Kook's Weekly - January 19 - Golden Dome Confirmed, Blue Origin Synergies, and the Dual-Use Validation

[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: Okay everyone, thanks for joining. Um, it doesn't let me adjust the start time anymore. I mean, say what you will about Elon, he's sort of neglected the X app. It's kind of crazy, some of the basic functionality that doesn't work anymore. And I know that a lot of people hate the chat feature now where it's like you have to let it catch up for a couple minutes before, before you can do anything. Um, but anyway, I was traveling all weekend, so a little bit behind On everything, but we finally had the thing happen last week. We had been speculating, not blind speculation, but really based in our diligence and understanding of the technology and the company's initiatives that ASTS would be a government contractor. And that's what we got. But before we get to that, let's first just knock out some of the simple speculations. Uh, the cadence of people putting one and one together on the FM2 launch is growing to a critical mass where I've decided to release the meme. And so I had very carefully made a meme of Abel as Rambo shooting a New Glenn rocket, and I thought I was so clever for this. Um, but I wanted to save it until it started to become more and more confirmed in the market. So there's quite a lot of evidence now that FM2 is going to be launching on New Glenn 3. There's reasons why this is very synergistic. New Glenn is going to be having its 3rd launch of what is a 4-launch requirement to qualify for government business. Meanwhile, FM2 is an SDA government satellite. And so pairing the 2 makes quite a lot of sense in what Anyone could just simply say is a congratulatory moment for both companies. And so we have ample evidence, photographic evidence, actually, that there is a very meaningful business deal between AST SpaceMobile and Blue Origin. And so them pairing up in this way to demonstrate joint capabilities, as they've also separately put out in their own webpage of supporting Golden Dome. We saw a lot of reasons why these companies are gonna be working together as they jointly trial some of the new technologies. But then in the future, obviously that relationship is gonna scale massively. But then onto Golden Dome. So the, you know, one of many hints to me was when Blue Origin had put out the 9x4 version of its rocket. So the, the Big Dog rocket. And in the description of the clients they're serving, they're very specifically named AST SpaceMobile and Golden Dome. And so that was just more confirmation to us, uh, call it hopium if you will, but just more confirmation that ASTS in its capacity as serving Golden Dome was gonna be using this larger enhanced, frankly, somewhat customized rocket. To deliver those capabilities, and here we are. And so what we saw on Thursday, some some really exciting news is Space Mob as always was quick to hunt down the governments on Sam.gov and saw AST Space Mobile USA LLC in the third tranche of recipients. That set off obviously quite a lot of interest among Space Mob and Panman as usual was lifting offers. like crazy, buying stock as fast as he could. And it proved to be a prescient buy because the next day ASTS put out a press release confirming that they were part of the MDA SHIELD project. And then if there was any doubt about that, Scott came out and specifically tweeted Golden Dome indefinite quantity contract. So we're in, and that is exciting news. But what we don't know is the scope of the contract and really kind of what it will look like from here. And so I was talking to N-Pan Man that Thursday night, kind of wondering, you know, first of all, the stock had just ripped, whatever it was, 10% on Thursday. Figured, hmm, I wonder if that was the move. I wonder if, you know, people knew. And, you know, now shorts are going to see this and obviously just have their eyeballs pop out. And so I thought that they were going to come attacking this thing like crazy, thinking, you know, well, they were just on this list. They didn't get a name, they didn't get a dollar amount. We don't know what they're doing. So this is the final blow-off top move, and now we can go after it. So I was pleasantly surprised to see the stock rip further on Friday and it moved $8 billion, I think, of market cap kind of in fast sort of fashion. And when you think about it, I personally believe that this type of military contract is about a billion-dollar deal. And so for the market to value that at 8 times revenue isn't really crazy to me. And so, you know, never want to call the market moves rational because I know it's down, stocks down overnight, and we'll ultimately talk about that. But, you know, the market kind of, you know, sees the news and actually prices in something that struck me as quite rational. I know the shorts are going to disagree with me vehemently on that, but I've done my work and I believe that a contract like this is at least, you know, at least a billion-dollar type of deal ultimately if we're right on all the other things. And so what did they do? It's useful to always turn to Katzi here, and he does a deep dive on this. And so specifically, the MDA released its 3rd tranche of SHIELD contracts, and it's really the license to hunt. And that's the key thing. And so we didn't get, quote unquote, we can get Golden Dome. What we did is we got picked To get Golden Dome. And so Katzi's convinced that because we're a third tranche, that means that we went through some deep vetting of our capabilities. Tough for you, who's been really on top of this for quite some time, really kind of made the point that a lot of the commodity providers could be in those first allocations quickly, but then the real hardcore, more you know, unique N-of-1 type things were going to be in the later tranches. And that's sure enough exactly what happened. And we've seen quite a lot of evidence in these ITU filings about how this business might take shape. And so we have different inclinations that started to show up in our orbital operating plan. And so we had some sun-synchronous orbit, Shells put up. You wouldn't need those for commercial service. And then we have these satellites that are flying at lower altitudes and staggered altitudes, which start to look a lot like they're providing PNT-type applications, which are for position, navigation, and tracking. And now I think a lot of us have concluded that ITS will have a role in this on the transport layer, which is moving all the data around in space. And then on the custody layer, which is once an asset has been identified, making sure that you keep track of it. And so if you find a, you know, mobile missile launcher, you know, those guys can drive away, make sure you follow them. And so, and I'm sure that there's many, many other use cases, but there is a lot of really exciting things that will follow from this contract in our belief. So just adding some more analysis from other people, we have S&J Investments put out a cool, you know, it's frankly, it's AI slop, but it just helps people really understand because it's fair to say that when a contract is put out and there's, you know, 1,000 vendors on it and a lot of guys making kind of nuts and bolts and, you know, portable toilet manufacturers, you know, it's easy as the shorts kind of said, well, what a, what a group of companies you got right here. And I think one guy said sort of condescendingly, and, you know, you know, they'll, they'll find out, but the AI model sees right through it. And so they see that ASTS got a hunting license to go after and share in the $151 billion funding pool. It gives them the ability to skip 18-month procurement cycles so they can get rapid contract awards. It officially designates the company as a critical dual-use infrastructure. And that's the key point. And Painman and I were talking about that too. This really, well, this is a good example of where you can know too much and then you take too many things for granted and you actually are a little bit deaf to key junctures in the narrative of a stock. I would fall firmly in this category of I have come to believe so many things in such a closely held way that when they happen, I'm almost, well, I'm not surprised. When they got Golden Dome, I was not surprised. I didn't go out and buy shares after the market. I thought, well, this is so obvious that they were gonna get Golden Dome. How could this possibly be news to anyone? And that's really the wrong way to think about it. That is, that is coming from someone who is too close, who has such certainty in their understanding of the future to not be surprised by seminal events a company announces. And as Anpanman said, it really pains me to actually compliment Anpanman. So we might have to end this Spaces shortly, but I do have to be honest. And so He pointed out, well, this is the official juncture where all of the non-communication use case stuff that we talk about, and for which we get called the clueless cult and get called the clueless clubbers and all these other things, this is the ultimate validation of that dual use revenue model. So to anyone on the sideline, that's a material de-risking event. And opens up an entirely new stream of the total addressable market. Hard for me to believe why someone wouldn't have believed that in the beginning. You have Starshield, for example, proving by way of SpaceX just how big that opportunity is. And the company for the past, I don't know, 6, 7 quarters has talked about all their government work. They have the DIU award. They were awarded Halo and things like that. But, you know, people were still skeptical. And so I think that that's an important part about it, but it's not the only part of it. And so while Golden Dome is certainly a big headline, largest missile defense program ever, and frankly, say what you will, you know, sorry, Peter Lindmark, but we're going to take Greenland. You know, you and your boys in Liechtenstein are welcome to come visit, But these missile defense technologies go hand in hand with Greenland because that's where the missiles come from. Not Greenland itself, but they fly over. And so this is why Trump is going after Greenland, is because the, the poles— not, not the good people of Poland, but the poles as in where, um, polar bears live— that's where the missiles will fly over. That's the flight route from Russia over Canada into the US. And so a lot of this infrastructure related to Golden Dome is going to be deployed in the Arctic regions. And so anyway, just cancel your vacation plans to Greenland if you intended it to be a Danish vacation is probably the right call. But it is not the only program, even though it is the most exciting one. And so we have the Spectator. Who's a prolific contributor, just pointing out some Fairwinds posts, which again talk about all of the different ways they're working with AST SpaceMobile. So there's one that's mentioning the US Armed Services, the Space Force, the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and they talk about the militarized AST broadband devices and AST tactical hub systems. It gets really exciting to think about all of this. For one, just in terms of the innovation that's being made available to our armed services. But secondly, then the commercial implications of when you offer life-saving technology to support the warfighter. So, you know, the industrial military complex is full of little loot boxes when you actually, you know, do some good stuff. And not least of which, is the MDA NOBLE contract. And so NOBLE stands for Nimble Options for Buying Layered Effects. It's always incredible to me to think about how much time people on Capitol Hill think about acronyms that stand for things. It's truly a skill. And I can only imagine that AI has really blown open the door in terms of them coming up with super interesting names for things. But The big deal, which Golden Dome is thought to also be, is this noble contract. And so it's not a single contract, but instead it's really a flexible acquisition vehicle to allow the government to buy your stuff quickly. And it acts as a wrapper so that all of a sudden you can just sell a lot of your technology into the government. Some people like Kevin Chen and others have really been focused on the noble contract and opportunity. Uh, it's something that frankly I probably haven't spent as much time on. It's not included in the DD doc. My oversight shows that there's always room for improvement, but this is really something that could blow the door open in terms of size. And so Anpanman just, you know, put out a, a tweet with the Cerberus dogs on top of the globe. And it is an open invitation. So it could happen at any time and could also increase the application of our technology to some other types of use cases, again, mostly non-communication. So we have a lot of deals seemingly coming our way, but are we going to have the ability to build out for the government? So luckily, Space Mob never sleeps and we have our operatives around the globe, but specifically in Florida. And so Florida Salty Man, uh, which is his handle, was doing some reconnaissance, frankly driving by, probably on his way to Dunkin' Donuts, to, uh, Homestead, Florida, and noted that it is no longer a pasture and posted some pictures of the building where ASTS will increase its satellite production in Homestead, Florida, which is on a military base. And we believe that this is gonna be capacity for some of these government applications. Not totally clear how all this splits out 'cause they're also adding some capacity in Midland. They're adding a building in Midland specifically for special types of arrays. The way Scott talked about this on a call led me to believe that this was for Golden Dome-focused arrays, which might have some differences versus the typical communication satellite arrays, but that's just speculation on my part. Don't really know. But more broadly, taking a step back, we're really on the cusp of a very exciting secular trend. And this is something I've always hoped to get right. Hadn't ever really been early to a secular trend in size, even though I've certainly studied them to make sure I understood what happened as a postmortem. But in so doing, it really was always a goal of mine to nail a big megatrend early. And so, for example, seeing the rise of like social media in the mid-2000s would've been a good example. Seeing the rise of SaaS companies would've been a good example. Seeing that crypto, you know, back in the early 2010s, seeing that that would become, you know, a bona fide replacement of gold. That's a good example of a massive secular trend. It's kind of frankly hard to spot them sort of in the early beginning, and in the middle you're kind of in denial because you're so mad at yourself for missing it. You don't do anything even though it's probably still a good time to jump in. But the kind of Space 2.0 is certainly a secular trend that I decided to plant my flag And you can just see, as we see this unfold, space is quickly going from this sort of niche, nerdy type of thing where it's, oh, like the space bros are talking about their little space stock. You're seeing that the world's governments are very quickly rallying behind the importance and strategic nature of this technology. We're seeing just that Starlink, frankly, is providing the tipping point between The light and the darkness. We saw what happened when Iran turned out the lights. They just started killing everyone. And so Elon's trying to get Starlink into Iran because when you have citizen journalists showing, uh, kill zones being set up to murder citizens, that, that, that has consequences. And when you turn off the lights, horrible things can happen. without necessarily the type of accountability that one might expect. And so you're seeing this proliferation of Starlink, which is just frankly remarkable that they have 10 million subscribers at this point and growing very quickly. But then governments are jumping on, whether it's missile defense, whether it's backup GPS, whether it's resilient communications. Well, you had Europe the other day had service getting knocked out. You had Verizon get knocked out. The world grinds to a halt when our mobile networks go down, either when our terrestrial networks go down. And so the current applications of this technology are many and massive, but then as these technologies are out, I continue to believe that as a platform, new applications will be invented. And that's the most exciting thing to me. Is identifying a platform that then can have user-generated content. That's, you know, taking an example, someone could have dismissed Roblox as a video game, but what they would have missed is it wasn't a linear video game. It was a user-generated content platform for which then the creativity of the world unconstrained could make cool stuff on your platform and grow in ways that you couldn't ever possibly do from a central. Command and control type of way. That's what I'm really hoping happens with ASTS, and we have, you know, really just seeing this at the forefront: space, the militarization of space, electronic warfare coming to the front. These are the types of megatrends that are something we're very exposed to, and that's what's going to create an ever-expanding TAM to deliver into. And so, if you're a dominant company with scalable technology. You're just sitting up, sitting there with your little Easter basket picking up all the eggs. And that's the type of thing that what I've seen is when you have a very difficult time assessing the size of that opportunity. And so something I tweeted about today, it was something from Steve Mandel from Lone Pine. So a really great growth investor. And he really mirrors, you know, something I saw in my own kind of journey in investing is when I started out, It was all about finding stocks at negative enterprise values or trading at 4 times earnings and stuff like that. And a lot of times you'd see these growth companies, take Google for example, right after it IPO'd and people will go, oh my God, it's so crazy. It's at 30 times earnings. When you look back at it, anyone that bought Google back then is paying probably like 0.01 times earnings at this point. Because the thing people missed is, yeah, sure, at that exact moment it was at 30 times earnings, but the growth prospects of that earnings were beyond human comprehension. And so it actually ended up becoming one of the cheapest stocks ever. And the key thing to, you know, same thing with Nvidia, you know, the list goes on. Anything that can grow at a nonlinear rate is almost de facto going to be misunderstood by Wall Street. That's just sort of like a kook observation. And Steve Mandel made that point of, you know, I really reward my analysts when they show me why a company at 40 times earnings is cheap, not the one at 4 times earnings. And one way to kind of bolster the probabilities of being right in that respect is to find the most dynamic and expanding markets, because it usually means that incumbents aren't there because they would've previously thought, oh, it's a small market. Well, we're not going to deal with that. And then it's left for some quote unquote niche guys to dominate. But then when the market flips and becomes massive, they're the incumbent. And so then all of a sudden it's very difficult for other people to catch up. Take something like Coinbase, for example. Someone could have said, and I haven't really looked in depth at Coinbase, but so this analogy might not totally be right, but just hang with me, is, you know, you could have made the argument, oh, Interactive Brokers and E-Trade and stuff, they're just going to crush them if crypto becomes a thing. Well, Coinbase just became so ingrained in the psychology of crypto investors and became the go-to name, very difficult to displace. Same too with things like Robinhood in terms of the rise of really rapid retail trading. And so you really want to find these early market share leaders because the incumbents can tend to have a very difficult time responding and displacing them. They don't have the the people and they're not as nimble. So it's something that comes up a lot with the ASTS short thesis. It's, well, if it's so great, why doesn't AT&T do it? Okay. You know, show me where AT&T has 400 RF PhDs. They don't have it in the tower companies. Oh, they'll just do it.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Well, okay.
[00:23:41] Speaker C: These guys are like in the Christmas tree business. They hang Poles and then they put some radios on them. They're just putting ornaments on a tree. So you think they're going to space tomorrow if they hadn't built their business around it? And they're dividend companies. Where do you think they've had the billion dollars of R&D that their shareholders have let them spend, which would've crushed their dividend? Not happening. And so sometimes the competitive response that people sort of generically expect when they do 5 minutes of due diligence simply isn't there. And we're even seeing with SpaceX, people go, oh, SpaceX is just going to crush AST SpaceMobile.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: How?
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Certainly a formidable competitor, but they were really set up for doing something different. And their ability to pivot is certainly 100 times more credible than that of AT&T or one of the tower companies. But I think people can generally overestimate the ability for someone in a different lane to drive across a freeway and go in a different direction. There's a lot of inertia that prevents that, and there's a lot of inertia that allows an early market share leader to grow with a defensible position. At least that's my belief and my bet, but it requires execution. So luckily we got an update on the FCC filings from ASTS that they are currently producing satellites at a rate of 6 Which is great news. So it is my belief that they are launch constrained right now. And so as I've said before, constellation constipation, I believe that on these early satellites, as they are finally getting to a sustained cadence of producing, now they have to just match those up with launch vehicles. Once they start getting synced, It's just gonna, it's just gonna flow and we won't have these sort of painful sort of periods of uncertainty. Right now we're at the peak annoyance point where we largely believe and expect them to be producing lots of satellites. They say to that point, we are currently producing approximately 6 satellites a month from our Midland facility. And so they're doing it. But then the market goes, well, where are they? And at the same time, ASTS just can't put out some things because of NDAs with, with launch providers. And also sometimes the launch vehicle is a little uncertain to pin down as well. Like, we don't know exactly when New Glenn will fly. But once we get to May and June, we're going to be in a different cadence, and that's going to be pretty awesome. So anyone— Granted, the stock's at all-time highs, so it's not really asking anyone to hang on for dear life right now, but just keep in mind just how much fundamental milestone distance you can travel in 3 to 6 months. Because I do believe that in 3 to 6 months, we're gonna be in somewhat of a remarkable place. Now, what does that mean for the share price? I don't know, because the share price is certainly discounting something, and I tend to believe that the stock market doesn't do a great job of discounting. I've certainly been hurt myself by assuming the market will look forward, and in my experience, uh, many times it sort of will just look directly out the windshield, uh, while also keeping maybe 60% of their focus on the rearview mirror as opposed to, uh, looking far along the horizon. That will change at some point. My belief is that once we're comfortably hitting launch cadence, my belief is then people would finally get it and put it together. So once we're hitting a launch cadence, once we have a sense of what the ARPU is going to be, again, a big point of the short thesis that we can't disprove frankly until it happens. You can have a view which is different from the short thesis, that's fine, but you can't really argue about something that hasn't happened yet. Once you have defined monetization and you're into the belly of putting up the constellation, my belief was that a long time ago, my belief was, and my belief currently is that the market at some point could end up just racing ahead and discounting some quote unquote silly perspective of the future, which I don't really know what silly means, but we can look at the Deutsche Bank estimates for this company, which come out to like a $700 share price. It's entirely plausible once you start really knocking down some of these last variables and they become unless variables, as in the company will continue to go on this track and be doing $40 billion of revenue unless people no longer want to use their cell phone. That's an unless statement, as opposed to right now, the company's going to do $40 billion of revenue if the ARPU is X dollars, and if we have this many users, and if they can deliver the constellation. We're going to be quickly shifting those if statements to unless statements, and that's where the real catapult on the share price happens. And we've already seen that to an extent. The fact that the stock price went from, call it the prior range was like $40 or something to now $100, is the market telling you that some if statements have now been de-risked to unless statements? So it's a very exciting thing to be able to talk about these intellectual frameworks, but unlike a professor, actually come down with the ball in the end zone in a way that matters. So that is exciting. But you know, it's kind of funny is what is the probability of ASCS doing all this stuff? And literally as they announced the Golden Dome contract, Elon Musk turns off X and Morgan Stanley comes out with a Industry report on the space sector and leaves ASTS out. Call me a cynic, but I view this as a deliberate silencing of the company. Elon is doing whatever he can to muffle this company. So whether that X outage in particular, you could say Cook's lost his mind, but the MS Morgan Stanley exclusion, I would bet my life on is Elon saying. Thou shall not cover AST Space Mobile if thee would like to be in the SpaceX IPO. The silence from some certain banks is deafening. And those exact same banks are well known to have partnerships with Elon and are going to be on the lead left of a SpaceX IPO. So quite funny, as if that will stop the space mob. It will not, but that's what's happening in case anyone has any doubt. These banks are going after the SpaceX IPO business. And they are not going to pump AST SpaceMobile and piss off Elon in front of that. But good news is the FCC doesn't care about Morgan Stanley. And so they continue to meet with the company and are seemingly getting pretty close to getting the SCS approval. So the market access for the US for the constellation approved. That will be an important event. We are currently doing this through STAs, but to end up with the broad regulatory approval, which by the way will happen. This is another one where I'm very, very confident at once again betting Anpanman's life that we will get FCC approval or we will sacrifice Anpanman. This is going to happen. Uh, when it happens, I don't know what the stock price will be or what the reaction will be. But anyone that's thinking like an owner, such as myself, this is a fundamental event where we would certainly celebrate with doing some, you know, buckwheat grass shots or something else very healthy and exciting. And, you know, if you think like an owner, fundamental events start to solidify your values. And that's another kind of interesting thing to think of is that a lot of people look at a stock price like ASTS, certainly The way my wife looks at it is like, oh my God, it went up a lot. Whatever goes up can go down. And so like this entire weekend, all I heard is, well, Cook, you know, she didn't talk like Sean Penn, but let's just pretend she was talking like Sean Penn. Oh, you know, Cook, all your market, all your money's still in the market, so it's not, it's not secure. And so we can't do anything because your money is not secure. And I'm thinking, Whatever, you know, we just had some fundamental events. So my value as an owner got more secure on Friday because now I know for sure we are approved to participate in Golden Dome. The value of my ownership stake in this company as a partner of the company went up. And that's an important way to think as an owner because you're ultimately long the terminal value of this company. In the interim, you're long what the pumpers will pump. and what the fudders will FUD. So your upside are the pumps, your downside is the FUD. Um, the ultimate value you have is what this thing's actually worth. And that's how Scott and Abel have to think, 'cause they can't pump and dump. They actually have to make this thing worth a lot, which means they actually have to do things that create value. And so getting the Golden Dome, uh, award, being on the contract list, that's real value. Getting the FCC approval for the broad constellation, that's real value. People would pay a lot of money to buy this company simply because those regulatory approvals are in place. Now, would they pay $50 billion for a failed Constellation that had regulatory approval? No, but they would probably pay a billion. And I don't want to think about that price anymore, but these things do have value and you are having to make sure you measure the fundamental improvements and changes in your investment. So that you realize just because the stock goes up, the ultimate value of the company might have gone up as well. And so you might still have the same remaining upside, surprisingly, despite the fact that the stock went up. Another thing that is rapidly changing, presumably to our benefit, is just the change in the EU. And so as someone who I readily admit, And I'm trying to figure out how to not do this as much, but anyone that uses Twitter, I think, is undergoing a psyop from Elon because I notice it in myself. Like, it really gets me depressed because I feel like the Western world is collapsing on me and that there's, you know, no hope. But I think that that's kind of the desired effect of the algo. And certainly from an American's perspective, it looks like the EU is falling apart. It looks like sort of Constantinople is lost based on the news flow that they would have us read and certain things like that. Having said that, the EU is now very skeptical. The one thing I do believe is the EU is very skeptical over having reliance on SpaceX for various obvious reasons. And so the things that were coming out this week again are just the skepticism of allowing Elon to get access to this 2 GHz band in the EU, providing mobile services that are currently being used by Viasat and Echostar, which will expire next year. And there's a new allocation process and they're going to want to make sure they have services they can rely on. Our belief is that SpaceX won't get those and that Vodafone through the Satco JV, which is legally as European as European could be. is in a prime position to get those things. Now, the only thing I worry about is with the Greenland stuff happening, there might be a point where the European-US relationship just gets so Balkanized that, you know, I don't know what could happen, but I do, what I do like is that in as far as a US-based company can create a European controlled entity for this business. I feel like ASTS has done the best effort you can do, which should put them in an incredible position to serve the EU market with Vodafone. And as those sensitivities become more and more acute, I believe that that just hurts SpaceX more and more. And what this comes to for me is a big idea. And so I go. Not only do I want to invest behind an incipient secular trend to just ton it, spike the football, and do the icky shuffle, which is really all I want to do. To to do that sequence of events, I need to also be right that there's a company thinking big and thinking aggressively. I was having this debate with King Tut. And he was of the mind like, well, these guys should be buying things like the, you know, StarCloud, things like that. And maybe he's right. King Tut certainly is a very, very smart individual. But my view is don't get distracted. Don't go start buying random stuff. Buy things that increase your strategic importance and your reach and your defensibility. And so for me, I could see, I'm not sold on this, but I could see logic why ASTS would want to take over Iridium. Immediately you'd get a billion-dollar book of government business, which you can then upsell much improved services on. You're buying all those contracts that are in place, transition their constellation, just let it deorbit onto your constellation. So you save, and the margins on that Iridium current business would be through the roof because it's all found value on ASTS's constellation. And then you also pick up, I believe, 12 megahertz of global spectrum, you know, really for peanuts at this point. You wouldn't even notice the dilution if you're an ASTS shareholder. So that to me is an idea of potentially thinking big. But the ASTS SATCO venture is another example of thinking big. They're in a position to get gold in the form of the spectrum allocation and to serve a market that's bigger than the US. The way they've been aggressive at positioning themselves this way to me is consistent with a company that is thinking big. And when I say big, I mean a trillion-dollar market cap big. And when I say that, I don't mean they'll necessarily hit it. It's hard to predict those things, but you can tell when it, when you have a company that is in empire mode, not thinking small, not playing small ball, but being strategic and swinging the bat. If you don't have someone that does that, then the probability of actually achieving a big idea is pretty low. It's hard to stumble into it. And alternatively, when you have a management team that is going for it and swinging the bat, doesn't mean they're going to do it, but at least your probability shifts from slightly above zero to something that's much, much higher. And that's what positions you to have a potential generational company, which to me is defined in that $500 billion to a trillion-dollar type market cap range. And it's exciting to see that SpaceX is proving that this is possible in space. And frankly, Jeff Bezos had said the same thing in that interview he gave a while back. He thinks this is the next multi-trillion dollar market. And a lot of people laughed at him saying, well, okay, book boy, how do you fathom that? And it's like, well, okay, but literally this is the book boy guy that figured out how to create multiple trillion dollar outcomes selling books on the internet. And then, you know, did a couple TAM expansions along the way with little things like AWS. So when this guy says he sees a big market, I think you give him the benefit of the doubt. And I'm seeing Abel think this way, which is really important to me. And then obviously, as Anpanman pointed out this week, when you look at the insider sale transactions, you just don't see them. So this is a guy who is YOLOing this thing from 2 to 120, and all the guy did was a prepaid forward on basically nothing of his own shareholdings. And even with that, he couldn't give up the ghost and he rolled it forward to prevent having his shares called away from him. This is a guy who is long. He doesn't take a salary. And so he is the definition of all in. He should join the podcast at this point. I think he's qualified. And we also this week, not totally sure on this, but Mickey Mikitani left the ASTS board. FUDsters, of course, were quick to pounce on this. But from my own perspective, as someone on boards, when you have a strategic, that's not always great. And so when you have an MNO on your board, there's a lot of things you're talking about in terms of commercial strategy, That is inappropriate for a board member who is your customer, who is in a commercially opposing stance as you, to necessarily participate in those discussions and have a vote on what's going on, even though they're super voting shares. And so in my experience, I'm on a board where we have 2 pretty 2 massive-cap public companies that everyone on this call would've heard of. And they, it's awkward. There are a lot of things we're doing at this company that sometimes we really don't want those board members to know. And so at the soonest opportunity, you want to sometimes get them off your board, and that's determined by your shareholder rights. And so Rakuten finally doesn't hold a sufficient number of shares And this shows up in what's called an investor rights agreement, an IRA. And so when I negotiate these things, you're negotiating to keep your board seat so long as you hold a certain amount of your shares. Usually it's, you know, the deals I do, it's hold at least half of the shares you bought in a round. They're not actually triggered from memory off ownership stake as a percent because the private companies just don't— that's just not how investor Rights agreements are structured, but for the public company, that does make sense. And so with the ATM, with the conversion of the converts and things like that, Rakuten finally lost the right to a board seat. Now, if you're AST SpaceMobile, you're not going to extend that privilege to Rakuten when it is no longer a contractual right they own. There is very few reasons to have an MNO on your board if you otherwise could not have them on your board. Because again, they're not necessarily your friend. They're certainly useful partners, but AST SpaceMobile could have a lot of reasons to want to have the other Japanese MNOs as customers, which would be bad for Rakuten. So I don't know if anyone really got all huffy and puffy about this, but to me, this is just simple board dynamics and it would make sense if I were on the ASTS board as an independent. I would certainly be wanting to take Rakuten from a full board member position to an observer, which is their entitlement. And the last tweet was just about Abel just being so locked in and going for it. And so we have a true owner-operator at this company, and that's something that I'm certainly very aware of. And so a large part of my investment is just having faith in this individual. And faith is really defined by me in terms of his actions. And so the way he does not milk the company for economics, he's not stripping the company through big salaries, a very modest option grant he finally took. And the fact that he's keeping all of his shares is really telling us and signaling to us in the strongest possible way that Well, of course, like any individual, he could be wrong. He believes based on what he sees and he's being a consummate owner-operator. So next week should be fun. We obviously had quite a January. A lot of other stocks had quite a January, and it's always a question of when the market's gonna correct and cool off. And sometimes you hope the answer is never, But like most things, sometimes the macro just catches people when they get just a little bit too long and it whips people back and we get sort of some healthy corrections. And it looks like right now that's what we have in store for at least the next week, driven by Greenland, ironically. And so taking Greenland, I believe, is actually probably positive for AST SpaceMobile because it's just increased investment in missile defense systems, which is straight to us. But in the meantime, the direct impact of that is tariff noise with Europe, and that's enough to kind of shake the market when otherwise you had a lot of juice going into January effect, and now you're going to have some people overextended and whipped the other way. So that's why I wanted to, even though I just had— I just got off, literally just got off an airplane straight to catch in the 4th quarter of the, uh, championship game. I wanted to make sure I do the Spaces because when we do have a correcting market, the probability of ASTS getting caught up in that is high unless there's some news. And there of course could be, I wouldn't count that out by any means, but it is important to realize like how many times people have been knocked out of this stock because they didn't know what they owned. We just recently in October, we had the stock rip to $100. And then correct to $50 and people were harikari-ing themselves. And then look, if they had just chilled out, they'd already be up 12%, even if you top ticked it, or they would've been up, Friday would've been up 15, 16%, even if you top ticked it in October. And so if you get, you know, if you're new to this company and this is your first Kooks Weekly and all of a sudden you're going, oh God, did I top tick it? First of all, unclear. The Golden Dome announcement's a pretty big deal, and I have no idea where the stock price should go or could go in the near term on this, but you really did have some exciting fundamental news. And then the important thing is don't get bullied out of it. It's not to say that this is guaranteed to be a good investment. No one could possibly give that guarantee, but what you should do is actually try to know what you own. This stock will for sure always be volatile. It always seeks to impose a high price on newcomers. There will be a point where you will be like me and be inoculated from this, both through the number of times you've gone through it, but also then ultimately the cost basis of your position where you go, I don't know, whatever. You know, at this point, I don't even get that bent outta shape. You know, famous last words. Talk to me next week if the stock is like at $105 and I'm, Posting like crying memes of myself and defriending Anpanman. But for now, I'm holding a strong face. But it is important to study what you own so that you aren't the victim of volatility. And that's really what, you know, all of us that contribute to the Space Mob, I think inherently what we're trying to do is help people not get knocked out by volatility and not get knocked out by FUD. And so the, the, I actually love Morgan Stanley as an investment bank, but the fact that, you know, they're not covering them in their space initiation, the fact that you have Scotiabank coming out with sort of BS hit pieces on this, then you have shorts come out and try to scare people. But then when I invite them on this call, invite them to do write-ups and you read their write-up and maybe some people were moved by it. I certainly read the write-up by @valuations and I thought it was actually humorously written. I mean, I kind of think it's hysterical when he is like, yeah, you know, the space mob, it's like being chased by a bunch of meth-addicted raccoons. I'm like, yeah, maybe we should tone it down. But then I go, you know what?
[00:47:54] Speaker B: Fuck it.
[00:47:55] Speaker C: Like, that's the culture. We are a bunch of raccoons on meth that found steaks in a garbage can. And I'm, I don't know, you just gotta like own your culture at some level. Like you can never disavow your culture is my, kind of conclusion on this. And, but the important thing, which I've been trying to do, is get these shorts to engage and really figure out what they know. So I actually know the guy from Raging Capital. He's a good dude. Worked with him many moons ago on some things, but I know his mentality, I know his mindset, and now he's, you know, 12 to 15 years older. And so he's probably gotten more ossified in the trajectory he was on. And that's why it's good to know, like, well, what is your perspective? And, you know, he goes, well, it's, it's Iridium IPO 2.0. All right. Yeah. As if we didn't study that. But to someone doing 5 minutes of DD, I could see how they could come to that conclusion. But that's an easy one to, to move on from. The valuations guy, his short thesis was really, well, these guys might be right on all the fundamentals, in which case my short is no longer a good short. And we could just end it there because no sooner did the guy write his write-up saying, you know, Golden Dome is hopium, but if it's not, that's a risk to my short, then the company of course gets Golden Dome. So I don't know what to say. Like, it's easy to slam us when we're pontificating about the future, but then like, okay, what if we're right? I know it sounds preposterous, some of the things we say, but what if we're right? What if it is just a preposterously good investment? And that's kind of like what happened here. It's people thought we were nut jobs for thinking this thing was gonna be a legitimate market share leader and, you know, take on, take down SpaceX and become a large government contractor. People thought we were nuts, but nutty things happen. Microsoft exists. That's nutty. Why did IBM let that happen? Nvidia exists. Why did Intel let that happen? And somebody would be like, Kook exists. Why did his mom and dad let that happen? Well, you know, I don't know. Longer story, but you gotta know what you own. And so just be aware if we have some volatility, use it, but don't let it abuse you. And that's all I got. So thanks everyone for joining me. Looking forward to joining next week and already have a bunch of tweets that I've bookmarked. So sometimes if you write some content on ASTS and you see like a quick bookmark, That's me. You're being monitored because I'm constantly monitoring the situation when it comes to all things ASTS. Good night, everyone. Thanks for joining.
[00:50:29] 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.
[00:50:53] 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 their phone 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 MNOs. Listen. Mmm, waffles.