Kook's Weekly - March 22 - The SpaceMob Slingshot: Trillion-Dollar Math and the AI Frontier

[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.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: All right, good evening everyone. I hope everyone had, had a busy, busy weekend. I certainly did. And so while, uh, other people are monitoring the situation and seemingly just adding activity to their life, I've just tried to check out. And so my belief is all these sorts of macro tempests tend to be, uh, for one, incredibly confusing. If you try to make sense of them, but then also kind of just like not productive. And so depending on what your strategy is, right now I'm looking at the S&P down 30 bps overnight and there's Marines on the way, yada, yada, yada. And so what is this really going to cause me to change? Really nothing because The world will probably still go on, increasingly so, because there's no nukes in Iran. And so I just am, it's kind of adding to what I want to add. And so the things that I've been doing is I've been adding some of what I call torques for ASTS, which is a little bit of a complicated option strategy just to overlay on top of my core position. And so what I call a torque, I didn't, I don't know if there's like a better name for it, but I sell a put spread in order to buy calls. And so then I cap my downside. So you're really buying long stock risk, it's just you don't attach to a higher strike. So I've been doing some of that and then buying S&P 500 and then another name, which I think some other guys might start talking about. Pretty soon, but I just want to stay as an ASTS-only account by and large. But I do a little bit of other stuff around the edges, which is usually pretty small, usually less than 1% of my ASTS position. But weeks like last week and, you know, what it's looking like for next week are good weeks just to make sure you know what you own, make sure you have the right balance sheet. So try not to be very levered or have short-term calls, in my humble opinion. Those are tough things. And then just keep an eye on what we're going to be having over the next couple months. And so let's just start off with, ironically, a Texas hedge suggestion from a Swedish cat. It's like, does he even know what a Texas hedge is? Come on. And so points out, well, let's look at what this market looks like. And so we have the Starlink IPO around the horizon. That's now rumored to I don't know, it's rumored, but Polymarket is saying it's going to be a $2 trillion IPO.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Great.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: And increasingly it looks like it's a duopoly with ASTS and SpaceX. Now that's going to get a little bit more complicated when we parse it out because you're going to have Kuiper. And so you have to start to define each market. And so SpaceX, Plays in the launch market, if you were unaware, and they play in the fixed broadband market, which is their Starlink core Starlink product. Then they have a little bit of a toehold, which I'm sure is kind of nothing in terms of revenue for them on their D2C opportunity. And then I'm sure there's other ways they make money, but when thinking about the D2C, by all practical accounts, it's a it's a duopoly with AST SpaceMobile and SpaceX. And what's tricky for SpaceX is that ASTS should be somewhat easily able to move into fixed broadband at the time and place of their choosing. How they'll sell it remains to be seen, whether they go direct to consumer or whether they sell through their MNO partners. But the reverse is a more difficult argument. Where it's going to be very difficult for SpaceX to do much more than they've already done in the DTC market because it relies on the MNOs. We'll see how that EchoStar spectrum plays out for them, but you kind of have one-way optionality on ASTS eating into SpaceX's satellite launch, but somewhat limited from what I can, you know, really Say genuinely, I feel like we've seen all the cards that those guys could play. They have whatever they have, 3,500 satellites up and all the time in the world to have stolen all of ASTS's customers. And they haven't done. And ASTS has been delayed. Da da da da da. And, and still the, you know, the bullet bounced off the armor. And so now we're about to see what happens when, you know, David wakes up and gets his slingshot out, and that is coming. And so skipping around a little bit in terms of events, but we're going to have batch 1 probably ship in April or May. And that is the infamous Constellation constipation that I've been wrong about in terms of when they would be able to flush their satellite intestines into the great toilet of opportunity. Some of this stuff, I don't know. This is why you shouldn't do ad hoc spaces because then you say stuff like that, but they are going to have like a Japanese toilet, TOTO type opportunity when they actually are able to start shipping these. And at that point, the optionality of ASTS going into SpaceX's market is going to become more real. So now let's go back to our Swedish cat who has the audacity to suggest something like a Texas hedge. And so we have the Starlink IPO that's going to be at roundabout 40 times the price of AST SpaceMobile, maybe worth it. And if you're an investor, which I hope people on this call are, if it's not that hard just to buy the whole opportunity, just buy the whole opportunity. That's called buying the strip. And so if you're a distressed investor, for example, and let's say you own a bunch of bank debt, secured bank debt, well, you're kind of guessing what's called where the fulcrum is. And if the value cuts a little higher, you might get part out or reinstated, in which case you don't end up owning the bankrupt entity, which is your goal. So what do you do? You buy some of the unsecured bonds as a hedge in a way. Like if the value cuts a little higher, make sure you can still control the process through the unsecureds. Well, Then what else do you do? Well, you can buy some equity in bankruptcy, as odd as that might sound, but it's really smart if all of a sudden the unsecureds are trading, you know, around about 70 cents or something, start buying the equity as your hedge. And ASTS is a very obvious hedge for someone who does the work and identifies like, this is big, this being the market. And when you have something that's going to potentially trade at a $2 trillion market cap, And then you have this other thing at $40 billion, you know, a little less than that. It's kind of nothing. It's 2%. And so why would you not just buy some ASTFs if you were all gung-ho on SpaceX? Why in the world would you not ratio in some ASTF SpaceMobile just to catch that value to the extent that the value of the market cuts higher? So the same logic as to why I secure bank debt lenders in bankruptcy. So like the Apollos of the world, the Cerberuses and the Ares of the world. The same logic that guys that are buying bank debt with an intent to basically cram down a company and take it to buy, and they buy the bankrupt equity. That's the same logic that some investors might have on ASTS for the guys that are only doing the maybe 7.5 minutes of diligence. So they've obviously done more than 5 minutes of diligence, but at 7.5 they go, well, huh, Texas hedge. And then if they take the red pill and they start, you know, reading the PinDD doc, that's when they might do something else. And you're talking to a guy who did something else, which is buy an institutional-level stake in a pre-revenue company. But that's what happens when you have the conviction. You start to go, well, this is the thing that should be a trillion-dollar market cap because that's my belief. So it's very interesting. But then I was having a debate with a SpaceX holder the other day, and, uh, he's a good friend of mine actually, and he's made a lot of money on SpaceX. But these guys haven't had to do a lot of work on DTC. And so I kept telling him, I said, hey buddy, you know, make sure you take a print because we're coming for you. Um, you know, I, I hate to, you know, I was like, I hate to tell you, but we will bankrupt you, which we won't. But, you know, trying to be a little sensationalist to scare him a little bit. So he did some quick work, went on Twitter, saw some of the slides from Mobile World Congress that showed SpaceX had, uh, whatever it was, 35 DAs signed and 600 million subs, and sent it back to me and went, well, looks like they're doing just great. Like, what are you talking about with the CSD Space Mobile? And my point was, okay, so this pre-revenue shitco has 50 DA MOUs And 6 times his number, the number of subs captured by those MOUs and DAs. 6 times. So over 3 billion people captured by that. Is that not a wake-up call? Because the story behind SpaceX is dominant space monopoly. Well, that's not what the numbers are showing for this segment, D2C. And And I just go back to any— anyone that is familiar with the Facebook analog of desktop versus mobile, you just have to bet on mobile. And so ASTS is trouncing the competition in mobile before they've even started. And most reasonable people would assume that mobile is going to be the bigger market. Seems like a good bet. The bet's not priced for that statement. And so that's where this convexity of the upside comes. It gets me really, really excited. Even when other people are monitoring the situation and worried about the S&P gapping down, like, gimme a break. The Marines are about to land on Kharg Island. And as someone who has spent some time with the Marine Corps, like, just run. I mean, that would be like the dominant strategy. If I'm an Iranian soldier, I'd see these guys coming and I would very quickly set a world record for a Steeplechase distance run, getting the hell out of there. And so I just still feel like we're just a couple of weeks and this Iran stuff is in the rearview mirror. And so making long-term decisions about things that are frankly levered to this entire situation in Iran, the whole world should be waking up to the changing nature of electronic warfare, denial of GPS, things like this. So these stocks should be going up. I don't know who in the world would be selling defense companies right now when Hegseth is trying to go, or actually Steve Feinberg is trying to hire bankers to deploy $200 billion. And literally all of my friends are trying to get jobs at Anduril. This is the place to be. And so the idea that these things trade off is preposterous to me. But in any respect, just always think like, what's going to happen in 6 months? And so in 6 months from now, we're going to be leading up to the midterms. There's going to be, you know, people will be, they'll be back to school season, things like that. The acute nature of whether the Strait of Hormuz is shut, which it probably won't be, will be long since passed. And that's when you got to remember, at least where, well, you don't have to do anything, but what I always tell myself is, Remember how to think long term, and so then let's check in with this account CK Capital, and they say ASTS has a path to becoming a trillion-dollar company, and the math isn't complicated. Well, okay, sure, but it's a little complicated, but they do a good job dumbing it down. So they look at the SpaceX math, so the subs and the revenue, and then. Point out that ASTS is pointing toward 5 billion subscribers as opposed to SpaceX with 10 million. Now there's a difference in ARPU, but there's also some other differences in terms of the super wholesale market and things like that. And so this individual goes and says, well, a billion subs at $5 per month is $60 billion in annual revenue, and that's 20% attach rate. We don't know the right answer, but that doesn't seem totally unrealistic to me. And so then he says, well, at 15 times revenue, that's $900 billion market cap. At 20 times revenue, that's $1.2 trillion. And meanwhile, Starlink is trading at 120 times revenue, which is clearly just reflecting incredible growth expectations. No one's saying that 120 times revenue is a stable valuation metric for SpaceX, kind of like how Snowflake was trading at 100 times revenue. That was based on a lot of growth. And then the problem is when something gets a lot more competitive pressure and, you know, things like that, or the growth doesn't materialize, that's when a stock can kind of trade poorly over the next years. Who knows what'll happen with SpaceX, but you can really paint an exciting picture. So read that. It's a good tweet to read. Looks like it got an incredible amount of engagement. I'm actually going to give him a like right now. 276 likes. So the math is there, which is always really important to do what I would call the owner's math. And so if you think like an owner, you're going to actually do your calculations on a napkin, not in a spreadsheet, because you really just want to know what your true north is. And then you put your head down and you get back to cooking. I would find it very surprising if Abel is spending a lot of time doing a detailed DCF of his company, As opposed to just kind of knowing, oh, I have 5 billion subs. I need to have the best service possible to have the highest attach rate possible and generate something that is so clearly valuable to the consumer that I get a lot of value capture against that. That would be my math if I were someone like Abel. And what I would also be focused on is grabbing the talent to make it happen. On that note, ASTS hired a chief of artificial intelligence and autonomy. And so we have @TopSecretStocks not being very secretive. They're literally posting their thoughts on the internet. So someone's got to tell this person to like turn their account private or something unless, unless they are being ironic. And so we have this hire coming from Boeing's AI lab. And they ran strategic initiatives across space edge computing and things like that. And good to see talented people come in. We also had Anpanman highlight this same hire. They went through the person's background. And then an account I always look to, to arbitrate truth is Theodorus the Atheist. And so This account is kind of a no bullshit account to put it lightly. And you always just want to see if something gets picked up by Theodoros as well. He's a technical guy. I always pay a lot of attention to whatever he's paying attention to. So that's great. We have a lot of talent, but then we continue to have this opportunity validated in and around us. So Amazon, company famous for bringing you books, is now, well, this isn't technically Amazon. We have Blue Origin founded by Bezos filing for 51,000 satellites to do AI data centers in space. Now the Substack bros with their Excel spreadsheets would tell you that this is not economically viable. Substack bros tend not to be rich. They tend not to do shit. They hide behind the screen and don't know necessarily what is going on. Blue Origin has a lot of money at stake, has some very talented people, and they're putting their money where their mouth is. And so they have a proposed constellation of 50,000, 51.5 6,000 satellites operating in SSO, sun synchronous orbit, which means staying in the daylight. And what's interesting about that is AST SpaceMumble, thanks to Katzy pointing this out to us, also has a shell in SSO. SSO tends to also be very valuable for military applications, but I think will be the new prime real estate as well. For AI applications. So it's an interesting thought I've always had about this is really rule of capture type thinking. And so this new era of economic space capitalism, it's kind of thinking of what term is appropriate for it. If you get up into orbit right now, orbital slots are free. I don't believe that that will always be the case. You know, you could have, if you were very smart 400 years ago, You could have probably, if you had a good musket, staked out the entire Upper West Side and called it your own. And then you probably have to fight off some people over time, but you could have captured a lot of land just like Aster did. He paid for it. But if you were there first before the value was really known, it's a good place to be. Leasing up the entirety of the Permian Basin, for example, Was a good idea. Well, you know, getting free acreage on the Bakken and, you know, all this other stuff that the railroads ran through, this was good thinking. And so I believe that getting orbital slots will also be viewed as good thinking in the years to come because once you're really out of that real estate, or at least the prime real estate, then there's going to be a price for those slots similar to air rights in Manhattan. Spectrum is a great example. It's very finite. And so this SSO space could end up, I think, really exploding because of the AI applications, because AI is very power intensive, as everyone knows. And SSO is how you power max. Power maxing is good. So then we go back to ASTS. So this AI data center and space stuff just keeps coming. We took a little hiatus for a couple of weeks where this was kind of out of the front and center, but it's kind of roaring back. And then we go back to Dr. Ollie. This is another account that does some great work, a real OG of the MPA variety. And it goes back and kind of revisits why ASTS is such a great platform for space-based AI. And it's really the big power generation is the first part. You gotta have a lot of real estate in space. You're not necessarily going to have— hold on one sec. Doing— my wife was like, where are you? Doing podcast. Where else would I be at 8 o'clock on Sunday? And so the second is how you cool it. And so you have to radiate the heat away and We've all glommed onto the fact that ASTS has solved a lot of these problems and there's patents to boot. And so that's really exciting down the line. Again, thinking like an owner, is it something that we will get, will, you know, create hard value from tomorrow? I really don't know, but probably not. But does our tech, does our IP, does our underlying production capacity and talent formation Does that set up to be set us up to be a prime winner of this trend in the not too distant future? You know, in the words of Tupac, all eyes on me. I think I think yes, and the market has a funny way when it gloms onto that conclusion of starting to put a lot of value on things like that. And so it's nice to see that back in the. In the frame. And what's important to me is that we have this incredible product roadmap ahead of us, so much more than dead spots, as we've already seen. And it's really, again, showing the platform value of AST SpaceMobile. This is not a point solution. This is a global infrastructure platform. And what's so crucial about that? what might appear to be a subtlety is the difference between something that trades at 3 times revenue versus 30 times revenue. The market will reward things with platform value, with market share domination. And then what's cool is NVIDIA also really cementing this theme, quote, space computing, the final frontier has arrived. They're putting AI data centers in orbit. It's exciting times. And we believe that ASTS is the backbone of what will be because of its power generation and its heat diffusion properties, which was hard to do. And so having certainly done a lot of work into this about the heat diffusion issues, this was the reason why most experts thought the company would fail. They thought that it was not going to be able to deal with the incredible heat generated. And then also the change in heat as you go in and out of orbit, which wouldn't be the case with AI because again, you'd be in SSO, you'd always be in the sunlight where right now our satellites are going, you know, hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, and that stresses them out. And that was a big engineering issue. But beyond the AI opportunity, the thing that is much closer Is Satellite Connect Europe. We shall now call this SCE. And so, as Peter Lindmark pointed out, who's our kind of our chief European correspondent on the ground, I think actually literally working really close to where Space Connect Europe actually is. We're just seeing more employees join and build that entity out, and that's an exciting way for us to capture more MOUs, more subs. And it goes far beyond what I think people like me had originally envisioned where we would get, you know, an MNO, a dominant MNO in a market and then have 30% market share. You know, that's great. What we saw with AT&T and Verizon is boom, enemies can work together. And that's where all of a sudden ASTS is this common glue because of its economies of scale and the role logic behind MNOs actually agreeing to share infrastructure in this respect. We're, we're seeing that happen with Europe too, and that European market is very big, and our market share is, is going to be dominant. And that again goes back to the SpaceX bros thinking that their, you know, absolute dominant monopoly is a dominant monopoly. And then you point out casually that this little pre-revenue shitco has multiples of the subs covered under their agreements and expected agreements.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Multiples.
[00:24:42] Speaker C: That is this slingshot that I think is coming where the market wakes up and goes, this should not be a $40 billion company. Let's add a zero, you know, in the the world of Portlandia. Like, let's put a bird on it and slap some birds on this thing, and it should just like, you know, bluebirds— there's like a lot of birds going on. It should be a very valuable, uh, company. And the MLUs are, are going to come, and they're going to be everywhere. And so Scott and the company have been pretty transparent about the flurry of DAs that they're expecting. I think they use the terminology, we're going to, we're going to harvest our MOUs really in line with where initial service happens, because that's where the money is. And I think they spent a lot of time ironing out how those agreements will work and really how to monetize it. I can't imagine how complex these deals were to pioneer, but they've done it. And so now that you have a template that has been market tested, The rest should be easier. But what's cool is things like, again, what Peter Lindmark pointed out, Orange wholesale CEO talks commercial launch for new D2D service at AST SpaceMobile. And he talks about how not only are they working on the European part, but then elsewhere in the Orange ecosystem. So they want to roll it out to their European customers, but then they're going to go Global with it. Very exciting stuff. Lots of contracts are going to come. And while the MOUs are telling you what's going to happen, so is the government. And so going back to this economic warfare unit, which is really seems really cool, to be honest. And so Deal Team Six, which is going to have this $200 billion of capital to really thrust the U.S. to the forefront of innovation, which is very smart. Let the private market fuel incredible innovation. Government money is going to be flowing to all of these types of things. And ASTS is no longer a hypothetical military prime. We're an actual prime and we work with other primes. And so to me, one area where I wish I had been sort of smarter, and it goes again to being a long-term thinker, is when Biden passed the IRA Act and they basically just guzzied money into utilities. All you had to do is kind of understand the thrust of what government was doing. The government was putting its finger on the scale. You just had to buy stuff. I think it was like, if— I actually used to own this angle. From now I'm forgetting what it's called. Like Power is the ticker, Quanta. services, things like that. I'm just pulling up a chart. When the IRA was passed, I mean, this thing's been a 5-bagger since then. The chart, chart is straight up. And, um, and that was before the AI boom. And that's what's crazy is like great things happen to good things. And government said, we're going to, you know, create a lot of renewable stuff and we got to really bolster up the grid, which they did. That was where the money was going and the stocks went up. And so the government money is going to be going into this. And just even last week, we found out that yet more money is going in specifically to Golden Dome. And so they, um, just upped that by an additional $10 billion to $185 billion. These are big programs. And the expectation is the ASTS is going to get some more Golden Dome awards. This coming quarter in Q2. I think these things really wake the market up. Golden Dome is sort of magical in terms of the dollar amount, the importance to the military. And so having the company get more awards and scaling that certainly increases the validation of the company. And I think we'll reinforce this dynamic of the Texas hedge. And so People seeing the massive market opportunity created by SpaceX showing this type of growth was possible. You just want to buy the strip is what my view is going to be. And Golden Dome just solidifies in people's mind like, hey, this is a bona fide military contractor as well, just like SpaceX. That's exciting. And so The real question for us is going to be who else is working with AST SpaceMobile? It's not lost on us. Here's a Katzi tweet that Lockheed uses the exact same PowerPoint template as AST SpaceMobile. So either someone took their template deck when they left AST SpaceMobile and went to Lockheed, which is a no-no, or they're working together, or hey, you know what? Hexagons are cool. And people just randomly had the same thing. But beyond Golden Dome, the SATCOM opportunity itself, so just actually using satellites to talk to people, not to systemically destroy another company's military infrastructure, blind it with radar searches and all this other fun stuff you can do with satellites, actually reaching out and touching someone is still a use case for a satellite. And the Space Force just prioritized, quote, resilient commercial SATCOM. And gave it its own acquisition lane. And so thanks a lot for Jonathan Cooper pointing this out. But the general thrust is just government wants more of this stuff, multi-layer comms. They don't want a single point of failure. And we all know the benefit ASTS has with its bent pipe architecture because it allows the government to retain control, to make sure that very sensitive communications aren't bouncing around, uh, countries that you don't want them to be in. And we had, uh, Tough4R point out that Fairwinds just won another contract for enhanced security with Leo Networks. So there's just all these little pieces that keep, keep coming, but then Going back to the non-communications use cases, the radar application of this stuff is still amazing. And part of that is related to denying people the ability to have GPS. And so the Bluebird constellation is capable of rendering the Russian GLONASS system ineffective. While not interfering with GPS. And so it has to do with the spectrum bands that ASTS has. One that is very interesting is, of course, the Ligado spectrum. Ligado spectrum, for people that have played Along From Home, knows that the Department of War has actually already started using this. And that's actually a very contentious litigation with the Ligado, uh, pre-petition investors who got kind of screwed by this. Um, but the government is very territorial about this spectrum, and it's been disclosed in litigation that they're using it for radar and other things like that. And so what Katzi did with a really cool post is show that with our mid-band satellites, which are coming, we have the ability to— we be in the US as a customer of AST Space Mobile have the ability to completely jam the GLONASS channels. And that is PNT, position navigation and tracking denial. You black them out. Pretty powerful. And so then other people have now designed systems that get around GPS denial. Anduril just devised some clever technology to do this as their drones were getting smoked in Ukraine. But it just creates one more layer of complexity that our adversaries have to deal with. And my belief is that silencing the enemy can be a big business and yet another use case that I think that ASTS will get paid for in its non-communication use cases. The other thing, it's almost like a running joke at this point, but FirstNet will happen soon. And FirstNet had a meeting last week. And we don't know when or how a deal will take shape with FirstNet, but at this point, anyone that's in FirstNet denial category has to have their head checked because it's literally in the FCC docket with Band 14. They've posted all the technical details. FirstNet has changed their own website highlighting the service. There have been numerous YouTube videos of FirstNet people where their titles are manager of the ASTS project. I mean, it's, it's, it's like all the pieces are there. And that's just kind of exciting because it could be, on my math, that could be almost a billion dollars of revenue. You really just tie that against 6 million subs at FirstNet and some probably pretty healthy ARPOs from what is really kind of like a high-value affinity group when you think about first responders. But then beyond things like FirstNet, which are going to probably Rely more of a constellation being rolled out. You have this ever-present IoT opportunity, and this is something I'm just so bulled up on when I think about how many AirTags I've purchased. And just this weekend I was in and outta cell phone service and like really in places where you would not want your cell phone to die. I felt a little bit, if anyone watched the prequel of Yellowstone, Some of these places where you're really not that far out of civilization, you're really looking in a landscape and going like, this is exactly what people were looking at in the 18th century when they were, you know, trying to not be in that place because they had to get out because it's barren and rugged and you will die. And it's a great place to go camping, but you have to think, well, what happens if my— if something happens? I cannot call for help. Well, think about some of these trade routes where the flow of goods are going through many of these places from one urban center to another. Think like I-15 going through, I think, Death Valley. There's a lot of stuff that moves and especially on the ocean. And so this IoT opportunity for trackers is Really important. And you have AT&T partner with NVIDIA and Cisco to build an AI grid for IoT. Well, this isn't going to be something that's going to be limited to AT&T's terrestrial network. Why would that make sense? Especially in IoT, if anything, that's the thing that's most exposed to dead spots versus people, because people stay where people live generally. Things are moving between people definitionally a lot of the time where people are not. And so if AT&T is partnering with NVIDIA to really ramp up an AI grid for IoT, that almost necessarily is going to be relying on a non-terrestrial network to have it all connected. And that gets really exciting. Again, how do I quantify it? It's not possible, at least by me, but it's the type of thing that's going to support a very hefty revenue multiple because the market will know that this is open-ended growth runway. And that gets really exciting once a company starts to put up real results, which this company will in the coming quarters. That's when people go, well, okay, so they're obviously delivering some good stuff. And then that can inflect upward. with, you know, really as far as the eye can see for growth runway, the market will pay a lot for that. And that's where you really kill it as an investor, where you guess correctly— or not guess, but you, uh, do the work and forecast the right directional movement of revenues— but then you are positively surprised on the multiple the market will pay you for that. And that's your double bang of You're compounding at the rate revenues go higher given a constant multiple, but then you accelerate your returns when the revenue multiple goes above whatever the static assumption was. It gets really exciting. And all of these things we've talked about, you know, during this little session are all things that represent sort of surprising to the upside revenue opportunities beyond dead spots. To power all of this is going to require spectrum. And as everyone knows, Legato is a big slug of really great spectrum that's going to allow ASTS to deliver incredible value to its MNO partners because it's delivering more than bent pipe. At that point, it's actually delivering the blood of telecom, which is the ability to Have radio frequency transmissions, and so the Legato docket keeps pressing ahead. We have a consolidated opposition to objections filed this last week, and so it keeps coming. I actually don't know the timeline of when this when the FCC would approve this, but the comment period's closed, I believe. And, you know, it'll happen when it happens. That's really what we have. There's one more thing. Scott filed, Scott, the president of the company, filed to sell a little bit of stock. We've been over this before. This is his compensation. And so it sometimes, you know, depending on your own background, either you can be sympathetic to it or not. But Scott is a high-powered executive. He's a valuable person. His next, he provides valuable services. His next best alternative in life would be a very highly paid banker, but he chose to make stuff and went to AST SpaceMobile. And most of his compensation is in stock. And so he gets a $200,000 or $250,000 base, which is great. I'm sure he really appreciates it, but to top up his comp to make it comparable plus plus to what he was earning, he has to sell some stock every once in a while for some liquidity, and then he will get additional stock from grants. This is called a re-up. And so ASTS for him is a compensation and investment vehicle, but he's foregoing effectively, you know, the vast majority of the cash comp he would get doing something else, like being a banker. So he filed to sell a little bit, and so he did a small sale in, uh, September and October of 2024. So the stock kind of was, you know, flat to generally kind of blah for a couple months after that, but I don't believe there was any real bad news. And then the next sale was in March Uh, 17th. Stock certainly traded down, um, after that, but by July the stock had doubled from when he had filed to sell. In June he had also filed to sell, stock doubled pretty good. And so when I think about this, I don't really think about it because at this point I really understand what Scott's sort of picture is and I don't really read into it. But if I were Scott, these guys are really sensitive to the optics and they also have a lot of respect for the retail investment community. And so given that this isn't like he's selling all of his stock and he's trying to dump it at the perfect price, which he's definitely not doing that, then I think the game theory is actually somewhat interesting here where whenever he files to sell a little bit, you can almost assume that there's good news about to come. So he's never going to get sued for selling stock before good news. That just ain't going to happen. Um, there's no jury in the world that would say that there was a harmed party in that other than himself. And so I think this is what these guys generally do, is they'll have their quiet periods, or— and so they reported earnings, um, and then they take their prints, which is their compensation, But they do so knowing that there's likely in the month subsequent to that filing gonna be some good news, which gives them a liability shield and doesn't really cost them a lot. And so he sells some shares, fine, he could have sold 'em higher or whatever, but he's gonna get re-upped 'cause that is again part of his compensation. So for him, it's just about how to bring in a couple million bucks a year of compensation while keeping the vast majority of the big slug of his stock, which is worth almost $60 million right now, keeping that big slug as the real investment vehicle that he's created by being an executive at AST SpaceMobile. And that's his pathway for being a seriously rich dude. And I'm sure he imagines that his position is going to be worth a quarter of a billion to half a billion dollars at some point. And I hope it is because that also is Boding well for yours truly. So this week we'll see. I'm really just glued to seeing if there's any developments on New Glenn. That thing should hot fire, I think, but we could be wrong. And then once it hot fires, then they'll they'll lock in a date for New Glenn three, which at this point, if it slips a little bit, I won't be able to go unfortunately because of some. kid stuff, which I can't change, which is unfortunate because I would really go to all these launches. But then we're really close to April and that's when we're going to really, I think, be right in the hump of getting batch 1 out the gate because they've been working on the composites. And I actually spent the weekend when I was camping, it's crazy how many people are involved in the space industry, but I was with a guy that works at another publicly traded launch company, which shall remain unnamed, but he was telling me all the specifics on how they do the composites. And this is complicated stuff. It's very challenging to do. So I always am humbled by some of the experimentation and the trial and error involved to get this stuff done. And that's the latest thing that ASTS was doing is just Making sure that composites could withstand all the stresses of launch. The composite helps them shave down the weight of the satellites, which allows you to stack a lot of them in a launch. But anyway, when you kind of get inside baseball from some of these space companies, you know, just sitting around a campfire talking about composite, it's like— I wonder if people, what other people talk about at campfires, but that's what I talk about at campfires is composite testing. And when you start to really learn more about it, you just start to cut people some slack. Like, these guys, they got it. It took a little while, and this stuff's going to ship in April, and it's going to coincide with the run-up of SpaceX. And so you start to look at this picture we have over the next quarter, and I get really excited, um, because it would really be fun to have this stock really just rip up to $250, because then I'm going to go buy every Toyota dealership and only sell Tacomas and force my worldview on people because they will not be able to buy anything other than that. And that's going to be what I do as an eccentric rich guy. So with that, I hope everyone has a really great evening and hopefully we have some cool news this week, but I think it's really just the market digesting macro. And then I think the smart people are going to be getting positioned appropriately for what I think is this very exciting Q2. I know I am. I'm always a little bit early and usually wrong, but that's what I'm going to be doing. So have a great week, everyone. Thanks for joining me. Uh, let's keep finding cool research, and I'll monitor that situation and aggregate it for the weekly. Talk soon.
[00:45:48] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile 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 Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big. I don't think we need to know that we can breathe affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile 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 enemy.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:46:54] Speaker B: Mm, waffles.