Why Was $ASTS Dead Silent at the Paris Conference?

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[00:00:24] Speaker B: Okay, looks like we had some people show up. Um, some guy today told me that he really hated my spaces because he said I was an entitled brat, and it, it really hurt my feelings. And so I'm glad that I was able to find a way to recover from it. But, you know, it's kind of— you should just take a step back and ask yourself if the guy whose anonymous podcast you're listening to is someone that bothers you. elevates your cortisol and you think is an entitled brat, you only have 24 hours in a day, and I very, very strongly recommend not listening to me if that's how you feel. Also, it's an indicator of where people are feeling right now. I know I've updated the retail sentiment meter because previously, the bottom was catsy grumpy, but I think honestly, the real bottom is when I start focusing on crypto. because that's predictable, and that's what I've been doing. So there just hasn't been a lot going on with ASTS. It's actually— this was the week when I sat down to do the weekly yesterday and then today, and it just wasn't a lot, which was really surprising. So I've been spending a lot of my time just doing my own personal write-up on my StablecoinX investment. So that's something that I also took some crap from. So some guy's like, Kook, what are you pitching these shitcoins now? And I'm just thinking, okay, guy. This guy's also a little bit of a cranky fellow anyway. He just had twins, so he probably hasn't slept. But I know a lot about payments. I'm on the board of a payments company, and I was going after Circle when that was trying to SPAC. It's something I just fundamentally feel like I really understand. Stablecoin X is particularly interesting. I Was not thinking it was going to work this quickly, so I was kind of taking my time doing it. Yep, I wasn't friends and people that are interested in what I'm working on, so I'm just kind of banging out one slide at a time, posting it on X. But that's how I've been just time, and Tut and I were joking today that it's sort of been the cure for our low libido. I mean, ASTS can really just vaporize whatever moderate testosterone count you might have had. I happen to be sort of in the midline. I get my T tested quite regularly because I want to make sure that I don't end up, you know, like Anpanman and become a baker. But, you know, there's things you can do. There's herbal supplements, things like that. Haven't gotten the T shots approved, but, you know, ASTS being a stock definitely can drain your testosterone. And there's nothing like investing in crypto to get it right back. And you can imagine the fun I had. I was just talking to some neighbors and we were talking about this stuff and One of my neighbors lives below me. He's retired, and he has a lot of time. He's a curious guy. He owns a trucking company. He had been into Bitcoin, and I was explaining the concept of the moonbag, which Latrell Spackwell had taught me. I was telling this guy, Mike, I was like, you know what's interesting is during COVID my typical Wall Street world sort of broke. I normally would only talk to people that went to 7 schools and worked on Fifth Avenue, and all of a sudden you're trapped in your, your house on Discord and Reddit, and it just like was a whole new world. And so I was just talking to people I would have never spoken to, in particular like 20-year-old degenerates, and just learning like how they think. And I was explaining to him the concept of the moon bag, and he's like, what is that? I'm like, well, it's if your stock goes to the moon, you have a bag prepped for it. It's a moon bag. And he's like, that is so genius. And I was like, That's called young thinking. You just got to stay up to speed on things. So I've been distracted and it reminds me actually of the last time I was distracted was May and June of 2025. And this was when ASTS really started to rip. And I remember I was in the same sort of funk. The stock had been bad. I was finding a way to totally check out so that I could maintain my mental energy. When the stock is bad, I just have a hard time looking at it. I need to go find something else to do. So this time last year, voilà, what was I doing? I hate to be this honest because it just really confirms that I'm a total parody. I was looking at the crypto reverse mergers. So every morning I was waking up at 5:00 AM to check in Anpanman, looking for random little shitcoin RTOs where you could buy 5% of the company in like 3 seconds and they would move And by the time I got out of the water, they would have gone up 100%, and I'd make like 50 grand and call it a day. And I just started to get so focused on these things, just really because I was trying to tune out ASDS. I remember, and man, every day we just go, there's one stock that matters, one stock. Kept saying the same thing, and I was like, yeah, whatever, dude. I'm all about, I'm all about that now. And he kept on just being like, no, it's ASTS is the only thing that matters. And, you know, to me, at that point, still doing the weeklies and everything. And when I look at that, so I'm pulling up a chart. So in May, ASTS had been— it's unbelievable— $23, um, in May of 2025. And then it had been pumping, it got up to $50. I remember I was, you know, feeling good, obviously. It just hadn't really set in. And I remember then I kind of woke up from my super in July and August and just went like, how did this happen? I was so focused. It was really just out of complete desperation that I had not really internalized that run. It wasn't to say that I didn't own the stock, but I wasn't internalizing it. That's my own little process of of just mentally checking out. I see a lot of thumbs down than thumbs up, so I'm assuming that my connection wasn't good for a second. But you know, here we are, and so the meme of you know we're at rock bottom when Cook starts talking about crypto. I I really hate to be dishonest because it's certainly not a positive reflection on myself. But the last time also just as kind of mental trigger, the stock bottomed and then proceeded to go up over 100%. So here we are and it's exciting times. It's quiet times though. So what I was really surprised by is there was the Paris conference. And so the company, the company was there, seeing thumbs down again. I don't know if my internet's not working. We gotta, it's a problem I can't solve, but we had the Paris conference and normally I would have thought, especially given how much momentum the company has, I thought that there would start to be some more things coming out, whether that's DAs, whether that's government contracts, whether, whether that's anything. Talking about the weather, there was almost nothing, which is very peculiar for this type of silence. And so the company was out there and they were talking and actually talking about quite interesting things, but the energy that you would normally expect around these things just didn't seem really to be there, which again is somewhat curious. I don't really make heads or tails of it, but quiet nonetheless. And just really kind of surprised. And so let's see what they did talk about. It was a big event. We had Peter Lindmark there, which is always great. And he, let's see what he was reporting. So there was a panel with Scott discussing about how D2D scales, and that was a highlight. And there was a quote unquote proper discussion. Great. But yeah, not a whole lot. So meanwhile, I'm trying to keep it together as I can. So, you know, there's some people like Endless Frank that go absolutely AWOL ballistic. I channel that energy. Toward posting slides on my crypto investment when everyone leaves it, when anyone leaves a nice comment to encourage civil discourse and positivity toward each other. So, you know, we're all dealing with this in other ways, but it was interesting to talk to one of the Space Mob guys that had actually interviewed at the company and met extensively with Abel. And he just made the point, and this was, you know, not yesterday, it was a little bit of time ago, But he said, well, Abel has a couch in his office and he sleeps on it and it overlooks the production floor. This is what you want in a founder. This really resonates with me. We have a portfolio company where the founder is a billionaire. He's got some of the world's greatest art in his office, which I saw, and I was keeping tabs on that because it's always curious to know where our secondary dollars are going. It turns out art. But his office is directly over the production floor in what is a pretty crappy area of the city in which he locates. This is an area where you have to have 20-foot steel gates because otherwise there's MS-13. This is not where you'd be particularly wanting to spend a lot of time. It's where he spends his time though, because it's where the action is, and he's directly over his production floor. By contrast, there is another founder of a company we tried to do a deal with, And originally his office was also on the factory floor, but then things got big, things got good. And then he moved his office to— I don't want to say the area because it starts to narrow down and potentially dox me, but let's just put it in terms of maybe London. All of a sudden, when the founder gets the best office space in Mayfair, when his company is far off in some industrial area, you start to worry about disconnection to reality, disconnection to the operators torquing the bolts, putting the microns together.
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[00:11:02] Speaker B: It's important not to isolate yourself on a mansion in Capri while your empire burns in Rome. These things have been repeated throughout history. It's something that when you're analyzing a founder, you want to be very conscientious of, do they continue to be as engaged? Do they keep their eye on the ball from when they were a day 1 company to a day 10-year company? There's a point in time where a company gets big and you have so much talent and good leveling of the staff where things can change. And that founder energy can change. Amazon doesn't have Bezos anymore in the distribution facility, and Amazon is fine, but it's gotten to a point where it can run pretty efficiently. But at an early point in a company's time, a founder being on the production floor is what matters. And so while it's quiet to us, and while everyone seems to want livestream videos over every employee's desk, so we know, you know, minute by minute, data on BW11. No company does that. The closest thing we ever got to that was during the BP oil spill, when they figured out how to put cameras on the ocean floor. And then all of a sudden, a bunch of analysts on Wall Street, myself included, spent their day just literally staring at the ocean floor, watching oil come out of it. That was the only example I can think of where a company began to livestream a critically important event. And I'm sure they wish they hadn't, but ASTS in a way does livestream. It has the TLA data that it reports to NORAD, which is what we monitor. And so versus most companies, we have an incredible amount of visibility. And so we don't get minute-by-minute press releases. And so let's say, for example, that Catsy is correct, that what they're doing is doing some station-keeping testing. Now, I don't know if that's true. I read what he writes. I've seen Toad Sommelier and some of this other analysis. I've tried to replicate it. I am personally not 100% convinced that that's right. I'm also not convinced that it's not right. I just simply don't know. And so I'm looking at it in the simple way of looking for the sort of dramatic change in V*, which historically, when I've done Birdwatching, I've done a pretty good job of correctly calling when these things unfurl right now. I've got a script that does— I know other guys have actually built way better programs for this at this point. My dates back to when Space Mob was a lot more— you actually had to do this with your own Python. But so I'm just looking at the TLA data. I don't see it. I don't think it's unfurled. But what I do see is a satellite cruising along just as it should. I have seen a little bit of difference in the mean motion comparison. BW-12 and 13 acting a little differently from BW-11. Now, that could be because they're deployed. I just don't know. And so what we do know is if the satellite had burned up and crashed, We would almost certainly have had an update. From all accounts, it looks to be nominal. It's within the deployment window of the prior satellites, and it's very easy to construct a narrative that they're doing station keeping testing on this satellite, in particular because future satellites are going into different altitudes, especially the mid-band satellites, and they want to understand presumably what they can do when on which power loads. Makes a lot of sense. So when you have uncertainty, which we do, the question is always, well, do you trust the management? And I saw a lot of comments over the past 2 weeks where people are demanding transparency, emailing IR, you know, whatever their suggestion is. And it's like, I mean, what is IR possibly going to respond to? Like, yeah, we're going to put out some fluff. They have nothing to disclose. So what are they going to say? And every time they do disclose anything, they get a class action lawsuit. So why in the world would they do that? But what you have to understand as an investor is, do you trust the team? If you don't, you really should not own this stock, especially when Rocket Lab has perfect correlation to this stock. So if you're just trying to get exposure to the theme, just buy Rocket Lab because it seems to deliver exactly the same stock price movement for now. And if you trust Peter Beck, you should invest in Peter Beck. If you don't trust Abel Avalon and his team, it's a wild proposition to suggest that you should spend time focused on this stock. When I don't trust a team, I move on. I was just debating with someone on another stock. He was giving me a hard time. He's like, well, Kook, I heard that you didn't understand the Joby thesis. I understand it and it might be right, but I just don't have that gut feeling. I have some reservations on it as I thought through it. I just don't know. And I told him, um, what did I just tell him? Literally just was chatting with him and I said, um, I only have 1 to 3 positions. I'm not trying to be right on everything. I am just trying to be right on 1 or 2 things. And if I don't really have a strong view on something, or I don't have a good feel around a founder, Then I just move on, and that's a really good way to live your life. In my view, you don't have to win every battle; you just have to win one or two. And so, going back to ASTS, the reason why I do fight this battle admittedly right now, I'm just trying to check out just to pass the time and not burn out my brain. And that's why I've been spending time on Stablecoin X, which is very interesting to me. And I own a lot of it. I just hadn't really tweeted as much about it again. Again, I also hadn't. quite anticipated that it would move this fast, although I had anticipated that it could likely move this fast, which is why I bought it. But you have to take a zoom out and remember what you're playing for with ASTS because I do think about that, the inconsistency of how investors can act of where do I want to allocate my money? And so do I need to always own all this ASTS? No. Do I want to own all this ASTS? Yes, but there are other stocks in the world that are exciting. My multiple of money on USDE has been astounding. I'm just capacity limited. I have a big account. There's only so much I can buy of that. I could have bought more, I guess, but there's some reservations I have on that in terms of, is that a forever trade? There's a lot of things that I'm thinking about on that. When I look about the size of the ultimate opportunity, because I'm really sort of a 5 to 10-year out, type of investor. When I look at the opportunity on an investment, that's how I'm really thinking about it. Not what can it do in 3 weeks because I don't have a lot of faith in myself as a trader. So USDE for sure can outperform ASTS because it's just a smaller company and it's got leverage on leverage. ASTS, I'd be shocked if it goes to $250 tomorrow. I guess it could happen, but I would be shocked. But could it go to $2,500 over 3 years where I have extreme conviction around it? Yes. And so that's why I own the position of that size. And so what drives that conviction, which it's easy to have shaken, especially when the market sucks, is really understanding the evolution of the TAM. And so this one-bar thesis, Is something, um, that's confounding. So I just got some feedback, um, about my sound. It says it sounds good for a while, then it gets staticky. I don't know what to say. I have a professional microphone and I'm hardwired into my network, so I think it's just X. So I'm sorry about the fidelity of this call, but the Curse of the one bar is something that hits me daily. And so last week I was driving my kids to school. So a school is obviously a very high population density of people, all of whom are trying to talk, you know, it's kids and parents and parents and parents, you know, trying to communicate. My kids' school is actually in, you know, pretty big residential development. Lots of people. It's one bar. No one will let them have a cell phone tower there. And so when I kind of think about my own life, the second I step out of my house, one bar, drive my kids to school, one bar, the beach, one bar. So much of my life is one bar where it's tantalizing. You look at your phone and you think, oh, you can do it, phone. And then it can't connect a call. I get some text messages coming through, go straight to voicemail, can't get data. It kills you. It's so annoying. And so this gray area coverage is such a big idea for ASTS. It's such a big opportunity. I still have some questions around how this monetizes because does it go on like a day pass, a weekly pass, or is it part of just the hybrid network architecture, which is the better answer? Um, but While we can't answer that question alone, if you put on a consumer investor mindset, which is how I try to think, if you're delivering incredible value to the consumer, your ability to extract economics within some parameters of you yourself having some defensibility and scarcity, you can generally figure out a good way to monetize, even if you can't perfectly see it from the outside today. These quotes, from the MNOs are just so revealing. Yet anytime someone is disconnected, it drives an emotional response, argues Vodafone executive Tim Boddy, who also is the vice chairman of Satellite Connect Europe. He says, beyond the 1% problem, Boddy also believes satellites can solve the 1-bar problem, the coverage holes within the network in more critical use cases. And so it's— 1% problem is where you don't have coverage at all, The one bar problem, as Anpanman points out, is 20 to 30% of the total addressable market. This is such a big idea, and it will touch so many people and deliver so much value that it gets me really excited. It's a big idea. Lately, we've had some other people try to join the race with this big idea. VSAT was out with their Equitas JV, and they say it has a binding contract, but then I saw they're out. What are they doing? They're trying to get their prime contractor selected. I don't have a strong view on this. And so we'll see. I mean, I think their view is just trying to really create sort of a rental constellation for other people to use. As they call it, a neutral shared space and ground network that multiple mobile operators can use while keeping their own spectrum, customers, and service. Okay, so that's kind of ASTS's business model, but then how are they going to get there? For one, when you use a prime contractor, as we've talked about really ad nauseam, that's where you're handing over responsibility to someone like MDA or Boeing. It's very difficult to iterate. The power of vertical integration really can't be overstated enough. I believe it's true when I say that every constellation that was outsourced to a prime has mostly failed. Some of them still exist today because they emerged from bankruptcy, but they had to cross the chasm of death to be here as we know them today. Because they go over budget, they get delayed, you don't have control, you cannot adapt. So it's something that I generally be very skeptical of. So I'm going to obviously follow it like everyone else here, see how VSAT develops. In the scenario where they become a credible challenger and disrupt the perception of the ASTS opportunity, I would take stock of that. But right now, to me, it looks more like a paper constellation. And if anything, them doing what EchoStar did, which is look to talk a big game to then get someone to drive the price of their spectrum higher as they ultimately sort of dismantle the company. But we'll see. I know there's some people like Lucky Stewie, who is an aspirational consultant who hopes to one day get paid by ViaSat— apparently not yet paid by ViaSat— he would viscerally disagree with, with this view, and he's free to do so. And we'll all find out, because I actually don't really know the answer. But what I do know is that sovereignty is on the menu. What we saw from the Paris conference was the trend that we had already been seeing: the increased sensitivity around sovereignty, especially as it relates to defense. We are seeing a rearming of Europe for reasons that are logical, although in the context of history one would say, how has this ended before? I don't know, you know, Maginot Line. But they're doing it and it doesn't seem like it's going to stop, and They need a sovereign solution, and they're figuring it out. It's going to be a hard thing to figure out, but the military nexus to this can't be ignored. The cat is out of the bag, and then we know that this trend is going to be further accelerated when the U.S. and goes out and talks about its own capabilities. This is the shot heard around the world. When the U.S. demonstrates the power of its own sovereign systems, which results in such asymmetrical capabilities, the rest of the world can't possibly sit by and watch. They have to do something. And so Michael Pollack, who is with ASTS, summarized his presentation in Paris and said That in the room they had key leaders from the U.S. Space Force as well as representatives from various Western allied ministries of defense. Many were encountering ASTS for the first time, and that has now begun to shift as awareness grows. We spoke about how AST SpaceMobile Bluebird satellites are already delivering meaningful support to the defense community and how this capability will expand as additional satellites are launched. The U.S. defense community has already seen an early demonstration of what is possible using our existing 12 BlueBird satellites in orbit today, and our allied partners are now gaining a clearer understanding of how our direct-to-device broadband technology is reshaping expectations of legacy satellite communications. So Europe's response is not going to be, oh cool, congratulations America. We are really glad that you have this incredible capability that we don't have. That is not their response. Their response is going to be, oh my God, how do we get this too? And it's going to be hard. It's very difficult to compete with the American industrial complex. For one, our 50 states. work together in a better way. EU has countries that have to work together, some of whom are probably not totally trusting of each other. And so solving some of these problems is very, very difficult. Then you have countries which are somewhat big, yet somewhat small, like Japan, Korea, Singapore. How are they going to have this same capability Especially when they don't exactly live in risk-free neighborhoods. They also have some communist neighbors, uh, and some fascist neighbors. Threats are everywhere. And then just to make these other countries feel a little bit more left behind, for reasons unknown to me, the Air Force said, we can confirm that we have weapons in orbit. We have taken over the moon. So now countries are thinking, oh God, these cowboy Americans have now predictably put guns in space. You know, there's literally nothing more American to our non-US people on this call than America putting guns in space. Like that is literally the most American thing that we could have done. And of course, this is what we have done. So the space race is now on. In a somewhat frightening new direction, but one that is unlikely to be stopped, and ASTS is a part of that. So tracking, sensing, all of these systems are tied together, and it's a really big secular trend, and all of the countries are going to get in on the action. And so then the question is, do we participate in the main thrust of the action, which is of course with the United States? And the answer is unequivocally yes. But then the question is, are we then blocked out from the rest of the world because we're deemed— we being ASTS— deemed to be, uh, not a credible partner? And that's where we go TBD. But look at what we have with Satellite Connect Europe, what we have with JLEO, which will be announced at some point. It's showing that our sovereign section, uh, structuring can address some of these issues and be the unlock where other countries can get The benefit of American-scale technology with control, and that's a very powerful idea. But these are all longer-term big ideas, and in the meantime, we're just all massively frustrated by not understanding what's going on with Bluebird 11 and where Batch 3 is. And so I have some things out there that summarize some of the theories around Bluebird 11. We already talked about this. And then the, you know, the wait for batch 3. I'm working with my new boy, Market Apostle. We've set up some surveillance systems, which are pretty cool. Started to be a little bit overwhelming, honestly, to try to track it all, but we're on the case. When we see these satellites ship, we'll obviously let everyone know, but they will ship. And so the company has a massive backlog of satellites in production. They're not slowing down. You can see that because the Antonov, keeps landing. They keep having more and more equipment and supplies brought into Midland, parallel production paths. They are not slowing down. And so it's going to be a really fascinating journey in the next 3 to 6 months because we're likely going to start to have a position where we are prepositioning satellites at launchpads and starting to really play offense. And I look forward to that because that will change the conversation from where it currently is. And launch will follow. Company's out recruiting yet another launch executive. It would be great if the company could give us a lot more transparency into this, but there's contractual reasons why they can't. But also what I've come to appreciate with the space industry is it really resembles a game that I'm not good at, which is called And so you do not show all of your cards. The other guys can kind of guess some of your cards, but they really don't know. And so you don't go out and advertise what you have or what you don't have, because you hold a lot of cards, which are your cargoes, and they hold some cards, which is limited launch capacity, but not zero launch capacity, especially not zero launch capacity forever. And so there's a lot of supply coming. People want rockets. People want to underwrite programs. We don't know when Blue Origin's coming back, which is going to add a ton of capacity. And so everyone's kind of able to wonder, you know, do they have pocket aces or twos or somewhere in between? And I personally believe the answer is somewhere in between. And so ASTS is out hiring a new launch campaign technical program manager. They've had some other hires in the past. They keep trucking along. I'm optimistic that we're going to be all headed to the Cape pretty soon. I really can't wait. It's kind of a new fun tradition for me. I wish I had gone in August, but I just had too much going on. And I think we're going to just be banging out onesies and twosies on Falcons per month for a little bit. And then 2027 is going to see a much more scaled launch campaign, in my view, and we're going to have plenty of cargoes to do it. So then looking further out, something that again, just sort of ebbs and flows in terms of whether people care, and I understand, is the data centers in space. And so we have Sundial talking about it again, and I continue to believe that this is a solved problem. And so I'd put an asterisk on that. I believe that this is a solved problem, where we don't yet know the cost curve for which they have solved for. Which is to say, for random Joe Schmo using Gemini, that needs to be delivered at a low cost because that's pretty unimportant compute, as opposed to military and government workloads, things like this, the highest of the highest value operations, Then also things that are done in space. For example, all the AI that will be deployed as part of all these new guns that we put in orbit, these are extremely high value. When I say that AI data centers have been solved, it's caveated by at what part of the supply stack in terms of the marginal cost. Certainly, it hasn't been solved to obviate all the terrestrial data centers. That would be a profoundly naive statement to make right now, but that's not how these things work. Initially, you start to take the high-value segment of the market, and then you move down as you scale. This is how Elon works. He did not have cameras for FSD 8 years ago that were cost-competitive and the quality he needed to accomplish what he wanted to, but he knew they would get there. And so also by driving toward that, by putting so many Teslas on the road with FSD, which didn't work until recently, he was also then creating the supply chain, creating the technology that he needed but did not yet have. And so it's truly a case of fake it till you make it, but then he arrived at a future point where he might be able to totally blow away Waymo, because he will fundamentally be able to make self-driving cars that you can buy for $50,000 versus self-driving cars that cost $200,000. One will be Betamax, one will be VHS. This is how I think the AI data centers in space will proceed, because as you begin to do it, you begin to build out the supply, Fundamentally drive the R&D and make the advancements, which allow you to get closer to the things that are definitively advantageous to do in space, which is dramatically simpler cooling, lack of water issues, and abundant and more powerful sunlight. These are the things that are inextricably related to success for AI data centers, And you just have to navigate launch costs, radiation hardening, and I'm sure a whole host of other things, but around the edges, each step gets you closer to the pot of gold at the end. And it's just useful to know whether this is in fact a big trend that will happen, which is something that I do think is true. And then do you own the security that is leveraged to that trend and is going to participate in a meaningful way with high returns on that trend. And I believe that ASTS also checks that box, which is a big opportunity, which gives you multi-year growth drivers, which is exciting. Back on Earth, boring, boring Earth. Starlink got its approvals for some international expansion for Starlink Mobile. Great. They're on a different trajectory than ASTS, different strategies, but the confrontation between these strategies will occur down the road. But meanwhile, ASTS also had some approvals, and so Rocket Tank 123 was staying on top of the case and kept us abreast. And the FCC accepted the filing from ASTS for international IMT and additional V-band spectrum. Yay! One comment that was actually pretty interesting, speaking of yay, actually speaking of yeah, yeah, Dave. pointed out that Rocket Lab finally finished its ATM. What's interesting, because we've all lived through ATMs and they're annoying because they pin a stock, just like when we issue a convert, there's just a lot of supply you got to chew through. It's just all else equal, someone leaning on the bid makes a stock more asymmetrical to the downside for a given period of time. So if you're Renaissance Technologies or something like that, looking at the metadata of the stock market, all else equal, if a company has an ATM, it's sort of like picking a fight with someone with one hand tied behind their back because you kind of know they're hitting the bid every day. So they could do some good things, make stock go up, but all else equal, there's just more supply every single day net-net. And so not good. And this weird correlation that ASTS has with Rocket Lab, and also which includes Voyager and Redwire, It is kind of interesting to think we'll find out in hindsight whether or not a lot of this frustration that sort of seemed to be situational awareness induced, those Momo factor unwind, which either was had some causality to situational awareness or situational awareness caused the weakness in the Momo factor, kind of both. But then the question I kind of wondered is: Did ASDS kind of get pinned under this? Rocket Lab ATM in this weird way. It felt like that on Thursday. Then Friday, it was just so annoying because you could see what was happening is Rocket Lab and ASTS both had pretty big open interest on the $60 lines, and Rocket Lab on the $65 line. So no sooner do you wake up on Friday morning and the market is just gutting these stocks to keep them below those strike prices, which seems very convenient. And of course, as they go down, it causes it to go down a little bit more because of the gamma. And then they freak out retail. It's a Friday. You know, people want a harikari. And then, you know, voilà, market makers get to keep all the premium and don't get assigned. You know, I hate to be like so cynical, but that seems to be pretty clearly what was happening. And we'll see. It's going to take some oomph stock to get past some of these option expiry walls, but we've now cleared the Rocket Lab ATM wall, which is potentially kind of a headwind I hadn't really appreciated, but in hindsight makes a lot of sense. The ultimate reason why these stocks will punch through is just simply the enormity of the opportunity. SPAC Bobby put out a Wells Fargo table effectively just on Starlink subs. They're expecting Starlink subs to go from 17 million to 46 million by 2028, with Starlink going from $19 billion to $51 billion of revenue. This is why people are so excited about SpaceX stock, as they should be. It's really exciting. It's very difficult to find this type of growth in the market. Now, I don't have a personal view if they'll hit that growth, but presumably Wells Fargo did some work. And the greater point remains that this is an area of secular growth. It's hard to find secular growth, especially differentiated secular growth. And that's what drives interest into stocks. And there's usually a lot of chop in between. Look at the poor guys dealing with AI right now. One day you feel like the skies are blue, and then over the weekend, all of the frontier models effectively form a cartel and agree to slow down for all of like 5 seconds until they don't. And you don't know which way is up. So you can either get whipped by that, good luck in your life, or you have to figure out a real strong view of the future you believe in, knowing that it's always going to be kind of messy to get there and stick with it. And if you have the view, of the future for ASTS, amen. But just the same way where I struggle sometimes, well, I do struggle to have good clarity on things like Joby, Aurora, QuantumScape. I look at all the stuff, the go-go stocks that people look at. Sometimes people are right and maybe they're going to be right on those. But like I said in the beginning, I've concluded I don't have to be in every trade. I know my limitations. which are many. And I only need to be right on the very, very few things that I do. And I'm only going to do the things that I have a lot of understanding of and conviction in. So I would just recommend that you also think that way. It'll save you a lot of grief of buying something and realizing you never really actually believed it or understood it. And then the last thing we have is New Glenn. And so, you know, like we were talking about back in May when these guys had the catastrophic, devastating, and dramatic explosion, you know, we said just how quickly time passes. And so here we are, it's almost October, and these guys are going to be back on the pad pretty soon. And Blue Origin's talking about the vision of them launching New Glenn 100 times per year. It's going to take a lot of progress to achieve that, but that's the scale of what they're trying to do. And so, you know, you think about it, that's the equivalent of like 250 to 300, probably more than 300 Falcon 9 launches. And never mind that Starship is going to be coming. ULA, Rocket Lab, Relativity, the Japanese are scaling up. There's an incredible amount of capacity coming.
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[00:43:26] Speaker B: 18+. And there's also going to be an incredible amount of cargoes coming because, you know, if I can't have it all ways, kook. If I'm right and things like space-based AI are a thing, the demand for all those rockets will be there. And the, you know, the cargo carriers will be our generation's Aristotle Onassis. Will they still potentially be in commodity markets? Yes. But go read the biography of Aristotle Onassis. It's quite interesting. He was a man with balls and ego the size of Jupiter that found himself owning a commodity transportation network where you just had inflection in the secular demand for the thing he moved, which was oil. And so there was an elbow in the demand for oil called Americans realized they like cars, and that meant oil was moving, and he was the man that moved it. And there just weren't enough tankers for a long enough period of time, and he made a lot of money. And I believe it could be very possible that the launch providers over the next 10 years find themselves as the Aristotle Onassis of space. And good for them. And I hope they build a lot of rockets because I think that there's going to be a lot of incredible opportunities for innovators like ASTS to find incredible ways to utilize those rockets to create massive businesses in space. So I apologize about the bad reception I've done everything that I know I can do to fix it. So I apologize that people have to suffer through that. And I hope we have some more news this week so that we have a more exciting Weekly next week. And otherwise, thanks for joining, and I hope you have a wonderful evening.
[00:45:20] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: 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.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Mmm, waffles.