesting because it really shows the
5:09
collapse of the human spirit at various levels.
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And you know, when the weakest new people sort of fold and
5:16
capitulate and really like, where does the stock have to go
5:20
for people who don't know it well and don't own it to step
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in? And one thing I've always found
5:25
in my career that is, you know, then the spear that has slice my
5:30
heart is I generally know more about an investment than anyone
5:36
else. And in this instance, anyone
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else is like with the exclusion of Katzie Ampan Mantana or Kevin
5:41
Shannon. You know, there's like, OK,
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there's a couple people that know better than I do, but by
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and large, I I probably know it more than anyone else.
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And so as a result, I have the most confidence.
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And guess what happens when you have the most confidence?
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My discount rate is the lowest. I've been willing to price it
5:55
the highest because I hold it when it goes up.
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And then what happens when the stock goes down?
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Guess who does not have buying capacity?
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Me. You know, we're not all ampan
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man who can like buy the dip with his royalty streams from
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selling like a sort of consumer goods all across Asia.
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You know, I don't have that sort of backstop in life, so I just
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eat it. And that's what happens
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generally in the market is the people who know it the best
6:22
already own it. And so they don't provide any
6:25
buying support. It has to reprice so that, you
6:29
know, people who are generalists can go like, oh, I get it.
6:32
I I don't have this knowledge. I don't really understand non
6:35
communication use cases. I don't really understand L band
6:37
like, but I do generally understand this NAV framework.
6:42
And so I can see a floor, you know, I not me, but this
6:46
hypothetical buyer that steps in.
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I can see how there's downside support at call it 50 bucks, you
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know, whatever. And that's where you then you
6:54
start to have this support and it's this tiered level of buyer
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graded by people who are the most bullish, who know it the
7:02
best. And then the people who are the
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least bullish know it the least and use a different valuation
7:07
regime at various points. That's who's going to set the
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price. And I've seen this throughout my
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career. This narrative works really well
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on stylized examples like oil and gas where you'll have things
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like 1P reserves versus 3P reserves.
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And so using that as an analogy, it actually makes a lot of
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sense. It's like, OK, what's the hard
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NAV here? That's where the conservative
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distress guy just steps in and goes, I own it here.
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And then the, the person that really knows the, you know, the
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geology, etcetera is like, well, I'm going to give these like 3P
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reserves value because I actually really have a view.
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Well, they're the ones that will own the stock at the highest
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price and doesn't mean they're the dummy because if they're
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right, the stock might go up a ton.
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The distress guy never bought it because it never got to his
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clearing price for entry. And so there's no right or wrong
7:53
answer here, but it's very useful to understand sort of the
7:56
the path dependency of where these levels come into play.
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And this past week we've really had a lot of despair.
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And again, like I said, and now I can see Anpan Man join.
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Well, Anpan man was away. I was, you know, just to remind
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him, especially when he's on mute and can't respond.
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I was just saying how he's usually like, you know, kook
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your dark sense of humor, you know, scares people and things
8:16
like that. And I just again, I just try to
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embrace it. Anyone, you know, everyone
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should know me at this point where when I'm posting like all
8:23
caps, like there is no floor. You can go 6 feet under and like
8:28
pictures of like screaming cats. I'm usually laughing my ass off
8:33
when I post those things right about, you know, right before I
8:36
go jump in and surf and like leave everyone to ponder those
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posts. So don't freak out when you see
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that. That's actually when I'm like
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the most bullish 'cause I'm just screaming with myself.
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And anyway, so let's get to the let's get to the facts of the
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matter, which really is people should realize that I'm a total
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wing nut nut job, unstable person who channels all of his
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frustrations in life through researching 1 stock and one
9:00
stock only. And so know your sources, do
9:03
your own work. And you know, all these people
9:07
are calling me a retail scammer again, I have no idea.
9:10
I'm not a retail scanner, so that's my also my comment is I
9:13
am not a retail scammer. So I hope that allays everyone's
9:16
fears. But next week, not this week,
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but the next coming week, we have ASTS earnings.
9:23
This is going to be a very interesting call.
9:25
So on one hand, they're going to have to talk about what we
9:27
already know, which is the failure of BB7 to make orbit
9:32
and, you know, past tense. So what everyone is focused on
9:35
is batch shipment #1 and really what that means in terms of, you
9:41
know, what I call 3 till Infinity.
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So yes, I have the meme all preps for people that go back to
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early 1990s RAP. 3 to Infinity is my theme of what's about to
9:53
happen. Once we have the next batch of
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three satellites, they will presumably have uncorked and
10:00
debottlenecked the entire production line.
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And so it really is 3 till Infinity.
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And I believe that on the earnings call, we're going to
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have, if not shipment already, but very high visibility toward
10:13
the next shipment, which might not be enough for some people,
10:16
But I believe for a lot of us who are long term investors is
10:19
going to be quite enlightening. And then we could very easily
10:24
have some developments around some military contracts and
10:27
things like this. So it's going to be an important
10:29
earnings call and really set the tone because it's going to
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define the timeliness of this investment into the back half of
10:35
the year. And so if they can convince
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people that they really uncorked the production bottlenecks,
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which I think I personally have a pretty good handle of, and
10:45
it's one of those things where it can certainly seem darkest
10:48
before dawn. Many people can confuse darkest
10:51
before pitch Black Death, end of the world.
10:54
That's what is fun about markets is, you know, the same
10:56
information can lead people to believe that the patient has in
10:59
fact died. I think that this earnings call
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is going to be one of those awakenings and could set the the
11:07
fever for people realizing that this is a second-half of 2026
11:12
gangbuster investment. And what is going to really
11:15
help, too, is any increased visibility the company can
11:19
provide around monetization because now the bears are back
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out of like, Oh yeah, of course the tech works.
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Wait, what? And oh, yeah, I guess they'll be
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able to build these satellites even though they still like to
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rain on that parade. But now we're kind of back to,
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you know, there's no market and you know, it's just it's
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interesting to see the bear narrative change, which is fine,
11:40
they're entitled to it. I could care less, but it is
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interesting to track. And so into this earnings call,
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let's review what our bakery correspondent reporting live
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from his high carb lifestyle shows that we have in terms of a
11:57
setup. We have all time high short
12:00
interest. We have acutely negative
12:02
investor sentiment. So yours truly has certainly
12:05
crashed out like angry want to go break stuff.
12:10
Having my kids tell me that I rage bait that much.
12:14
I don't think my kids actually know what rage bait means, but
12:17
that's what they said. They're like daddy, you rage
12:19
bait because the stock went down.
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Like, OK, wake up call, probably should get more balanced life.
12:25
But then we see the implied and realized volatility near their
12:28
lows, you know, about to have an explosion and then we have the
12:32
big upside catalyst to come. And then a lot of us, as you
12:35
might not be surprised, are tracking very, very carefully
12:38
all sorts of little tea leaves that that make us believe that a
12:43
lot of things are going really right.
12:45
So we have a really great set up, which is nice.
12:48
The company has to deliver and almost sort of like you need,
12:52
you know, that invisible hand to come down from heaven and guide
12:55
you toward the light. AT&T pops up and, you know,
12:58
gives us a little bit of love on on X, which is interesting
13:03
because just the other day we or actually last week, we had that
13:06
conversation about analyzing John Stanky's comments from the
13:09
earnings call where despite him saying, oh, we have all these
13:12
options and we're going to partner with, you know, SpaceX
13:15
and Amazon. What he really said is we cannot
13:19
let ASTS fail because we depend massively on them.
13:22
And we have no idea when these other services will actually be
13:25
available. And so the forensic analysis of
13:27
what Stanky said was incredibly positive.
13:33
And anyone that, you know, was wondering about that, go back to
13:36
last week's weekly where I've documented all this.
13:38
And so sure enough, AT&T is out kind of pumping, letting us know
13:43
that, you know, they still love us.
13:46
And what I think is also useful is remember, we're not in a
13:50
political debate where there's like little gotcha moments like
13:53
this is not fake life where you're trying to impress the CNN
13:56
anchor about something ridiculous.
13:58
This is real life where you're trying to either create value or
14:01
die. And it's binary in the ultimate
14:05
outcome of like you have done it or you have not done it.
14:08
And the experts will like to measure all these goal posts on
14:13
a relative like what they said and what they did, but failing
14:16
to recognize that the movement of a company toward domination
14:21
is very hard to do. And so when you look at there's
14:25
this guy, I think he's some language, I can't say, but his
14:30
his username is at Stefan Pooh 13.
14:33
And he's from some country that uses Cyrillic.
14:37
I can't remember what you call that alphabet, but non, non
14:41
Roman alphabet. And he goes, the problem is this
14:45
company grew the valuation by setting unrealistic
14:48
expectations, not by delivering what they guided for.
14:51
Well, he's got this totally wrong when it comes to the
14:54
primary act of like making money.
14:57
And so I view myself again as a shadow board member.
15:00
I view myself as running my own family office, thinking like an
15:03
industrialist, you know, hidden from view, but trying to control
15:07
the world through my investments, trying to kind of
15:11
be Iron Man, honestly, in my spare time.
15:13
And so when I think about this, sure, I could get wrapped up in
15:17
like what guidance was and the fact that they annoyingly miss
15:19
it almost for sport at this point.
15:22
But then I step back and go, what is it I am trying to
15:26
achieve as Iron Man? I am trying to have Asts win.
15:34
And so initially, the experts said the satellites would not
15:38
work at all. They would get no contracts, the
15:40
FCC would not approve them, they could not hire, no one would
15:43
launch them. There is no spectrum, there is
15:46
no government business and a whole host of other things.
15:50
And so then what have they done? The satellites work, They have
15:55
almost all the M and OS. They have FCC writing the rules
15:57
for them. They've recruited global talent.
16:00
They have launched contracts galore.
16:02
They own their own spectrum in the most valuable market in the
16:04
world. They are part of Golden Dome in
16:07
addition to 10 other programs. And there's a lot of other
16:10
things they've done like set up a European subsidiary, God knows
16:15
how many other things they've done that haven't thought about.
16:17
And so again, expectations are relative.
16:20
The market ultimately sets expectations based on the price
16:23
of the stock. When the stock was $2.00, the
16:25
market expectation was this company goes bankrupt.
16:28
So they have exceeded the market's expectation at $2.00.
16:32
The market's expectation at $20 was they might not go bankrupt
16:36
and they might muddle along and maybe there's some strategic
16:38
value to this company, but we have no idea if they can
16:40
actually deliver anything. The company has exceeded that
16:43
expectation as well. And so first for for those of
16:46
you they're not professional investors, it's very easy to get
16:50
influenced by others and to really be infected by this line
16:58
of thinking of like, well, they missed their guidance.
17:01
Tesla has missed their guidance. Lots of companies have missed
17:05
their guidance. The question is, did they miss
17:08
their guidance because they were a mature industry leader and
17:12
they're missing guidance like revenue because of competitive
17:15
onslaught? That's a problem.
17:18
And so when like Chegg started to misguidance because ChatGPT
17:23
was invented, you have a problem.
17:26
When Tesla misguidance because they were revolutionizing the
17:31
entire concept of what transportation was by
17:36
commercializing and building the first scale electric vehicles
17:40
that people wanted to buy in the world, that's a different type
17:44
of missing guidance. When SpaceX is unable to hit a
17:49
launch target for Starship, that's a different type of miss.
17:54
That's an innovation miss versus pressure from competition miss.
18:00
And so when I look at this, the whining and crying and moaning
18:04
and groaning on ASTA missing guidance is not the same thing
18:09
as Blockbuster. Missing guidance because Netflix
18:13
is destroying their entire foundation of being is not the
18:19
same. And people can do whatever they
18:23
want, surely. But what I really want to make
18:26
sure people at least think about is making sure you're
18:30
contextualizing A disruptive guidance miss because a business
18:35
is about to suffer versus a guidance miss because a company
18:39
is embarking on making the impossible possible.
18:43
If the latter and they succeed, you're going to be OK even if
18:50
they miss some guidance, because what it means is that everyone
18:52
else is going to try to copy them is really far behind, and
18:54
they will probably also miss whatever timing.
18:56
And we're already seeing that with Starling.
18:58
Their service sucks and who knows when it will not suck.
19:03
And Kiper has had all sorts of problems and they're really far
19:05
behind. So it's really important to
19:08
contextualize this. And then the goal posts are
19:12
being shifted by the Fudsters all the time.
19:16
And so that what I wrote in the tweet is the, the world
19:20
previously thought ASTS was, you know, 4th down in like 1,000,000
19:24
yards, basically impossible. And it's just not the same when
19:31
when looking at the nature of what they're trying to achieve,
19:34
the difficulty in immateriality of missing guidance versus
19:38
getting it right and solving the natural challenges you have of
19:41
doing something no one's ever done before.
19:44
So that's an important point. Then let's go check in with
19:47
Katzie. And so there were some
19:50
interesting developments around Spectrum.
19:52
I actually meant to look into this a little bit more.
19:55
It shows to screw around on a six foot 4 surfboard instead,
19:59
which was a way better use of my time.
20:01
I can catch up on the Spectrum stuff tomorrow, but point is the
20:07
company is using all sorts of techniques to massively increase
20:11
the capacity. Of their spectrum, what's really
20:14
neat about this stuff is using different waveforms on the same
20:18
spectrum. So those waveforms aren't going
20:20
to interfere. So you can kind of shoot wave A
20:22
and shoot wave B on the same spectrum and achieve different
20:26
things like radar versus communications.
20:30
And so that obviously provides an incredible opportunity for
20:33
monetization of of the company. And these are all sort of the
20:37
exciting things. And when Katzie brought these
20:40
things up three years ago, to say he was laughed out of the
20:42
room is an understatement. And again, that's where people
20:45
like Tim Farrar went truly batshit and would say some of
20:49
the most vile things possible to Katzie, which is just, again,
20:53
remarkable. If you know the guy at all, He's
20:55
just like really nice guy. And, and to, you know, accuse
20:59
this guy of some of the things that Tim Farrar accused Katzie
21:02
of being is, is just simply, you know, like spitting derogatory
21:09
words at Mother Teresa. And, you know, and then it turns
21:12
out Katzie's right, you know, and the joke, you know, we have
21:15
if Katzie's right about everything, the guy's kind of
21:18
been right about everything. And it's not because he was
21:20
guessing. He saw it in the documents.
21:23
And he put one and one together. And so the company, despite some
21:26
of their efforts to hide some of these things for competitive
21:28
reasons, would give just enough little clues.
21:31
And Katzie would bury himself in these FCC filings and ITU
21:35
filings and is a is a very inquisitive guy with evidently a
21:43
very technical background, but certainly a capacity to learn
21:48
really unlike anyone else I personally know.
21:50
And he used that to figure some things out and he was very
21:54
generous to share it all with us.
21:56
And lo and behold, he's right. And so he's useful to go back
21:58
and, and for, I know for Ampam man and I, we're always just
22:02
sort of amazed because we realized I had to kind of listen
22:07
to this guy, you know, three or four years ago when Space Mob
22:09
was like 6 people. And, you know, we didn't like be
22:13
dismissive of him. But at some level we're like,
22:15
are we really on this conference call with this guy?
22:17
And it's like stocks at 2 bucks, bro.
22:19
Like don't give a shit about your radar theory.
22:21
Like we just like can't go bankrupt.
22:23
And, you know, but we entertain him because we're nice guys too.
22:26
MP man and I are both are generally not.
22:28
We're not going to be like, yo, you're wasting our time.
22:31
And we're really glad you listened to him because it gave
22:32
us incredible amount of confidence about all sorts of
22:35
other things and made us sort of believers.
22:38
But it is, you know, worth calling balls and strikes.
22:41
And so now we're seeing a lot of these things come out into the
22:43
open and it's remarkable. So now let's get to the AST
22:48
proxy statement. And so look, people call us paid
22:53
pumpers. I would just like to point out
22:55
the company doesn't even pay its executives.
22:57
So they really don't have a paid pumper budget.
23:00
They give us XL size T-shirts which don't fit me because I am
23:05
a solid medium. So even the consideration in
23:08
which they give their paid bumpers some schwag like I can't
23:11
even wear it. So I would, you know, put that
23:13
on the proxy, you know, give Kuka XLT shirt and he wants a
23:19
medium and that's my bonus for 15,000 tweets.
23:25
So that's a bum deal, but it's a better deal than a bell got
23:28
because a bell got 0. And it's really useful to
23:32
appreciate that. Again, we have an owner
23:34
operator. He is, he finally got a stock
23:37
award, which is I'm sure forced upon him.
23:40
But then the other executives. And so a guy like Scott made
23:44
$250,000 base. So sure, you know, better than
23:48
working at McDonald's, but he's also, you know, senior managing
23:52
director level at, you know, any, any global investment bank.
23:56
Shanti Gupta, partner level guy at any big three accounting
24:01
firm. In fact, that's what he was.
24:02
Those guys make a couple 1,000,000 bucks a year.
24:05
God only knows what Doctor Yao could make, like what his value
24:09
at market is. It's probably a lot.
24:11
And so these guys really make all of their compensation in
24:15
stock. They are bullish and they're not
24:18
just blowing out of all their stock when they get it.
24:20
They're taking, you know, relatively modest prints to get
24:23
some liquidity for their families to pay for stuff like
24:26
schools trips, probably healthcare 'cause they're
24:30
probably working their ass off and, you know, need to get their
24:32
Pernovo exams. And so it's good to see this
24:35
proxy. And just remember, a Bell is
24:38
playing to win. And we have an owner operator.
24:40
And for a lot of us, the fact that a Bell wasn't really
24:43
leaking anything to himself and was only earning economics in
24:48
the exact same way we were, you know, probably in order of
24:53
importance, a Bell taking $0.00 in salary and being an owner
24:58
operator and then #2 catsy existing.
25:01
Those are probably the two most important things for my
25:03
investment thesis. And so I recommend everyone to
25:06
learn how to read a proxy because incentives Dr. outcomes.
25:12
And Elon says that the most, and I truly believe it, incentives
25:17
Dr. outcomes. And so a Bell's incentive is
25:21
make the stock go up. So far that has been generally
25:26
the outcome worth noting. So now let's get to stuff like
25:32
building, you know, metal in orbit, which I guess some some
25:36
of our learned people care about.
25:39
Well, in order to get metal in orbit, you need people on Earth.
25:43
And AST investors pointed out that the AST space mobile
25:48
recruitment Dr. continues And so there's now more jobs
25:52
outstanding on the website than there were previously.
25:58
So there's over 200 company continues to grow.
26:02
And we have to ask ourselves, you know, what are what are they
26:04
delivering into? And we believe that that's a
26:06
multiple shell company. The more I sit back and think
26:10
about this, there's some analogs that are close to home for me.
26:15
One of which is the rise of my personal hero, Ken Griffin.
26:21
So some people might be taken aghast at how the person who is
26:25
responsible for the short ladder attacks could and somehow be my
26:28
hero. Well, Ken Griffin is an S class
26:32
badass I don't know that I've ever met.
26:35
And yes, I have met someone who is a more brilliant business
26:41
tactician with an ability to hold and really exclude
26:48
complacency from a business, to innovate and see opportunity and
26:52
adjust with markets like this guy.
26:57
But the real genius behind Ken was figuring out how to build a
27:01
business and infrastructure a very efficiently.
27:05
Doesn't really apply to Asts because what Ken did is
27:07
basically build out world class infrastructure through pass
27:10
through expense reporting that LP's in theory got the benefit
27:13
of through returns, but never really got the ownership of what
27:16
ultimately led to things like Citadel securities as well as
27:19
like the entire high frequency trading business sign up.
27:23
But what Ken did is he woke up one day and boom, he basically
27:27
has Goldman Sachs as a guy without having taken outside
27:32
money. He's raising bonds.
27:33
But it's it's actually just astounding that you look when
27:37
you look at the rise of Citadel and how they did it.
27:40
And so now he has weapons grade infrastructure around the world.
27:44
Pretty cool. What gets me so excited again,
27:47
as a shadow board member, Iron Man, secretive industrialist
27:52
trying to control the world through my investments reality.
27:57
I just own the stock at a stupid brokerage account.
27:59
But you know, it's kind of fun to to say this stuff.
28:02
What I think about is, yeah, cool, we have like all these
28:05
satellites, but what we also really have is this unbelievable
28:08
infrastructure to build satellites.
28:11
That's really neat. And what we've really seen in
28:14
the world is this value of like, wait for it, manufacturing, you
28:20
know, pretty wild that for the whole, you know, big chunk of my
28:25
life, everyone was like, software eats the world,
28:27
software eats the world. And people were really investing
28:30
in electrons. And then, you know, you wake up
28:34
one day and you realize, like the stuff you actually really
28:36
need in this world still requires atoms.
28:40
And so it's physical plant. And you look at what's important
28:44
in the world right now. It's, you know, do you have a
28:45
physical plant to go build a bunch of Tomahawk missiles?
28:47
You know, do you have the shipyards go build a bunch of
28:49
ships? Do you have the big battery
28:51
manufacturers to build EVs, to make humanoid robotics, to build
28:57
ships, to have data centers? It's actually like the atoms
29:02
that have mattered. And I still think that ASTS,
29:06
when people take a step back, they're going to go, holy crap,
29:09
this company has global infrastructure to be one of the
29:11
largest satellite manufacturers by tonnage in the world.
29:15
And what really hit me was last week when I was watching this
29:17
video from SpaceX, there's this 28 minute video Elon put out.
29:21
It was so cool. And so I highly recommend people
29:24
find this and watch it. It's about Starship because you
29:26
just look at the physical plant that they've built, the rocket
29:29
manufacturing facility, the test facilities, it's unbelievable.
29:34
The the physical infrastructure they've built.
29:38
I know it can be replicated because Blue Origin has done it,
29:40
but a Blue Origin is, you know, it's like one of the top 10
29:42
richest guys in the universe decided this is the thing he was
29:44
going to focus on. So yeah, the, the barriers are
29:47
pretty high. We'll see if Rocket Lab can do
29:49
it, but there's very few companies that can do this.
29:51
So if you're building up the infrastructure to manufacture
29:55
rockets, test them, and, you know, really then do cool things
29:58
with them, it's pretty scarce. Good.
30:00
There's some real barriers there.
30:02
What ASTS is doing is this vertically integrated sort of
30:06
Manhattan Project for satellite manufacturing in a world that's
30:09
now realized that the secular trend is space and satellites.
30:12
And I go, you know, again, for my little would be, you know,
30:15
Bruce Wayne mentality, like, that's cool.
30:19
That's my little industrial empire.
30:21
And I don't think that people really understand the ASTS
30:25
thesis in that way. It's usually like, will the tech
30:27
work? And they're thinking about the
30:29
little Bluebirds popping out of the nest.
30:31
But the nest itself is an unbelievable source of
30:36
competitive advantage. They've done two things.
30:39
They've designed the cutting edge technology, but then they
30:41
had to design and build the cutting edge physical plant to
30:44
manufacture it. All 2 very hard things.
30:47
And that goes back to the winding moaning and groaning
30:50
thing we just talked about a second ago.
30:52
That when they miss expectations.
30:54
Well, yeah, no shit, dude. They're they're building the
30:56
house right now. It's hard and I don't think in
31:04
the house is actually the wrong analog there.
31:07
What's the right thing? I mean, they're literally
31:08
building the factory while they tried to build the product.
31:12
And these are two very, very hard things.
31:14
It's not like Porsche retooling and being like, surprise,
31:18
there's a 9/11 GT3 SC with a manual.
31:21
We said we're never going to build AGT convertible, but now
31:23
we have with a manual assholes who you know all about spider
31:27
RSS and you know yeah sure, Stew Gart can just like retool and
31:31
pop out a new $300,000 car no problem.
31:34
But building the factory in Stuttgart was very hard.
31:38
So the 9/11 pretty cool piece of intellectual property, but then
31:42
the plant to build the 9/11's also pretty cool piece of
31:47
technology. And ASES has bun both of those
31:49
things. And so again, when you're
31:50
missing guidance, you got to ask yourself, well, is it because
31:53
I'm doing 2 extremely hard things which when complete, give
31:56
me these unbelievable modes and unbelievable sources of value,
32:01
or the missing guidance because of some competitive pressure
32:04
like the blockbuster analog? Again, they are not the same.
32:08
And you need to develop some cognitive skills in life to
32:13
realize when two things are massively different that lead to
32:18
massively different like life outcomes for yourself.
32:20
So that's my, you know, inculcation of this point.
32:25
So now let's get to the other things that are hard with
32:28
satellite companies. So you got to have metal in
32:30
orbit, but you also have to have stuff on the ground.
32:33
You have to have ground stations.
32:35
So we had seen, we didn't actually really tweet this
32:38
because it seemed like the company hadn't really intended
32:42
for this to be public. But now it's coming out.
32:44
There had been something in the SES, which is a European
32:47
satellite company in their annual report talking about
32:50
their their deal with AST space mobile.
32:52
Well, SES was buying Link and they're a European sort of
32:57
satellite TV provider. Like what what are they doing
33:00
with ASTS? That was really the question.
33:03
And it came out in an expert call with SES about a
33:07
partnership for ground stations, which has yet to be announced,
33:10
but apparently it's a done deal. That's cool.
33:14
And so we've actually now kind of closed the loop on this.
33:16
We've seen it in the public filings.
33:18
We were really all kind of very confused about what it could
33:20
mean, but then it came out in an expert call and now it's in the
33:24
public domain. I didn't do it, but you know,
33:28
talking to it. And so, you know, now we know
33:31
what they're doing and here's what they're doing.
33:33
SES is providing AST space model with ground infrastructure,
33:35
teleports, gateways, fiber backhaul, and the local
33:38
regulatory landing rights needed to bring AST satellite signal
33:41
down to Earth and connect them into terrestrial networks.
33:46
ASTS owns the satellites and commercial relationships with
33:48
the M and OS, but those satellites are useless about
33:52
someone to land the data and you need the backhaul.
33:55
And so in effect, SES appears to be selling a gateway as a
33:59
service to ASTS itself, which will be passed through to the MN
34:02
OS and that just allows everything to go faster.
34:05
So cool development again, really kind of like a picks and
34:08
shovels type of thing. Not something for anyone to, you
34:11
know, wake up tomorrow and go, I need a or wake, you know, like I
34:13
don't need to go like buy stock in the overnight market because
34:16
of that revelation. But if you're a long term
34:18
investor and you're seeing how the building blocks are being
34:21
put together, that's another one.
34:24
It's you know, it's good to know.
34:27
And so now let's revisit the bear argument again.
34:31
When people get really negative, the sort of fragility of human
34:36
emotion never ceases to amaze me because I get sort of frantic as
34:39
well. Like you get negative and then
34:41
honestly, it just spirals. I've, I've again found it very
34:45
useful to, to, you know, work with the space mob because in
34:49
isolation, you can be a very lonely place.
34:51
You know, the stock goes down and you don't really know why
34:53
you don't really have anyone to talk to.
34:54
And then you assume you're wrong, something you're missing,
34:57
get in a bad place, sell at the bottom.
34:59
That's really kind of what happens to most people.
35:05
Space mob is sort of a self help group, for better or for worse.
35:08
And what it does help you, though, is contextualize, you
35:11
know, a lot of information and bounce it off a lot of other
35:14
people who can help frame it and, you know, make it feel
35:18
better when you're losing unimaginable amounts of money,
35:22
which is certainly me. But you can really see the bear
35:25
argument, which is just simply ASCs is not launching satellites
35:30
fast enough. OK, well, you know, this guy Pat
35:35
Cakes. I mean, Kevin Shannon was pretty
35:36
funny. But, you know, Reddit is really
35:38
a cesspool of human weakness. And that's really the bear
35:44
argument. You can see it in Victoria write
35:46
ups. You see it everywhere.
35:48
Everyone just sort of falls on the sword on launch, you know,
35:51
and they they spin it out of control and go, oh, my God,
35:54
there's not going to be any launch and you're not launching
35:57
fast enough. And they're really not thinking
35:59
through, you know what we've talked about many times?
36:01
So I'm trying to also watch this hockey game while I do this.
36:03
There's a lot of multitasking. Zuccarella.
36:05
Hell yeah. I'm a hockey fan for the past
36:10
one week. So I really don't even didn't
36:12
even know what a power play was until I Googled it.
36:14
But what a what a great sport for the playoffs.
36:17
Definitely not letting my kids play hockey, though.
36:19
My only lesson from this is like, God, this is violent.
36:21
I don't know. I can't like, why can't they
36:22
make this a little more family friendly?
36:24
But anyway, going back to business at hand launch is a
36:29
really easy bear thesis to dismiss because if you're short
36:31
the stock based on concern about launch, what happens when you
36:34
wake up and they launch? It's like whoopsie Daisy.
36:37
And So what happens if, you know, this week you wake up and
36:40
realize, Oh no, they have like 4 successive SpaceX launches in a
36:46
row for 3 Bluebirds each. Does that blow up your thesis?
36:51
What, what happens if that's true?
36:54
What happens if the FAA, you know, grants an expedited launch
36:58
approval for New Glenn and they and they nail it?
37:01
What happens if as TS actually has some undisclosed
37:05
relationship with the NSSL, which is the government launch
37:10
program? What if, what if, what if, if
37:12
you have a bear thesis, you have to go through the permutations
37:14
of how quickly that could flip on its head.
37:17
And what happens? Do you get your your eyeballs
37:20
ripped out on that? And it's, you know, useful thing
37:23
to think of. And meanwhile the FCC is just
37:28
gunning it in terms of making Leo happen.
37:32
And so the FCC is paving the way for D to C.
37:40
They wanted supercharged choices in the market.
37:42
And what's really interesting is to see Brendan Carr talk about
37:45
this. They see it as a big upgrade and
37:51
competitive with fiber. And so, yeah, this this is
37:54
somewhat related to space XS core offerings and things like
37:58
that. But it's, it's just showing how
38:00
quickly what was dismissed as a niche market is now being viewed
38:04
as like one of the bona fide, you know, 4 horsemen for
38:07
consumer connectivity choice. And the FCC is really leaning
38:11
into it. They're, you know, letting them,
38:14
these guys use more power. They're letting spectrum be
38:20
repurposed, things like this. This is certainly helpful for
38:24
SpaceX, but it's also very helpful for ASTS.
38:27
Whatever is good for SpaceX generally means that we can, we
38:31
could already do things well under the prior rules and we can
38:34
do them better with new rules. And then you're going to have
38:38
things like Legato, for example, where spectrum that was stranded
38:42
is going to be repurposed and you know, effectively approved
38:45
for this use. We believe that things like
38:48
grain management will have their spectrum approved for this.
38:52
SiriusXM might, and that's just more capacity that is available.
38:57
And then that just is more demand for that metal in orbit.
39:00
They can process and really make use of that spectrum.
39:03
So it's very interesting. So then we get back into the
39:06
whole competitive dynamic. There was this interesting study
39:09
out of China of all places, so out of Tsinghua University.
39:15
They took a look at how Starlink actually worked, and the
39:19
punchline is that it's kind of crappy and doesn't work very
39:22
well. And there's lots of drop calls.
39:24
And they specifically tested things like WhatsApp, which is
39:27
interesting and people don't really like it, but it's better
39:33
than nothing. But it kind of contextualize,
39:35
you know, why it is that the Starlink service isn't really
39:38
having a lot of demand. That's because it's not very
39:40
good. And so the mistake is investors
39:43
go, aha, Starlink isn't having the demand, people don't really
39:47
like it. So therefore ASTS is doomed.
39:52
Well, I don't know, you know, can you think of some services
39:55
where the initial thing wasn't very good and so you didn't buy
39:57
it and then the killer app came out and everyone used it.
40:01
Feel like the personal computer is an example.
40:04
The cell phone is an example. Everything is an example.
40:08
And so that's really where the bears are glomming now because
40:13
they're getting what they think are their first aha moments that
40:15
OK, supposing you can get regulatory approval, supposing
40:18
you can build a satellite, supposing they work, no one's
40:22
going to pay. Well, OK, you know, that is the
40:24
debate and we'll find out about it.
40:27
But one would point out that the Sterling system really sucks and
40:31
it's not very useful. And so as a result, you can see
40:34
why consumers don't get really addicted to it because it's high
40:36
friction, doesn't work very consistently.
40:38
And that's not how the American consumer, for example, works.
40:41
It needs to be frictionless. People have really high
40:44
expectations and they are demanding.
40:48
And so that's why a Bell had first principles to have a
40:51
service that will be that killer app.
40:54
Then meanwhile, SpaceX is having these posts about direct to cow,
40:59
you know, which again, we kind of made fun of before, but it's
41:01
about this rancher using SpaceX connectivity for smart cattle
41:06
callers, cattle callers, that removes the need for cell towers
41:12
or on ranch infrastructure. Well, now there's a problem
41:16
statement you probably haven't thought of.
41:17
And this is a big Starlink thing.
41:20
And so it just goes to show you, you know, how much demand there
41:24
is. We could really quickly see, you
41:25
know, how many head of cattle are there?
41:28
How many? And you know, probably Australia
41:32
out of cattle in the US, I'm going to guess like a million.
41:36
I could be off by a lot. Whoa, OK, a lot, 86 million.
41:43
And so that's a lot of cows who knew?
41:45
I guess the whole thing about like, you know, methane
41:48
emissions from cow farts is probably right.
41:51
And so that's a, that's a lot of cows.
41:54
Not every cow is obviously going to have a sterling collar, but
41:59
you just kind of can think about that.
42:00
Well, that could end up probably, you know, having a lot
42:03
of applications in terms of herd management and things like that.
42:05
Who knows, one of probably 4000 use cases for this technology.
42:11
And so as it rolls out, let's see what happens.
42:14
I'm taking the bet the market's going to be really big.
42:17
And then the M and OS themselves, I believe are going
42:21
to be the next part of the AI trade.
42:23
And so Verizon, for example, came out in their earnings call,
42:26
said it's in deep talks with hyperscalers, cloud providers
42:29
and large enterprises to use its fiber and 5G assets for AI
42:32
infrastructure. They say a revenue opportunity
42:35
could they could be worth multi billions of dollars.
42:37
The company said more details. We could come in three to six
42:40
months. I've always thought of Asts as
42:42
an AI infrastructure play because all of the compute in
42:46
the world don't mean a thing if you can't communicate to it.
42:51
Signals have to go back and forth to process information.
42:54
And so sure, maybe some AI can be on the edge.
42:57
I don't know. Makes sense that there's going
42:59
to have to be connectivity. Makes sense.
43:02
You're going to want to have this always on the demand for
43:06
things that are then everywhere are going to probably have more
43:09
exposure to gaps in connectivity issues.
43:13
And this is my bet that this will be right.
43:16
And so goes to the IoT observations and really the AI
43:22
infrastructure observations that I think could be quite
43:24
meaningful. Meanwhile, Amazon is coming to
43:27
the direct polar opposite of user demand.
43:30
People are convict, addicted to convenience.
43:33
And so Andy Jassi, who is the president of Amazon, said the
43:39
last thing I'll say about it is, you know, your question about
43:42
Global Star. Increasingly, what we're finding
43:44
with our customers and enterprising governments is that
43:46
they don't like to have any periods where they don't have
43:49
connectivity. It upsets whatever customer
43:51
experience they're going through.
43:53
Even in metropolitan areas, we all hit certain parts of the
43:56
highway or certain roads where you can't get connectivity or
43:59
you're hiking or skiing. We see very large demand for
44:02
consumers to have direct to device.
44:04
That was really the impetus for our acquisition of Globalstar.
44:07
They have unusual and scarce global spectrum that's required
44:10
to provide direct to device. So that's what Amazon's view is,
44:14
you know, what do they know about anything, right?
44:16
And then more broadly, just space is the secular trend.
44:20
Government defense is oriented toward that, and it's just
44:26
really the priority of US defense spending.
44:29
So that's a good place to be in terms of where money is going to
44:31
flow. And then the procurement
44:34
methodology has also changed. So as we've talked about many,
44:37
many times, they're going to be leveraging the commercial
44:42
capacity for government use because it drives down costs and
44:48
makes the systems much more resilient and robust.
44:51
And so that goes right to the fairway of ASTS going back to
44:55
what I started originally around of how much value there is in
44:59
the satellite production capacity we're building because
45:02
we are going to be able to make, you know, I don't know the exact
45:06
stat, I looked it up the other day, but I think we'll have one
45:09
of the top three satellite production capacity ratings of
45:15
any anything. And that's that's going to have
45:18
value as new use cases and new needs emerge because our
45:21
satellites are quite flexible at the end of the day, ASTS has
45:24
invented a way to create the most power in orbit.
45:27
The first way they're monetizing that power is through RF
45:31
signals. Other ways you can monetize that
45:33
power is AI compute actually beaming energy down.
45:38
There's all sorts of things, but fundamentally the platform is
45:42
around power generation and really the duty cycle of that
45:46
power. Power generation.
45:47
That was the critical solve they did.
45:50
Once you have that much power in orbit, hooking up elements to
45:54
create telecommunication gear is the very obvious first way in
45:58
which you monetize that power in orbit.
46:00
Just like Iceland probably thought of all sorts of things
46:03
of what to do with all their power and they realize that the
46:06
highest value at use way to export electricity when you have
46:09
an island in the middle of the ocean is aluminum smelting.
46:14
But their critical observation is we have cheap power.
46:17
And then they got into the aluminum business.
46:19
So useful to also think about that.
46:23
Golden Dome is in motion. We continue to have some big
46:27
awards coming out. According to General Mike
46:31
Gillen, Golden Dome is real. It is no longer theoretical.
46:34
We are underway. We are shovel ready and we're
46:36
building it right now. It is reality in motion.
46:40
Let's get some contracts, bro. I can't think of anything that
46:43
can change the sentiment more quickly than a couple big dog
46:46
contracts for Golden Dome. And so they're saying it's on
46:49
schedule, on budget, completed initial classified architecture
46:52
design, awarded contracts, site analysis and visits are
46:55
underway. All right, giddy up.
46:57
I hope we get some big contracts out of there.
46:59
I have some real expectations that we will.
47:02
But you know, kooks can be kooks.
47:06
And the Department of War has been investing a lot of money.
47:09
And so we saw some really cool things this week about I believe
47:12
it's $140 million for a Department of War contract as
47:16
part of a radar system. We'll see if that goes through
47:21
US. I hope it does.
47:22
And then we have gotten approval for using spectrum over the
47:26
ocean, which again has some pretty obvious use cases for the
47:29
military. So we shall see.
47:32
A lot of us have some pretty high expectations of some near
47:35
term military awards. Maybe we'll get something on the
47:37
earnings call, but that's really conjecture on my part, not
47:41
something I would, you know, really position around.
47:44
But then we also go back to the competitive landscape.
47:47
A nice article was out, a SpaceX phone question mark.
47:51
Not if AT&T gets its way. SpaceX won't be an MVNO if AT&T
47:56
has anything to do with it, according to AT&T.
47:58
John Stankey. Whoa, shots fired.
48:01
What, like common sense has entered the room.
48:04
And so, yeah, no shit. Like, AT&T is not going to say,
48:08
hey, Wolf, would you like to sleep next to our nice, cozy,
48:11
warm sheep? Just don't eat them.
48:15
They're not that dumb. And so the M and OS are very
48:19
clearly on guard about SpaceX. They know that they are an
48:23
enemy. Whether they kind of wonder
48:26
whether Asts might one day, you know, grow into something that
48:31
is too big to control is a totally different issue.
48:34
But ASTS isn't openly pursuing warfare against the M and OS
48:38
like they are being carrier neutral.
48:41
SpaceX is clearly going to do a phone that they need to do this
48:46
to justify, you know, $2 trillion valuation.
48:49
And the M and OS are, you know, they control the terrestrial
48:52
spectrum, which creates a very interesting dynamic because it
48:55
just brings into the issue of SpaceX just doesn't have enough
48:59
spectrum to do anything that ambitious.
49:03
Amazon does not have enough spectrum to do anything
49:07
ambitious. ASTS does in partnership with
49:11
the MNO. So it's actually a very nice
49:14
check and balance, which I'm sure the MN OS also appreciate.
49:19
And then Sam Altman in the room. OK, you know, hey, buddy, how
49:22
you doing? You know, weirdo.
49:24
And you know, it turns out Sam still weird.
49:27
But Open AI is reportedly building a phone designed to
49:31
replace the iPhone. Well, I can't wait to see that.
49:34
But it just goes to show you AI connectivity, hardware, devices,
49:42
they're all going to rely on spectrum.
49:45
No one has figured out a replacement of spectrum.
49:48
Now, wouldn't that be a big idea?
49:49
But I don't know how that would work, and I don't think it will
49:52
work. And so spectrum is the critical
49:54
path item of humanity and it's about to intersect with some
50:02
really big companies that have really big ambitions.
50:05
And ASCs is in the middle of that.
50:10
Think it's a pretty good place to be.
50:12
So that's what I remind myself with when I'm crashing out and
50:16
super sad and posting, you know, somber memes on Axe for no
50:22
reason. Then I remind myself, put on my
50:25
Iron Man helmet in big boy pants and realize, oh, Rome wasn't
50:31
built in a day. Stocks are volatile and this
50:33
company's building out massively strategic infrastructure that
50:36
intersects with the world's largest and most dynamic growing
50:38
markets. It's going to be OK.
50:41
And you know, then I focus on other problems like why did I
50:45
gain 2 lbs this week? You know, like this is what you
50:47
got to do to stay sane. And then we have to ask
50:49
yourself, well, if I'm focused on like, why am I not making
50:52
progress on my 6 pack? And I realize like, oh, perhaps
50:54
it's because I eat like 3 lbs of sugar coated nuts.
50:58
Then I asked myself, well what is SpaceX focused on?
51:01
Well again, incentives. Dr. outcomes as per Elon Musk
51:07
himself. So what is Elon's incentive?
51:12
200 million super voting chairs? I actually don't know the cap
51:15
table of SpaceX. I don't know if that equates to,
51:18
but I am sure it is a lot of money and he gets that if SpaceX
51:23
hits a $7.5 trillion valuation and establishes a permanent Mars
51:28
colony with at least 1,000,000 people.
51:30
So it sounds like that's a joint double trigger condition, which
51:35
means that he's going to be focused on deporting a million
51:39
people to Mars. Like it's kind of interesting
51:41
when you think about like, so how does he intend to do this?
51:43
I don't think I am going to live on a Mars colony.
51:46
And so is this like in collaboration with ICE or like
51:49
who are the Martians going to be?
51:51
It is a very interesting question.
51:55
Is there a surfable point break on Mars?
51:58
Would like to know. And so he's got to figure out
52:01
how to convince a million people to go to Mars and then actually
52:04
figure out how to get a million people to Mars while doing that
52:09
in a creative way. Because I don't know the
52:11
business model of Mars. Are these people paying him all
52:16
their money? And that's going to be
52:17
considered like ARR? Who knows?
52:22
And so the SpaceX incentives are beyond my comprehension.
52:28
But then the other thing that's interesting is he gets an
52:30
additional 60 million shares if SpaceX again, hits certain
52:34
valuation goals and operates data centers in space to living
52:37
100 terawatts of compute. Well, I don't really see
52:42
anything here talking about D to C or a phone.
52:47
So incentives, Dr. outcomes. What is King Elon going to be
52:51
having his team do? Sounds like it's going to be
52:54
abducting people and hiding them on Mars while somehow getting
53:00
paid to do it in a value of creative way.
53:03
Count me as very curious to see how this plays out.
53:08
Is his focus going to be on D to CI?
53:11
Think again. It's going to be AI data
53:13
centers. That's where the cursor
53:14
acquisition comes into play. You can see he's basically like,
53:17
damn it, I have a lot of compute.
53:19
You know, people asking Grok to like change women's outfits is
53:23
probably not a scalable business model.
53:26
I need to do something else. So you bought cursor smart front
53:30
end. Lot of demand for compute back
53:33
ended into Grok. OK, I'm starting to see
53:35
something makes sense here. Leverage my SpaceX
53:38
infrastructure for AI data centers.
53:40
OK, that makes sense to me. The Mars thing, I don't know.
53:43
I mean, cool, hope you were hope.
53:45
I hope it works, but I don't know the business model, but
53:49
where you know, people can only do so many things, like where is
53:52
the focus going to come on the DDC segment?
53:56
We'll find out. But incentives, Dr. outcomes and
54:00
we don't see that incentive actually being set.
54:04
We actually don't even see any incentives being set for
54:07
Starlink at all. And interestingly so then
54:10
Starlink seems to be hitting a Tam limit.
54:13
They're cutting price. Well, it's not the end of the
54:16
world, but it means you've exhausted the premium tier of
54:19
users who will pay the current price.
54:23
And so you expand your Tam by dropping price.
54:25
That's fine. The problem is when you have to
54:27
drop your price for everyone. Sort of like the reverse way in
54:30
which a power grid works where the marginal and unit of power
54:34
that's dispatched sets the price for the entire curve.
54:37
You know, Elon can discriminate by market and things like that
54:40
and by plans. So you can try to get different
54:42
people to pay different prices. That's fair game.
54:45
And but he's got to figure out a way to expand the market.
54:49
At the same time, Zuck also wants to go to space.
54:52
And so we have a article coming out and see what we have.
54:55
Meta is also looking to power AI data centers with solar energy
54:59
collected in space, taking a novel approach to meeting its
55:02
insatiable demand for electricity.
55:05
So we've got Elon with his key incentive being determined by AI
55:09
data centers in space. We have Mark Zuckerberg now
55:13
saying it, We have Google saying it, and we have Amazon saying
55:16
it. And yet the bears are like, this
55:20
won't work. But the four or five most
55:23
prominent companies with the wherewithal to actually
55:25
understand this are all focused on it.
55:28
Good to know. Because again, ASDS has an
55:31
advantage with the most power on orbit makes the company very
55:36
strategic, which again goes to then the infrastructure it's
55:39
building to produce all these satellites at scale.
55:41
Yeah, I get it, a little bit delayed, but once it's going,
55:45
what a glorious moment. That will be really neat.
55:49
So now we have a couple of technical issues and we're
55:51
almost up on the hour or two, always kind of turns out to be
55:54
an hour, even though I would happily just go for whatever
55:57
period of time is required. But we have the Russell
56:00
rebalancing. So, you know, saw the usual
56:03
suspects sharing this information and Pam Man and
56:07
Cassie and, you know, they have something here.
56:11
So Russell Reconstitution provides an interesting
56:16
technical event. And so I haven't done the math
56:19
myself, but it looks like, you know, in these AIS are pretty
56:25
good at those. So it looks like there might be
56:27
10 million shares of demand into the end of June.
56:31
What's interesting about that is we've had that before.
56:33
That happened last year and the stock was really ripping.
56:36
But then Scott needed money. And so Scott Deliski struck
56:39
again, you know, and frankly, like good for him.
56:42
And that took all the wind out of the stock.
56:44
But the stock was really pumping on the back of some good
56:48
fundamentals Block 1. And then you had this Russell
56:52
rebalance that just kind of added some some gas to the fire
56:56
and that looks like it's set up to happen again.
56:59
And so the stock is, you know, crushed on the 200 day moving
57:02
average, Really terrible sentiment.
57:06
We just had a failed satellite. So people, you know, you know,
57:09
bad fundamental event, right as we're about to have a big
57:13
technical rebalance. My belief we're going to get
57:16
what we want on the bat shipments.
57:20
It does seem like the stock is particularly coiled for
57:23
something great. And unlike previous times, it
57:27
does not look like ASTS is in the market to go raise money on
57:30
the back of any strength. They just did that other
57:32
convert. Never say never, but it sure
57:34
looks like they really might be done with that.
57:38
Which then coincides to three Tel Infinity, which is, you
57:42
know, my new little moniker for what we're about to have in
57:45
terms of shipments. Could finally be the time where
57:50
we sort of have slingshotted around orbit ready to go to the
57:53
moon. And so that perfect confluence
57:56
of events, we've seen it before on what happens when we have
58:00
these sort of traffic jams. And as Ampan man points out, we
58:04
have almost 64,000,000 shares short, all time high.
58:09
The convert guys have been covering because they're on a
58:12
lower delta. So you've had all time high
58:14
shorting, offsetting the mechanical covering by the
58:20
convert guys. So a lot of people are piling in
58:24
and it's going to be, you know, 12 noon at the OK Corral pretty
58:27
soon. I'm always a little worried.
58:28
I'm like, where are the shorts now?
58:29
But historically the shorts really just pile on, on negative
58:33
momentum. And they, you know, we kind of
58:35
see what they're thinking because these expert calls when
58:38
they just have these expert calls, which you're paying like
58:40
1200 bucks for. And it's basically just like, so
58:43
can they launch? Will they launch?
58:44
Will SpaceX launch them? Why?
58:46
Why would SpaceX launch them? There's no launch.
58:48
Oh my God, launch launch, launch, launch, launch, launch,
58:50
launch, launch. Then you, you kind of realize
58:52
like, OK, they really don't have a good thesis here.
58:55
It's just literally concerns about launch and they convince
58:59
their PM they go yo bro, I did some like work here.
59:03
Elon has launchers and Elon has satellites.
59:09
So Elon won't launch other people's satellites because Elon
59:14
has his own satellites. Bruh.
59:16
And then Bezos, he owns a book company and the book company is
59:23
not launching satellites, brah. And so his launchers, wait for
59:28
it, his launchers are going to launch the book company
59:31
satellites, brah. So there's going to be no
59:32
launchers. And ASD has a satellite company
59:35
only, brah. And he has launched contracts
59:38
with launchers who have their own satellites, brah.
59:39
And so they're not going to honor the contracts and they're
59:41
not going to have any launch. She's short it and they have,
59:48
and we're about to find out if we're going to blast their balls
59:51
off. And I hope that we do.
59:53
Because at some level, as I said earlier, I'm a wing nut and I
59:58
get real psychic joy from watching shorts get their heads
1:00:04
blown off so that I can make funny X posts about various
1:00:09
losers wearing Patagonia vests having open to work profiles on
1:00:12
LinkedIn. That is what I stand for.
1:00:17
Some shit posting with my boy Corey making fun of people
1:00:21
wearing Patagonia vests with LinkedIn open to work profiles
1:00:25
and so I hope they cover at 150 and we will all be able to say
1:00:30
reformed Trader was right about everything with his magical
1:00:32
charts with unicorns and triangles and I think he's going
1:00:37
to be right and it's going to be awesome.
1:00:40
So with that, I missed what appeared to be a pretty cool
1:00:43
hockey game, but I'll get over it.
1:00:46
And there is some stuff that came out over the weekend with
1:00:49
some cool DD people were publishing.
1:00:51
So I'll I'll get to that and I'll update the DD doc too.
1:00:54
And I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and thank you
1:00:56
very, very much for joining. And just remember when I'm like
1:01:02
crazy posting scary stuff, it's like I'm actually just like
1:01:04
laughing. So just also don't freak out.
1:01:08
Actually just ignore me. That's really the best thing is
1:01:10
if it's not actually due diligence that I always present.
1:01:13
That's serious. Literally ignore everything else
1:01:16
I post and you will live a happy, fruitful, successful
1:01:18
life. Have a great night, bye.
1:01:21
Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile podcast.
1:01:24
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1:01:33
To catch all the latest news about AST Space Mobile, make
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sure to subscribe. Thanks again and I'll see you
1:01:39
next time. We're doing something very, very
1:01:45
big, and I think with this technology we can really affect
1:01:48
billion lives. AFT Space Global is the only
1:01:51
company that has proven technology to deliver cellular
1:01:55
broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday
1:01:59
smartphone. People will just basically turn
1:02:01
their phone. And be.
1:02:03
Seamless, regardless of where you are, we don't want the user
1:02:06
even to know that it's connected by satellite.
1:02:09
Our role is to. Bring this into reality, always
1:02:12
in partnership with the enemy. Listen, Waffles.