AST SpaceMobile: Bluebird 11-13 Launch This Week

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[00:01:00] Speaker D: WrestleMania's T-Mobile. Like, I think that's fait accompli. It's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. Right now you can truly say to yourself, um, if I, if I liked AST at 100, you're gonna love it at 55 or 63 or whatever. Hey everyone, thanks for joining. I am start— I just wanted to start up a space ahead of tomorrow's launch. Actually, I guess it's Wednesday early morning. But, um, yeah, I wanted to just get people together and, and talk about a few topics. Um, I guess first I wanted to cover the markets. And so obviously, as, as Tutte would say, nothing changes sentiment more than price. And so now that the stock and the rest of the space sector has rallied quite a bit, I think obviously sentiment has improved markedly. And I think for those that have been paying attention, you could see signs of a bottom last week. I know there was one unfortunate AST holder who had been in since the NPA days, so he must have been holding at least for 5 years or so. But I think his sentiment turned pretty negative, and that was a to me indicated a signal that we were probably close to the bottom. In particular, this person had talked about having a tremendous amount of regret where when the stock had hit $130, had they sold, they could have pretty much entered into early retirement. But since then, of course, the stock had come down and as a result, with the stock at $55, they were further away from their goals of retiring. So this person in particular, and, you know, this is not to shame them, but they decided that the risk was too great, that the market conditions were bad, and they decided to sell their position and then perhaps maybe come back and enter it again when conditions improved. And so to me, that kind of indicated that you had this capitulation And look, everybody's situation is different. Your financial situation's different than mine or Cook's or anybody's. And so you've got to make decisions based off of what your, you know, what your needs are and your tolerances for risk. And, you know, that, and in particular, this person having gone through this 2-month drawdown decided to tap out, which was unfortunate, but, you know, This is part of the market process, right? Where investing in individual names is something that is not to be taken lightly. You have to have, you have to really understand what you own and have the mental fortitude in order to ride volatility, which especially is in the case for high beta names like AST. You're going to be tested, right? And this is why you don't go on margin because Having a high beta name and margin—that's that's a big recipe for disaster. And you know there was another individual who this person as part of their you know their steady state they do use margin quite a bit and utilize options as well. And I remember very vividly there was this one chat and and this person I think when the stock had hit fifty one it said. You know, this, as we kind of moved lower, they were watching basically every tick. And I can't tell you how many times I've told this person, hey, you should not hold high-beta names on margin. But this, you know, I guess they've convinced themselves that they're okay and they've been through a number of these cycles. And so lo and behold, when the stock did hit 51, they had messaged that they had sold their position because they didn't like the risk. And this is after writing it down from the hundreds. And I saw the psychology there where once you're out of position, oftentimes you'll see people, and I've done this as well, you'll see people kind of justify why they sold, right? So this person was like, well, I can't see the stock moving up in the near term, and there's all these macro things that are negatively impacting the space sector, and even though there's positive news from the company, it's not being reflected. And so, you know, they were saying that perhaps we could be in this downturn and maybe visit the 40s. And this was like, you know, right after they sold. And I've seen this over and over again where someone's psychology will change. Like once they don't have, they don't own a position, they, once they've sold it, then they'll turn completely negative on it, right? And it's kind of a coping mechanism, right? Because you want to, feel like you've made the right decision. But of course, you know, they capped that message off by saying, now that I've sold, it's probably the bottom, which it's interesting. I think everybody who has been invested in AC SpaceMobile for a long time, you know, that's kind of the inside joke is if you do sell something because you either, if you're forced to or you just can't tolerate it anymore, that you always end that that line with, well, this is probably the bottom, which in fact ended up being true, right? Like the stock did bottom after this person had sold it, call it $51, $52. And that other tweet from the other owner who had sold, I think it was like in the $53 or $54 level. But of course, the stock did rebound to a degree. And I think both of those guys came back and invested again. Which, you know, I think it's important to note that if you're not trading around, you know, for the part of your position that you're not trading, if you have a long-term position like this one person who had held since the NPA days, so call it 2021, there are tax implications, right? So let's say if you, if your average cost basis was $8 and you sold at $55, and then you're like, well, I can just buy it back a little later. Well, you got to keep in mind that you've taken a mark now. So you have capital gains of, call it, you know, let's just, well, let's say their average cost basis is $10 and they sold at $55. Then you have capital gains of $45, right? And so you've got to pay, I mean, thankfully it's long-term capital gains, but you've got to pay that. And then, you know, this person I think bought back into, or maybe will buy back into the position at some point. But they're going to end up with, unless the stock goes down, of course, but they're going to end up with less shares because they've got to allocate money for taxes. And so it's just, you know, something to keep in mind, which is why from a discipline perspective, now look, if a stock, if you know for sure that a stock is going to go from $100 to $30 or $100 to $50, you know, tax decisions shouldn't always drive your process, right? Like you should, if you truly knew that was going to happen, you would sell and pay taxes and then buy lower because net-net you would be most likely better off, right? Depending on, you know, what if it was long-term or short-term and where you live. But in my case, part of the reason why I have a large core position that I never touch is because I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to pay capital gains taxes on that position. And as I mentioned before, I do have a smaller, you know, trading position, which, you know, I'll generate hopefully, you know, gains, but sometimes losses as well. And I'm okay with that portion, but the core part of my position I don't ever touch because I don't want to end up paying taxes and then having to— yeah, it's, I just don't. And part of that is it keeps me disciplined where I just don't touch those shares because I always think about taxes and then, and I have a low cost basis. And so even in times where if I get an itchy finger, I just won't touch them. But yeah, so I think at least the signs, you know, in terms of sentiment, and this is why, for example, I don't block most bears or skeptics. I actually keep them on the timeline. I don't follow them with the exception of a few like Pivotal Capital and Hiro Nanda. I follow those guys because they're great bottom signals. But For the most part, I don't really block people, right? And so oftentimes last week you had all of these trolls and haters coming out of the woodwork saying that you know the stock was going to go to forty or thirty, and and and you had our two favorite consultants Lucky Stewie and and and Tim Ferrer also come out negative. And so these are all indications of of a bottom, right? It's it's funny how. Some of these skeptics and bears will come out and do a victory lap, and it's like, well, guys, you know that every single momentum name is down 50%, 60%, 70%, and we've just experienced a plus, what, 10-sigma move on momentum? Yeah, AST is not going to be immune to that. And so I guess you were right in the sense that the entire market's down and every single momentum name is down, but But besides that, you know, you weren't right individually on the name. But, um, but yeah, it's just funny, you know, just pointing that out that, um, oftentimes when, you know, obviously you feel bad and others feel bad and then you have all the haters come out and they're doing touchdown celebrations, that's usually an indication that because sentiment's washed out, um, there's a good chance that we have reached the bottom. And so obviously You know, after we found out that Situational Awareness had their book, they had to sell to Citadel, and, you know, everybody was able to then pinpoint a large institutional driver of the big unwind outside of just retail liquidation, hedge fund liquidation, and of course Korea as well. Then you saw the market start to bottom, right? Because oftentimes, as I've discussed and Kuk has discussed as well, when people smell blood, which they did 2 weeks ago, people start selling their momentum, you know, the positions that were— that situational also held. And then they also went short, right? Because they all know that there's a forced seller in the market and they can make money shorting into that. Now, of course, it's not an easy game. Like, you've got to— you got to be ready to cover and take profits because, as we've seen, things can then— you get whipsaw the other way. Right, and so, but yeah, it's been a pretty interesting few weeks. I think the important thing though is that Citadel tweeted, one of the strategy guys at Citadel tweeted today that things look good now because like all the leverage is coming out of the system and now people can focus on fundamentals, which is funny because obviously there was another, I think it was an economist at Citadel that was calling for a surprise rate hike. And then now you've got someone else at Citadel saying, now's a good time to buy. And of course they bought Leo's book at a discount. And from all intents and purposes, I think they've pretty much unloaded most of the risk. And the reason why I know that is if you look at— so someone had pointed out earlier today that it's rare that you ever see Citadel as advertised volume. But on Thursday and Friday, as I had pointed out, they were very active. They were the number one trader in all of situational awareness's names, which makes sense because they're looking to liquidate some of those positions. And then of course they were also the number one advertised trader in a lot of momentum names. So whether that was AST, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, IonQ, Oclo, SMR, Rigetti, I mean any number of momentum in those, but even fintech, right? Like Circle, Hood, they were pretty much active in everything. And so today I actually looked across all of those sectors and Citadel's gone. It's like Keyser Söze at the end of Usual Suspects. They were there for 2 days and then they're gone. So my guess is that they're probably done unwinding what they needed to, covering shorts and selling longs from the situationals book. And so now, interestingly, when I looked at AST today, JPMorgan and Merrill were the first, or were the top 2 advertised traders, and then retail was third, which is quite different than some of the other names that I was looking at today. I think retail was pretty heavy in Rocket Lab, for example. They were number one. But yeah, now that Citadel is gone, now you have this ability for the market to get back to normal and focus on fundamentals, which is what I was talking about at the end of last week where, um, you know, it was unclear if we were truly through the, um, you know, the, the unwind. But, uh, we were obviously closer, closer than we were, call it, a week ago. Um, and, and now that the markets seem to have stabilized, of course, you know, things can change. Of course, you know, Iran, US, it seems like every headline is we Either they are going to have peace or we're not. But and then you know we had the Japanese yen intervention. I read a few things where people were saying that if the yen trade, the carry trade gets unwound, then then the U.S. you know U.S. is going to suffer because Japan has to sell treasuries and then yields are going to go up and the funding trade is going to then pull back you know force people to pull back on risk yada yada yada right but at least for now I think. We've seen a tremendous amount of leverage and risk come out of the market, and we've basically reset ourselves, right? Now you can truly say to yourself, if I liked AST at $100, you're going to love it at $55 or $63 or whatever it is, right? And as long as the fundamentals are improving, you should be a happy buyer today or holder of the stock versus a week, a month, you know, 2 months ago, Right? Interestingly, as I'm speaking here, there's a red headline in Bloomberg: Kotu's hedge fund sinks 8% in worst drop in more than a year. Okay, so yeah, it wasn't just situational; it was all the semiconductor AI bottleneck bros who were long who got unwell. And so, you know, FinTwit, whoever else is making fun of Leo, the guy's clearly smart. He's a young guy that doesn't have the experience or risk management chops, but. he's going to learn and bounce back from this, right? And he's not alone. Like, I'm— as we— my guess is as funds update investors on July performance, you're going to see more of these letters and headlines of hedge funds who had to degross rapidly heading into the end of July because of this big unwind. But yeah, I mean, I think today and the end of last week feel much better than where we were at the beginning of last week. And I think, you know, now we've got a lot of things to look forward to. Now, some people have asked the question about SpaceX and earnings, you know, what could the impact be on AST SpaceMobile? Candidly, I'm not sure. I mean, I can tell you about the dynamics, right? So SpaceX, as I posted earlier today, Market, which is a data service. Let me just double-check this. SpaceX is currently— the short interest is $283 million, which is a lot, right? The borrow fee is now at 4 point— call it 4.1%, and that's up from, call it 2%-ish last week, and the prior week it was kind of mid-1%. So obviously there's a lot of— this trade of shorting SpaceX is getting quite crowded. And I think it's important to kind of separate who is short SpaceX. So there's obviously hedge funds and retail guys who are punting, hoping that this lockup expiry, which it could be anywhere between 10 to, I think, 20% of shares, is going to overwhelm the market, right? And cause the stock price to go down. And so you got guys who are positioned for that. They're short the stock or they're long puts. Then you also have folks who are, maybe they're, they run a long-short book, they're long SpaceX because they like it, but then they short, they short, you know, AST as a result. So you got like, and a few other names, we got some of those guys who are involved in the stock. But, but yeah, they're not direct. Sorry, actually those guys are not directly short the stock, but the folks that are, are the ones who are speculating on the lockup expiry and then Typically, it's going to be not insiders who, as we know, because of lockup restrictions, you can't actually directly or through derivatives short SpaceX shares. But the interesting wrinkle is that for all these people who bought SpaceX shares through SPVs, you know, they're through multiple layers. It's unclear if those people And well, typically they're not restricted from hedging. So there's clearly a ton of people who bought SpaceX shares, private shares through these SPVs, and are not subject to lockup restrictions, which means that they can't hedge or the hedging restrictions. And so there's probably folks out there who are shorting stock in essence to box their position, right? So they're long private shares, through an SBB or some other vehicle, and then they're short SpaceX shares because they tried to, you know, if the stock price was at $120, $130, $140, $150, they shorted shares to lock in their gain, right? And so they're hoping that eventually when the shares are distributed and they receive shares, they can then close, they can collapse the box, meaning they take those shares, then they close the short position, and then they're done, right? They've made their money. But I think it's interesting to note, like, for those people who are, who kind of push forward the whole idea that markets are efficient, you know, the key question is you've got 44% of the SpaceX tradable float shorted. You've got a whole host of people that are betting that it'll go down, that insiders are going to sell. And then you've got like, you know, some of these people who have SpaceX exposure who their short is really just a boxed position and they'll just collapse against that. But I think the one thing that people perhaps might underestimate is that this isn't news. Like, people know that this is coming. And for— let me just look at the top holders of SpaceX. So for Fidelity, who has a 1.7% position, Baron Capital at 0.8%, Vanguard 0.72%, Invesco, 0.71%. All these funds, this is not their full position. And so oftentimes, like when you're in the institutional side and you're looking to buy stock from someone, they'll ask you, is this the full picture or is that all you're going to buy? Is this your true demand? And I would say for Fidelity, especially in Baron Capital, that's not their full picture, right? not going to— they're not owning SpaceX for a 1.7% position or 0.8%. I mean, there's no one on the shareholder list right now. There's no one above 1% except for Fidelity, which is 1.7%, and then Valor Management, which I think 6.7%, maybe they're VC or something. But all these guys are waiting, right? So when they gave allocations to the banks in the IPO, they might have, because it's a 5%, you know, they sold 5% of the company to the public, they know that that's not their entire picture. And so Fidelity has been waiting, they've been waiting for this week, right? And/or next week when the lockup expiry happens because they are looking to build a position. And as we know, Fidelity, if it's a core holding for Fidelity, they can go up to 15% of a company. I mean, in this instance, they're not going to do that, um, because there's not enough float to do that. But maybe over the long run, if they truly believe in SpaceX, they would get up to that position size. But you have to ask yourself the question, like, Baron Capital, what are they going to do? Are they going to double their position to 1.6%? What about Vanguard, Invesco, um, Baillie Gifford, BlackRock? I mean, all these guys, right? Like, they're all, they're all not going to sit on this small percentage ownership. They're going to look to increase their stake in SpaceX. And so everybody knows that the lockup expiry is coming and they'll be ready to— they'll probably be hoping that the stock will go down and they'll be looking to buy. And so I think this whole notion of the lockup expiry being this tremendous amount of selling that there's not going to be any bidders for it is misplaced because all these institutions know that it's coming. They're all looking to gross out their positions. And so I don't know, we could be surprised. Like, there might be, there might be a squeeze. Like, maybe all the insiders that can sell, maybe they're gonna just sell a third of what they can sell. And, and then conversely, you've got all these buyers who are looking to snap up shares. Like, who knows, um, how that, how that turns out.
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[00:23:56] Speaker B: At Lowe's.
[00:24:02] Speaker D: Sorry, I've got to text my wife here. But yeah, so I think you know it'll be interesting to see how what transpires. I think tomorrow for SpaceX's earnings call, as I've mentioned before, before you know when bankers take a company public, there's a period of time where the bankers work on the financial model with the company, and then. You know, they try to make it, it's like, what's your upside case? What's your base case? And then what's your downside case? And then you build a model that you then share and talk analysts through, right? And so typically, and this is kind of the rule of thumb, when you take a company public, you should put out public projections or share those with analysts who then build their financial models that are easily achievable. Right? To the point where you are going to beat at least the next 4 quarters, right? Like you, when you see an IPO and a company misses the first quarter out of the box, that means that the bankers and the company have not done their job because obviously, you know, when a company goes public, there's quite a bit more risk because it's new. And so you want to build in a lot of margin of safety. Hey, what is this? All right. What is Cook saying in this message? Oh, okay. But the reason why I say this is that for reputable investment banks and for IPOs that are done the right way, the first 3 quarters should be pretty easy. You send back those numbers and the research analysts, they put in numbers that are more easily, not only achievable, but beatable. And you want to enter into this cadence where you beat and raise, right? And so I guess the only counter to SpaceX's situation is that there are quite a few investment banks that initiated coverage on the company that were not part of the IPO. And so those estimates might be, you know, they might be a bit higher than the core underwriting group, right? And so that could risk having consensus be slightly higher than perhaps the company had, you know, laid out for analysts. But For all intents and purposes, like, I would think Elon for this first quarter is going to beat and raise, right? And so you want to reward shareholders for participating in the IPO. You want to show that the company can, you know, manage its business. And obviously the prospects are good. And so you want to be able to beat and raise in this first quarter. And of course, hopefully the second quarter, the third quarter, which is why, for example, you saw the company enter into agreements with Google and Anthropic to do these data center leasing deals. And so they should, in all estimation, be able to beat those numbers. So I think for the folks, the narrative of SpaceX somehow maybe putting up a bad quarter and/or having a ton of supply of stock coming to the market without any buyers, I think that's misplaced. And so, you know, I think the risk of that narrative if the stock was at $200 is much higher, right? But now that it's well below IPO price and it's at $115 today, no, dare I say, if you put a gun to my head, yeah, I would be a buyer of SpaceX today versus, you know, where it was obviously 2, 3 weeks ago. But given the dynamics, if I was a hedge fund and and looked at the setup, I think it's probably a buy here. Not that I own it or would buy it, but yeah. So I think, how does that translate into the space sector? I think obviously there's a decent amount of people who are short AST as part of a hedge to SpaceX. And so if SpaceX rips and if people are looking to unwind that position, they'll have to go cover AST, right? So Either way, I think SpaceX doing well is going to be good for the sector. And so I'm looking to, you know, it'll be interesting to hear the earnings call and, you know, we'll learn quite a bit. This is the first public quarterly call for them. People are going to ask them all kinds of questions. Maybe they'll ask them about the launch sector, of course, and then of course Starlink. They'll ask about Direct Advice. Maybe you'll get some interesting questions around M&Os and Um, you know, maybe someone will ask them a tough question about T-Mobile and if, if, um, if there's any risk they might lose them. So, um, so yeah, it'll be a pretty interesting week. And, and I think the earnings are tomorrow after the close. And so I'll be down at Cape Canaveral, um, listening to the call, hanging out with other Space Mob as we prepare for launch, which, um, I'll shift to that. So, you know, we've got the Block To Bluebird 11, 12, and 13 launch, which is coming up not tomorrow but the early morning of Wednesday. The launch is scheduled for I think it's 3:42 a.m. The window starts there until call it 5:20, I think. So so yeah, me and a few other space mob will be down there. This is not a company sponsored event, which I think they'll probably given its. proximity to the Q2 earnings call, they probably decided to err on the side of being conservative and not host an event. Although I think some of the executives are going to obviously be down there for the launch, but there won't be a formal event. But yeah, so there's a few of us who are getting together, and if you're planning to be there, feel free to message me directly, and I can give you some details of where we're planning to meet and watch the launch. But yeah, it's an exciting time. I mean, As I've laid out in one of my tweets, now we're seeing production cadence starting to ramp up, right? Where I think we're probably somewhere around 3 to 4 satellites a month. I know we are a bit behind the 6 satellites a month, but part of that was, you know, given the mishap with Blue Origin, there was no need to rush production of satellites. And so I think the company slowed down a bit and took their time. in terms of building satellites and shipping them. But yeah, we've got 14, 15, and 16 that's gonna be shipping fairly soon here. And just tracking the delivery and integration timeline, I think BB8 through BB10, it took approximately 27 days from the days they were— from the announcement that they were shipped to getting launched. And so BB11 through 13, knock on wood, if that launches on Wednesday morning, that's being reduced from 27 days now to 22 days. And so this is what we should be excited about, right? It's the production cadence ramping up and also the time from shipment to launch, that timeframe getting compressed, which is a good sign. So yeah, I'm excited. I know some of you guys can't make it down there, which is fine. I couldn't make it the last one, so now I'm, I'm stepping up for this one. But, but yeah, maybe we'll do a space live for part of it while we're down there and maybe some other folks will join me for that. But, but yeah, those were kind of my quick, quick things I wanted to cover. I did tweet earlier today about grain management and I disclosed some upcoming dates, milestones, which actually some of those things can happen sooner. Those are just the bookends for the deadlines that the FCC imposed. But For those that have been following the situation, Grain Management has very valuable 800 MHz spectrum. They're already testing with AST SpaceMobile. So I think there's a good chance that the 2 companies are going to work together and that spectrum will probably get combined with the AT&T and Verizon 850 MHz spectrum to create even more capacity for the company to use. And so, so keep an eye out for that. You know, we should see A selection of advisors soon and and any decision. My guess is because companies are testing, we probably get a decision well before the November deadline. And in closing, I did want to just briefly touch on our on our favorite space consultant Stuart Taylor or Lucky Stewie as he's known. It's interesting. This guy, I finally did block him because he just. I don't know, it just became so annoying that I decided to just cut him off because he, for every post that I have, he would troll the post. But I think it's important for people to understand this guy's history. He pretends to be like this great investor, which is fine. Like he made money on BioSat, but it's important to note that I think, and I didn't, I just asked like Grok to just go look at his timeline because there's, you can easily do that. in Twitter. And, you know, this guy was— I believe he's invested— he started investing in ViaSat, uh, because Mark Denkberg is his close friend, supposedly. He started investing in ViaSat, I think, in the 20s, the 30s or so. Um, and it's kind of funny because, like, over time, the stock— you know, ViaSat had financial troubles, they're getting their lunch eaten by Starlink, and so the stock went all the way down to 10. It was a distressed company for all intents and purposes. Um, And so during that period of time, the one thing that changed for this company, and by the way, this is true of the entire legacy satellite sector, right? Like all these guys were left for dead. Levasat, um, uh, Space 42, uh, Iridium, um, Globalstar, you pick it. Globalstar was at a dollar, right? Uh, 'cause it was a distressed company. But then this company called AST SpaceMobile came in, created this new market called direct-to-device, um, and changed the game.
[00:33:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:33:52] Speaker D: Right? Like all these legacy guys who shit on the company got bailed out by the company. Like for ViaSat in particular, the company was bumping along distressed at, call it $10. And then in January, when AST SpaceMobile announced the agreement to buy the rights to Elgato's L-band spectrum, you know, for 80 years, that's what caused a rerating in ViaSat. So ViaSat, You know, continued to bump along around $10. And then it wasn't until, what was it? I think July when AST made the payment, the $500 million, $450 million payment to ViaSat. And then people are like, oh my gosh, ViaSat's not distressed anymore. And this AST thing is real. And so the stock ramped from $10 to like $15 and then went up to $30. And then the rest is history, right? Like ViaSat's, then people started What originally was undervalued L and S-band spectrum because no one was using it, all of a sudden you had this player, AST SpaceMobile, come in and basically re-rate all the spectrum, right? Because it was AST that bought Legato, and then not long after, towards the end of that summer, you had, of course, SpaceX buying EchoStar. But AST kind of kicked this whole thing off and of course created the category, right? Which then rerated Viasat, rerated Globalstar, rerated Iridium, EchoStar, bailed out Charlie Ergen. I mean, Charlie Ergen was on his deathbed, right? Like he was about to lose his AWS-3 spectrum. And we just saw, you know, he put Hughes into bankruptcy today. But if it wasn't for AST, all these guys would be dead pretty much, right? Which is why, you know, we talked about back in the day that these companies are worth more dead than alive because their operating businesses were not worth much, but the spectrum that they were sitting on were worth a lot. And so if there was one big mistake that I did make back in the day is I should have just bought a basket of all these guys, right? Because I should have saw that AST, by drawing attention and creating this category, it revalued all these companies' spectrum and it gave them a new lease on life, right? And so I just find it funny that this guy, Stuart Taylor, who got bailed out by AST basically acquiring L-band spectrum and highlighting the value of S-band, his investment where he was down a lot all of a sudden became valuable and he made money. And then of course, when Viasat became litigious because they saw that they had seller's remorse that AST was buying the crown jewels of what you know, what they owned, uh, through Legato, um, they tried to get out of the deal. And when that happened back in August, September, when they tried to go back on the deal, this is when Stewart, you know, Lucky Stewie, who, um, you know, over the, over the course of, I think his account he opened in 2022, he never talked about AST SpaceMobile. Like he talked about poker and he talked about, I don't know, some other legacy satellite stuff. Um, but it wasn't until August where Viasat became litigious and wanted to get out of the deal, all of a sudden Lucky Stewie became an expert on AST SpaceMobile, and that started his career as an AST troll. I mean, that's all he writes about. He writes about CATS-i, he writes about Bee and Kuuk to a degree, and how AST is a zero. Um, and he's been, he's been, I mean, You know, he's been consistent about it since, since that August. Uh, I remember I did call him out once and I was like, hey, so let me get this straight. You, you had no idea what AST SpaceMobile was. You never talked about it until August of 2025 when Biasat, you know, um, tried to go back on their agreement and they, they tried to enter into litigation. Um, and then all of a sudden you're writing about AST every day. Like, why is that? And, you know, he came up with some lame excuse, like, I had been familiar with the direct-to-device market before. I had worked with a company that was going to deploy it and I was architect behind it, but then it didn't come to fruition. I think supposedly it was EchoStar, right? But anyway, I just think it's hilarious that this guy, he's all consumed by our investment. Like, he just cares about what we're doing. So I don't know. I guess he is a lonely guy. Like, he, From what I can tell, like he has no family. He just goes to poker tournaments and he tries to get people to engage with him. And when he tweets, he tweets about how he's great. He's a great consultant. He's a great poker player. He's made a lot of money. He like tries to put these trades up where he's he's he's made like I think he put up a trade today. I just randomly looked and he's made like two thousand dollars and he thinks that's rubbing in our face. But Anyway, pretty sad guy. I did joke over the weekend that it's weird that the 2 biggest trolls who are supposedly independent consultants are Brits. And some people, most people found that funny. Some British folks didn't. But yeah, I just, I think it's, I think, I think Kati said it great where it's good to have villains.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:15] Speaker D: uh, in, in situations where, um, you know, especially ones that are idiotic idiots like, um, Tim Ferriss and, and Stuart Taylor, where they can provide, uh, entertainment relief. And sometimes, you know, they, they can help you, um, you know, push you to do more due diligence on your investment. Um, but anyway, but yeah, I just thought I'd say, say my little piece about him. But, um, anyway, um, that's all I had. I'm going to be down at Cape Canaveral Um, starting tomorrow afternoon. And, um, yeah, I'll be interested. I'm interested to see how the SpaceX quarter goes and, and especially the Q&A. But, um, but yeah, I hope everybody, uh, was able to weather the storm. Uh, you know, are we out of, you know, have we bottomed and are we out of that, um, uh, this big unwind? Uh, I, I certainly feel that way. I mean, I can't say for sure, of course, because no one knows where the markets are going to go, but But like I said before, if you liked AST at $100, you're going to love it here, and especially with all the fundamentals that have improved and all the big catalysts that are coming up. So yeah, I feel really bullish on AST, and I think outside of all the things that we've talked about before, the big one I think that people are underestimating is T-Mobile. Like, I think that's fait accompli. It's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. When is it going to happen exactly? Not sure. But, but the companies are talking like AST, they're definitely talking with T-Mobile. They've got to be, right? And so when does that happen? Unclear, but it will. And when it does, if you liked the Verizon reaction, you're going to love T-Mobile. So with that, I'm going to end it. Everyone, best, you know, I'm looking forward to meeting some of you down there and it's going to be a great time. This is it. This is execution. This is the launch of commercial service. And so BB-11, 12, 13 are going up and we've got 14, 15, and 16 shortly behind. And so, yeah, these are exciting times. So with that, I'll end the space and everyone take care. Bye. Bye.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again. again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:42:01] Speaker E: Listen.
[00:42:05] Speaker D: Mmm, waffles.
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