Kook's Weekly - November 30

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining. Sorry it's so late. That was a pretty cool football game. Um, so the sentiment is pretty bad, which is, which is one reason to not spend as much time on the internet as I do. But it's just probably the first thing to address is just the spiraling of negativity. And I'm kind of wondering, like, Weren't we pretty positive on Friday? Wasn't that like pretty recently? And now just kind of watching people on Reddit crash and comments. I always love the comments. Um, I, I don't know if people are trolling me. I think they're just being honest, but you know, a lot of people are going crazy.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: We need updates.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: And it's like, company's posting their fireside chats. Blah, blah, blah. You know, they're doing a lot, but human emotions are human emotions. And, you know, as my wife says, my feelings are valid. Your feelings are invalid, but don't say that. So you're supposed to just say, yeah, your feelings are valid. But I think it comes down to kind of the joke I made in a chat where, you know, if I just kind of let my emotions run free, I'd just sell all my shares right now in the overnight market. Which would have quite the funny price impact. But then I'd pull myself back together and ask myself what I'm doing with my life. And also, as I just kind of ran out after the football game ended to go to the bathroom, if you would like to know, I thought, you know what's so funny about this is it's not like the company's not going to press release FM2. It's not like they're going to not press release FM 8 through 10, and then 11 through 13. I mean, these are as sure as the sun will rise. We've seen pictures of these things. We know the composite has been dropped off for these things. So these are certain events. And then you, you just see this hysteria where people forget about that and they fall over themselves. I know there's a lot going on with the yen, which is just nuts what Japan's doing right now. And then what's causing, you know, these liquidations in crypto, which I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for those people, but, you know, then that rattles through and we see the overnight price of ASTS and I think that's what fuels it too. You know, I look at this and I'm just like, oh, seriously guys, like we are really down $1.60. You know, granted a lot of stuff is down, everything is down, but Are we really doing this because some dudes in Korea are trading perpetual futures on Hyperliquid? I mean, kill me, but that's the world we live in. And so if you want to understand what it feels like, just look at a picture of the ViaSat CEO, which is the COVID of this week's Weekly, a man who looks like he's aged 50 years in the past year and actually prays on stage I don't know what he's praying for, but it certainly looks like he's praying to die or a fire alarm or a rapid disassembly of a Starship next door to end himself because he is a man that looks like he also knows the inevitability of STS having a press release. This is a man who knows that while he might not see a press release Monday, December 1st, He more likely than not is going to see a press release in the coming days. And the ASTS press releases are not good for him. It's the inevitable decline of ViaSat. And so when you just want to take a step back, look at the body language. And that's a really interesting thing. I've studied a lot of body language things with these books around forensic lie detection. It just is a way to like read people, read CEOs, things like that. And there's a lot of involuntary cues people give off and, you know, kind of where their energy is directed and, you know, ways they calm themselves. And so having your hands in this prayer format is really a way to like calm oneself when stressed. And these are people that are stressed because this guy Scott sitting in the middle is going to destroy them. And the beginning of their destruction is December 15th. And so the first thing, you know, we're like a Roman crowd, like we've killed a bunch of gladiators, but now we want more blood. And so we got FM1 launch confirmed December 15th. That's going to be super exciting. I don't know what time of day it is, but I would imagine that people like me in Ampan And Tanner and Kevin and all these guys are going to do a live stream. We should all do a live stream to celebrate, even if it's like 4 in the morning, that'll be pretty fun. But when we look at this, this conference that Scott gave, there were a lot of really great things in this, in this video and just talking about the launch schedule. Really what we're learning is the importance of Blue Origin for the company. Really driving down these costs. It's backend weighted, but really you can tell they secure a lot of great capacity. And the other thing that was interesting that he said is the screenshot when he said it, and then looking at the body language of the Viasat CEO, who again has his hands in a comfort formation trying to calm himself, and then his face is just like as long as a Norwegian summer day. And Scott is saying, we've also made other MSS spectrum moves globally, which is again, very funny to have a picture of the Viasat CEO next to him when he says this, because this will be a future litigation. For those of you that remember me from spaces such as Coop Talks About Legato, one of the things about Legato is that Viasat had tried to trap ASTS into just a North American agreement. And ASTS said, no, uh, we're going to conquer the world. And the judge said, you know what, I'm going to let you all settle this outside. And it's very clear, and Viasat said it, ASTS said it, that they will be pursuing S-band spectrum globally. And so here now we have Scott saying in this conference, quote, we've also made other MSS spectrum moves globally. So this could just be. The ITU prioritization rights. That's the easy answer, but I don't think that's the full answer. And so I think that this goes to what Vodafone and ASTS are doing with SAFCO around the EU 2 GHz spectrum. As I suspect, there's more to this than we currently know about. And it's very exciting because ultimately the market, like it or not, will begin to place an enormous value on the spectrum capture that ASTS has. The satellites will be the means by which it's monetized, but the core upstream asset is the spectrum. And that, I believe, certainly wasn't part of my original thesis when I made this investment. I did not think that they were going to be able to get spectrum. It doesn't make it a change. Doesn't make it— well, it is a change in the thesis. It's an improvement in the thesis when a company that is effectively midstream really relying on someone to get them users and to get them spectrum is able to be so powerful and so disruptive that they're able to actually get the spectrum themselves at a discounted price because of their technology advantages. That is something that I hadn't anticipated, but is very, very powerful. And I think you're going to add, make up a number, $100, $200, $300 per share ultimately, because it really to me is the same as a railroad in the 19th century. Where if you started laying track across the US, you started getting all these land grants, which ended up having mineral rights. And that's where when you take stocks like these, I think all got acquired over time, Burlington Oil and Gas, things like that. Burlington Oil and Gas was Burlington Railroad. And it was all coming from these mineral rights that were conveyed to the railroads when they laid track. Think of that as the midstream asset. And then they were granted these upstream assets, mineral rights turned into oil, which ended up being worth a fortune. And that's what I think is happening here with ASTS. It's a fleeting opportunity for the first mover, but we are the first mover. And so that's why it is our opportunity. In other news, ASTS updated their website. Pretty cool. And so, you know, people would speculate, well, why of all of the things they have to do right now, why are they updating the website? And it's probably because they're about to get a lot more attention. And so either the beginning of the commercialization of the service, their partners starting to really pump it now that we're gonna have the first next-gen satellites going up. There's a lot of reasons why the velocity of eyeballs could be changing on this company, and maybe the website change is the telltale. And so that's all also pretty exciting. Uh, we also had Vodafone singing the praises about ASTS. And so it's nice to see our partners, especially when you think about it, the CEO of our partners, and these are big companies, talk about us. And so she points out that we're going to have European commercial service starting in 2026. That is one month from now is 2026. And they talk about how they've been working with ASTS since 2019. Again, these are very long partnerships. And so that's important. This isn't fly by night. There's deep, deep integrations with these MNOs. And so don't expect them to be replaced anytime soon. Vodafone making progress and having partnerships with multiple MNOs across Europe. This is very important. Sorry, a little cough, because this means that our market share is going to be much higher than what we thought it was going to be. Initially, you can take the US example. Initially we had AT&T and that was exclusive and thought, well, okay, you know, better than nothing. And then we got Verizon, big change going from 30% of a market, 35% of a market to 70% of a market was a big change. And so then likewise, Europe, we're not burdened by this end of exclusivity now. We're opening this up. And so this is going to be very important for the model because the basic model of this company is going to be users times ARPU, average revenue per user, very simplistically. When you start to double and triple the number of users, you can generally assume that the attachment rate of, you know, if you have a population of 100 million users, how many people are going to pay for the upgraded service? It's just law of large numbers. The more bodies that are captured in our addressable market, the more revenue we can have, the higher the multiple, the longer the runway of growth. And so these are nice things to see our partners do and give us updates on. And so now let's talk about charts, which I really have no credibility in talking about, but I will quote he who does, Reformed Trader. And so I always find this pretty interesting. One, charts are a distraction when I'm otherwise really upset and I can go, yeah, yeah, yeah, look, this chart that shows a big red arrow down is actually bullish. And so yeah, sure, whatever. That's how I think about it. But what's nice is that Reformed Trader is a pretty objective guy. I mean, this guy calls it like he sees it. He's been kicked out of our chat groups for like 4 times because I think every time he's like, this looks like a head and shoulders, we're like, Ban this kook. And then when he's saying it's like an inverse head and shoulders and about to go up, we're like, yeah, let's get back in. And so now we're, we're liking him again, just to be clear, because he's showing that we've hit this uptrend that started in May 2024. We retraced to the 61.8% Fibonacci level. Just always remember, mathematics is the language of nature, and this is a level that was also something or other that was important to him. I don't quite follow all of it, but basically it's a really pretty chart that shows that the stock is really where it should be when it's about to bottom and go a lot higher. That's really the summary. So step away from the ledge. This could be the beginning of a very grand ascent, which is what I personally think is, never mind what's happening right now because the yen is blowing up again. Thanks for nothing, Japan. Except thanks for making my spring break in Japan cheaper, I guess. Although the yen's actually rallying, so it's not so good for me. But what I expected is that we're going to get a F— whatever we want to call it now, FM7 or FM2 PR, which is BB7 for those playing at home. And then I think we're going to get visibility on the next 2 launches after that, which are going to be multi-satellite batches. And that's going to show this uncorking of production capacity. And I think that we'll hopefully get an update on reaching the 6-satellite-per-month cadence. And then I personally think we're going to get Golden Dome. And so Golden Dome, let's talk about it. So the irony of Golden Dome is that the literal radar is being kept Under the radar. Thanks, Trump. Can you leak something? And so what they're doing is interesting is they're trying to keep it out of the public while in the public. And so they're keeping big contracts out by giving small contracts. And then that reduces the need or eliminates the need to disclose those contracts. And, you know, I guess the whole point of that is to not let China know what we're doing or how we're doing it. Yet then you have a bunch of companies making videos on like exactly how they're doing it. So I'm not quite sure what they've achieved, but point is these Department of War contracts appear to be going out and then we're starting to get companies talking about it. So Honeywell put out a super cool video. I think Lockheed did one. And then, you know, coincidences of coincidences, ASTS SpaceMobile starts having golden halos around their satellites. Some people will think that the space mob is crazy for reading into this. That, you know, they don't know, maybe. But when you actually start to look at the pattern, okay, Department of War says to its vendors, we will not give massive contracts for All these reasons. Okay. Well, that kind of kills small companies because they have to fund this on their balance sheet. Big companies were like, sweet, we'll just fund it on our balance sheet so that we cannot compete with little companies. And now then you had ASTS raise $1.1 billion and then the ATM and everything. So really raising like $1.5 billion in October, a lot of money. I think they probably would have done it anyway. But all of a sudden, this is a huge opportunity for the company. And all of a sudden you gas up your balance sheet, you're in a unique position to take advantage of it. Checks out. You've had the company be very, very vocal about being involved in Golden Dome. So it's not totally a mystery. Then you have them change the graphics. By the way, Lockheed literally seems like they're using the same graphics, which is interesting. I think we've seen quite a few coincidences between potential partners at ASTS in terms of their press releases and designs. So it's pretty exciting. And my sources, which are not entirely clear that they're right, uh, seem to indicate that ASTS is in here. So that's good, but I don't really know how to handicap those things. So my personal view based on the mosaic of information, which I have, is that ASTS is going to host And that is part of Golden Dome. And I think that when we look back to last week, we had Blue Origin say they're involved with the Golden Dome, but it was actually a little bit unclear if they were saying that ASTS was involved in Golden Dome because they said that we, we have this new 9X for New Glenn rocket, this super duper one. And it had 3 real customers. It had Amazon for Kuiper, at NASA, and at AST SpaceMobile. And they specifically mentioned this will be serving Golden Dome. Seems, seems like something is afoot. And my understanding is that ASTS's role in Golden Dome increased as Blue Origin showed more capabilities, because I think these companies might be a little bit of a package. Package deal. And so then last week we also had some just random press releases from ASTS on like, oh, hey, by the way, we're American. And so as Kevin points out, Kevin Shen, that is, ASTS doesn't usually do these types of PRs. They've reported their facilities in quarterly updates. And so then, you know, why, why do this now, especially last week, which is kind of a dead week? And so his theory, which, which I hope all of them are right, is that they are priming the prompt for updates on the 6 satellites per month production capacity. That would be great. Um, it could be in response to SpaceX, uh, lawfare in the FCC docket where they're saying, oh, well, I guess ASTS is a European company now because of SATCO, which is not accurate, or ASTS is just showing how American they are in front of Golden Dome announcements, which are going to put all these companies in the direct spotlight. Not sure, but it is interesting. And the company certainly was giving us a lot of tidbits last week on what should have otherwise just been a passive week. Everyone, you know, was probably chilling out. Company didn't have to do anything and they were pretty active. And so I think that they were, my personal belief, and I'll, you know, FUDsters think I'm insane, but I think that they're trying to talk to us in terms of the space mob and in terms of the retail community. They know they have an audience. So step one is knowing that if you, you know, shout into the room, someone's there to hear it. Step 2 is then having an intent to do that. And that's the hard part. I don't know. But I do think that they understand that we are good with information.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:42] Speaker C: And they can tease us with some things. We'll put it together to help inform the community so that the most people, most of the time, will hopefully be led to the right decision. And so I think the company certainly is very loyal to its retail investor base and truly wants these people to do well. The company is showing with their own actions that they're very bullish on the company and the stock price in particular. And so they, I believe, want people to hang on and, you know, they're not trying to pump it, but they're trying to give us tidbits because they know there's people like me, Katsy, Kevin, Tanner, Tut, and Panman, you know, the whole lot of people that are posting all day. It's not like they're oblivious to our existence. They know that if you feed us, you know, we'll jump on the Spaces at 9:30 Pacific time on a Sunday to talk about it. And so then you ask yourself again, why did they put out all those press releases? And why are they starting to hint at things that we could clearly draw a line on? Hey, this looks like Golden Dome. Well, I believe it's because they got Golden Dome. And these are apparently supposed to be out more broadly by Christmas. So that's pretty soon, you know, really 3 weeks. So a lot could happen. But let's go back to this Deutsche Bank conference where we again look at The CEO of Viasat looking like Ichabod Crane about to lose his head. This guy looks so sad, but unfortunately sitting next to Scott. So every time I screenshot it, all you see is this really, really sad Mark Gamberg of Viasat. Oh, poor Mark. And so meanwhile, Scott is saying that the benefits of a really large satellite is a lot of power in orbit. Now, something I've said many times is the critical path of this whole thing is power. The bigger power plant you have in space, the more things you can do with it, which in our immediate circumstances is power a really, really big phased array antenna to close the link budget for a complex telecom use case. But there's a lot of other stuff you can do when you make a lot of power.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:57] Speaker C: And so I believe, as you see the AI race heats up, I believe that ASTS is going to be the prime example of companies that are going to be able to enable AI data centers in space. Who else? No one else has been able to innovate the way ASTS has been able to innovate in producing the most power in orbit. Bar none. AI data centers are going to be about power. Same as the RF use case. Power is the critical link. We produce the most power. I think that's going to be a benefit. And I think it's going to expand our TAM in ways that will be interesting in a few years from now. So then let's also just put again in context what this company is doing. So our friend Tanner, Just made this point where this year only 4 large GEO satellites have been ordered this year. And so this is the universe of the industry is around 4 satellites, midpoint 6,000 kilograms. So 24,000 kilograms total. ASTS is primed to be doing that type of gross tonnage. Per month by December. And let's just assume that slips. So by January, whatever. And so when you think about just the scale of what ASTS is doing measured by satellite tonnage, it's truly shocking and disruptive in a way that, you know, my mind goes to things like Tesla, things that are able to produce at levels previously unheard of. They're going to cause the cost to go down massively. And it's just useful to think about that in terms of how strategically important our company is. And then let's think about that a little bit more. We again revisit Red Tanner about the military opportunities, which ASTS's partners at Fairwinds talk about a lot. So it's pretty cool when you see Fairwinds having their job postings And they talk about ASTS militarized broadband devices, ASTS tactical hub systems. All these things that are ASTS specific, which are getting sold into our defense industry, just shows how large this company can be. It's a platform around which other products and services are based. I was just watching these really cool videos of the F-47, this new Gen 6 fighter jet that America is making, and it's going to have 5 drones alongside it the whole time. Just think about the need for connectivity that we're going to have in this world that we live in today and the world we're going to live in tomorrow. Who's going to provide that? I think I know the answer. So then we talk about, and so we had some really good finds this week. It already seems like a Lifetime ago, but there was a document that was dug up by Rocket Tank 123, whose tank is always full, and it was around ASTS setting standards with Apple. And notably, Globalstar was nowhere to be found in these filings. And so it should come as no surprise to anyone that's been following the Legato documents or me. who's brought to attention the lookout documents, that ASTS has hardwired in its agreements specific revenue triggers when its spectrum is integrated with Apple and Google or separately. The contract contemplates all of the above. It is no surprise that ASTS is working with Apple since ASTS is working with 70% of the MNO market share in the US, which is the most profitable telecom industry in the world. So yeah, Tim Cook knows about ASTS SpaceMobile. They're working together on the standards. Pretty exciting stuff. But what's begging the question is, is Apple going to ditch Globalstar? That's the question a lot of us have been asking. I don't know the answer to it, but imagine the power of that press release, which would be premature today. But there's no need for Globalstar, maybe for some backup emergency texting services and things like that, but you could still ditch them and just do that with ASTS. But the real meat of the prize is going to be in broadband. That's what people are going to want the second they see it. And that's where the big companies are all oriented toward working with ASTS-based mobile. Meanwhile, you have countries realizing the same thing. Chile came out with some— what was it? News article. And it was found by Rocket Tank, but it was Chile's Minister of Transport talking about how they've had serious discussions with ASTS and there's a concern about only having SpaceX in the market, as there should be. And then we also have Europe, surprisingly, getting more and more vocal about war with Russia, which is, I don't know what a scary prospect that is, but frankly, not inconceivable. And so the more I've studied Russia and I spent a lot of time studying Russia when they invaded Ukraine, read all the old history books to really understand all of it. And when you, I don't want to get into politics too much, but like when you think about the Russian mind state, I'm sure I'm going to get commented like crazy by Russian people on this call. But from a Russian perspective, they're the rightful inheritors of the Holy Roman Empire. From their perspective, they believe it was the last of Caesar's bloodline married into the Romanov family, if memory serves. And so they view themselves as the last bastion of that. And I could see them. Viewing it as their destiny to go that west, which they demonstrated a desire to do. Again, inconceivable to the American mind. It isn't, you know, American mind, I don't think is very braced for European land wars, even though we have one right now. Um, but the Europeans sure as hell think that that's a possibility. And so all the European countries are rearming. Uh, it looks like there might be drafts coming back and things like that. Some pretty scary stuff to, again, imagine a European ground war. But as part of this rearmament process, you need space capabilities. And so this is just becoming more and more obvious every day. Europe is really far behind on this and Satco is right there ready to supply what's needed. And that's why I think there's a big possibility that, ASTS gets a lot of spectrum and that Vodafone is probably running up and down the halls of Brussels, really selling our prospects, which could be a very big, exciting contract. I know some people noticed that on the AST website, when they're comparing the size of a person and a car to the satellite, they have a BMW 5 Series as the reference vehicle and not a Ford F-150. This is another example of, does the space, does the space mob look too deep? And I would say, are we looking deep enough? And so have I thought for the past 3 days incessantly about why ASTS chose to have a BMW 5 Series on that slide instead of anything else? No, this is all I thought about. And so I think the logical conclusion is that ASTS won Golden Dome and now they have their sights set on winning IRIS Squared. There, I stand it. The car choice in that slide was the dead giveaway of the future of NATO's rearmament strategy. But now going back to IRIS, and so I don't really understand how this project Is thought to be successful. But Utilstack Group is getting destroyed as they have to raise capital for it. What I don't know is, is there an off-ramp for this project or is it kind of hardwired to have a bunch of money spent on it ultimately maybe exist or ultimately die? Not, I just don't know. And any, anyone that does know how that works, please DM me or post and make sure I see it and I can include it in the weekly. I responded in the comments to Mega Constellations, which is a really good account and who really knows a lot about this. That's something on my mind is really understanding this project a little bit better, and I certainly have some area to improve my knowledge of it. So now let's check in on our friends in New Zealand. And so we have some interesting quotes came out actually. And so we know that we're involved with this company called O2, I believe.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: O2.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: And there were some quotes that were referenced that then talked about, uh, Testra, which is a company that's working with Starlink. And then they said, so our partner said, we admire what SpaceX does, but we like the idea of controlling the infrastructure. We're ultimately an infrastructure company, which means we'd rather put the capital on the ground here in New Zealand than run a large OpEx I thought that was interesting. So I dug into that a little bit. And the issue here is an MNL, we've talked about this before, when they use AWS TSS Space Mobile, they're using their own network and their own ground equipment. We're just dumb pipes, but their data sovereignty, the investment goes on the ground with the ground stations. It's their network. With Starlink, it's an integration to a separate network. It's very complex. The eNodeB, which is really the base station, is up in the sky. It's not forward compatible. You don't have data sovereignty, blah, blah, blah. A lot of differences. And so this is an example of the MNO really walking us through those differences a little bit more. And it's pretty interesting because then you also see the MNOs complaining about how from their own P&L, Their deals with Starlink are just gonna look like a huge expense. And that's a direct quote. And what I don't know is how our partners will account for this. So there can be 2 approaches. There can be net and gross. So AT&T could book the entirety of the revenue on their own P&L and then net out half of it in OpEx for ASTS, or they could just recognize net. net revenue, net of what ASTS is doing, and then it looks like it's 100% EBITDA margin. From their perspective, they'd probably want to use the net approach just because it's going to be so margin accretive and maybe help people's perspective of their business. But it is important to know that these companies do see a big difference of effectively paying out a bunch of money to SpaceX for just an OpEx line versus something that is their own. And on which they're generating more discrete revenues for it. Um, then we're just checking in. I think there's some more complaints about SpaceX. Yep. So Anpanman found a nice thing with Intel's Starlink pitch, and it just shows that it's SMS only. It only works with newer non-Apple handsets. Not, you know, that's not good. Can only be outside, blah, blah, blah. And so not a great scalable solution versus, of course, what Vodafone has been saying very vocally in contrast about, we talked about that podcast they did about how it's their own network. It works great. It's broadband, things like that. And meanwhile, we have Vodafone increasingly talking about first responders and emergency response. And so to me, this looks again, like Satco being able to Recreate FirstNet in Europe. That should be a really big revenue opportunity. I, for someone this week, and I should have included it in the weekly, I did just sort of a really quick back of the envelope revenue estimate for AST. You had Scott in that DB interview saying, look, we built our company for scale. So while the other guys are saying, we don't think the TAM is there, da da da da da. And if you don't think the TAM is there, then you shouldn't. Certainly should not invest billions of dollars to build a constellation. That much is true. And so these other companies are taking the position: we don't think there's a market.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: Okay, great.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: They're not going to show up to the dance. ASTS is taking the view: we think there's a market that's going to be tens of billions of dollars. So we're building a company in in front of that. That's what I think as well. And so I did in this tweet, which of course. Don't think I included here. Really quick math that showed how you could bridge to $20 to $30 billion of revenue. And you get there by looking at what AT&T and Verizon could be worth, especially when you start to monetize our Legato spectrum. You take that math times basically 2 for Europe because Europe is bigger, and then you have Satco, which is going to be great. And then you take all the Government opportunities, which are going to be easily a billion dollars in the US alone. You have 10 programs of record. Each of those are going to be $100 million. Some of them I think are going to be way bigger. I think Golden Dome alone could be a billion. And so all of a sudden you very quickly get into these numbers that start to look like $20 to $30 billion of revenue, which is exciting. But you want to keep track of these quote unquote little things like Vodafone recreating FirstNet. To start to do that math for yourself and really bridge it out. The thing I wish I had been better at earlier in my career is seeing market share winners in really big markets. And so the stupidest thing to do is kind of look at what you have today on something and go, oh, it's 20 times earnings, it must be efficient. But you know, Meanwhile, it owns 70% of its market and its market is growing 40% a year and revolutionizing the world. Well, that 20 times earnings, when you flow out the growth, turns out to be like 1 times earnings when you then later realize like, wait, why did this go up so much? And it's that nonlinearity is the trick. It's hard to see. And as you kind of do that math, especially if you publish it publicly, you're going to get relentlessly mocked and Made fun of by people, but it is the right math. You need to see where the big markets are that aren't necessarily as obvious today to a passerby. You need to find the market share winners and you need to see where a company can have nonlinear revenue growth. And, you know, if you find those, buy them. That's what I've done. And it's not only me that has been buying. And so Adriana, who is on the board, Cisneros. She is a Series A investor, her family was. And so she owns a lot of stock. But interestingly, she just dumped her annual exclusion for her children into ASTS SpaceMobile, which I actually find really interesting. Even though it's not huge amounts of money, you're allowed to give each of your children, I believe, $18,000 a year from each spouse. And so if you have a wife, you can give each kid Roughly $40,000 tax-free. And, you know, if you have that amount of savings, you should, because it's a tax-efficient thing to do. I just did this for my kids, and I had always told myself, be responsible, Kirk. Just put in the S&P 500. When they actually access that money in 30 years or whatever, you know, if you compounded at 8%, it's all going to have worked out well for them.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Well, yeah.
[00:38:19] Speaker C: That's a funny plan. And so last year I put in all ASTS for them at $5. So now my kids legit have a ton of money, which is pretty interesting because they're so little and they don't really understand what that means. But they're going to wake up and one day be like, holy shit, we have a lot of money. And it's because I dumped their entire annual gift exclusion into ASTS stock at $5. And this year I was actually, what was super annoying is I was going to put it into MFI. really just to pay homage to King Tut. This stock had just been destroyed last week and Tut has been doing a ton of work on it. I own some too. And so I was going to put all my kids' money into that thing and I wish I did because then it doubled over the next 2 days. So that sucks. But Vanguard wouldn't let me buy that piece of crap because they protect investors from themselves apparently. And so in the absence of being able to buy MFI, which frankly would have been the better IRR investment because it went up 100% in 2 days. I put it all back into AST SpaceMobile at $51. And you don't do that randomly for your kids. You know, very few people are going to be trading their kids' custodial accounts. I mean, can't think of a dumber thing to do. And so, you know, I, I know my mindset was buy something that they're going to hold for years. And, you know, what do you believe in most? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I put it in ASTS because I thought, you know, legit, you know, when I check in on this thing for them in 5 years, Binance is going to be a $500 stock. And so, you know, that more than pays for college for them just on this year's gift alone. But what's fascinating is thinking about my own logic and then seeing Adriana do it, and you go, why in the world, of all the things? She's already a billionaire. Like, just put in the S&P for her kids or something like that. She put in ASTS. And And I think that was a signal as well. And, you know, kind of a backdoor, a little insider buy, but an important one nonetheless, because it was for our children. So that happened and I have that linked out. We also had Scotiabank come back with an upgrade. I think we publicly shamed them enough. And so now we can be friends with them again. And then we also have some just more industry reports talking about Starlink and their interference. And this, especially when our satellites are up, I think will just become a bigger issue where people will see that Starlink is a move fast and break things company. And when you spam the orbit with 7,000 satellites, they're emitting an immense amount of RF pollution, causing a lot of atmospheric damage when these things deorbit. There could end up being, I think, real pushback. I'm expecting it. where there's a real separation between the satellite companies in terms of, you know, the actual things that should be important with ESG, which is make sure your companies are not destroying orbit. I think people should, will look and go, hey, there's a company here doing this with 100 satellites. And there's a company doing this with 7,000 satellites. Are we doing the right thing here? And we have a company that's able to have very advanced beamforming so that it's not disrupting radio telescopes and More importantly, terrestrial spectrum. And then we have Starlink, which has these massive sidelobes. If you want to want to know what that means, check my pinned tweet with the DD document and go to the section called interference concepts. And all this stuff is mapped out for you. This will matter in my belief. So that's what we have for this week's weekly Meta sentiment. Shockingly went from being pretty positive on Friday to being dirt poor right now. And I wish I could tell you that, I wish I could tell you that I was Scott. And as Scott, I was just going to tell you all that we're going to have a press release Monday morning and the stock will retreat to $150. But unfortunately, I'm not Scott. And I do not know if we're going to have a press release tomorrow, but I hope. And if I don't have it tomorrow, if we don't have it tomorrow, Again, just realize there will be a press release on FM7 shipping at some point. There will be a press release on the 2 batches of what we believe 3 each shipping for the SpaceX launches, which are on NextSpaceflight. They're out there. You can see them changing. There's an interesting change actually. People caught on that one of the updates for NextSpaceflight showed ASTS launching 4 satellites on the next launch. I wouldn't be surprised if that's right, because I thought that we were volume limited to launching just 3 satellites initially because it's a new program. But, you know, some of these updates aren't random and we could have a positive surprise on that. And I think next week is really the first week of a very exciting time for the company because in the month of December, We're going to have FM1 launch. We're almost certainly going to have a bunch of satellites shipped. We're going to have an update on our production guidance. We could very easily have some updates on Golden Dome, which I truly hope we're involved in. And other, I'm sure some other pleasant surprises. So I'm excited about what's happening next month. And thanks everyone for joining me so late at night. And I will talk to everyone next week.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: 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, and I'll see you next time.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big. And I think with this technology, we can really affect billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the animals. Listen. Mmm, waffles.