Elon Gains Massive WEALTH + SpaceX, NASA and Tesla
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Welcome back to the show. This is the Elon Musk podcast where we talk about SpaceX, NASA. We also talk about Tesla, Neuralink, Boring Company, X. Anything that Elon Musk has his hands in is what we talk about on this show. So welcome everybody to the live stream and check everything out here. I appreciate you being here and if you're new here, please hit the like button and I'll

Also hit the subscribe button if you find any sort of value out of this. So anyway, that's out of the way. Let's talk about some things that Elon has been doing recently, some things that are happening down at Starbase first, and then we're going to move into some Tesla stuff.

And we're also going to move into some other kind of like NASA stuff that's been going on with Jared Isaacman, who's a friend of Elon and who has also bought private space flights from Elon's company, SpaceX, in the past. And he's also the first private astronaut to do an EVA. If you're not familiar what an EVA is, it's when you go outside of your spaceship and

That's incredible, especially for a private company or a private person. Jerry is a billionaire, so he buys these flights off Elon and off SpaceX because he just wants to do cool adventure stuff and he wants to make his mark. So and also help people get excited about spaceflight.

But there are a few things that, you know, that's been happening in Jared's life lately that are huge, huge things. One of them is that Donald Trump named him as the next head of NASA, which is wild. Think about it. He's 30 something. I think he's 40. I can't remember off the top of my head. But yeah.

He's around 40-ish years old to be the head of NASA. He's also an astronaut. Like, that's cool. Like, that's the kind of leadership that NASA needs. Not a bureaucrat, not an ex-governor or a mayor or anything like that or a politician. NASA needs somebody in charge that is...

an explorer and that's what jared is so moving forward if jared does accept the position if he gets the position which he will like there's no reason why he won't because he's what i was saying before he's an astronaut he's also a fighter pilot jet he also runs a um a company that sells uh like drones that u.s fighter pilots fight against it's like the training drones that the u.s fighter pilots use so

He owns a company that builds those, promotes those, or produces those. And, yeah, of course, he's a shoe-in for this NASA head position. So going forward, I think he's going to do some really cool stuff. Jared also said something to the effect of, and I have to pull this up real quick because I forgot what he said, but he said something about how NASA isn't going to be a...

just sending astronauts to the space station anymore or like low earth orbit stuff and the like satellites and things like that but he said it's going to be a new age of experimentation and also um uh space flight experimentation so check this out this is the article from

Ars Technica, written by Stephen Clark, NASA's boss to be proclaims, we're about to enter an age of experimentation. You can get into a rhythm of using all of these providers to get things up very quickly. So what he's talking about is Elon Musk's SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing. And NASA has been doing this for a long time. NASA has been using outside providers for a very long time since their inception to build the things that they need in order to

do the tasks that they want to do. So if they want to go to Mars, NASA doesn't build that rocket. NASA has a private contractor build that rocket for them. And then they also have the private contractor build the lander for Mars to their specs. So NASA goes to a private provider and says, Hey, we need this rover to do these certain tasks, whatever those tasks are. It was mostly more than likely science-based tasks. I hope the sun get to Mars and,

like a Rover. They'll tell that to a rocket dine or Boeing or ULA or whoever is going to build this thing. And that's what they've always done. They've always done this since, since the beginning space shuttle, NASA didn't build that a contract to build that bunch of contractors built the space shuttle. Same with the, um, the Atlas rockets, the Apollo program, everything like NASA didn't build it. Other companies built that. So what they're doing now is they're taking these privately funded companies and

And these are companies for profit now. NASA used to do it an old way. And the old way was you give them $5 billion to start the project, right? And if they don't get the project done with $5 billion, you give them another $500 million or something like that so they can finish the project. They're like, whoops, whoopsies.

We still can't finish it. So they give him another $500 billion or $500 million. So you get an extra billion dollars out of it. Out of the $5 billion contract, you get $6, $7, $8 billion. That's not what they do now. They do something completely different. So what they do now is the provider, say SpaceX, knows what NASA needs. They need people to go to the International Space Station. So they'll bid on it.

And NASA will pick the lowest bidder that can do the job properly. That's not dangerous. So now they're going to use all of these companies, all these different companies that I mentioned before. But Jared mentioned this, you talked of commercial investment, thriving space economy, all these things that NASA was doing before. They're going to do it at a much bigger scale because all these companies, they don't just want to make money. They want to make continuous profit.

Because if they continue doing what they used to do, which is take that money and run, you know, they get the job done. But there's like, I can't get it done with five billion. I need six, seven, eight billion dollars. They're not going to be able to do that from now on. NASA is leaving some commercial expertise on the field, in this case, on the ground. And so here we go. Space Power Conference in Orlando says, I love all about.

commercial space industry right now, as I said in a discussion at the Space Force Association Space Power Conference in Orlando. They're all generally doing the same thing, which is putting a lot of their own dollars on the line because they believe in the future that it holds. So all of these things, all these things that these companies are building, whether it's rockets or booster stages or kick stages, which is a it's sort of like if you have a rocket

And then you have like the upper stage of the rocket that goes to space, but that upper stage can't make it to a certain trajectory or a certain orbit. This kick stage goes, kicks it off to where it needs to go. So,

built kick stage ground equipment, anything that NASA needs, these people will be building it. And they're putting their own money on the line because they have to make a profit. He says it's not just a launch. More startups are pursuing satellite manufacturing, Earth return vehicles, which is wild to think about. An Earth return vehicle instead of the ship that sends people to the space station, an Earth return vehicle, a ship that could

bring people back to earth from the space station, build one of those. Cool. So once the first ship docks with it, they can just leave if they want to, but rockets have to be one of the most mature segments of the commercial industry. Um, yeah, uh, blue origin is putting a ton of their own money online. I'd love everything blue rock or a rocket lab did as kind of another small scrappy startup that's doing great things. And for sure, SpaceX and their approach with a fully reusable first and second stage, which is the starship.

Yeah, pretty awesome stuff. Starship is huge. I spent 10 months, 10, 12 months covering it at Starbase. I was on the ground reporting live every single day from the side of the road filming Starbase. And I'll tell you what, man, that thing is 400 feet tall. You don't realize how big it is until you actually get there. It's gigantic. But he was talking about how SpaceX is going to change the industry. Like how will these companies are going to change the industry? Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos's company,

putting their own money on the line billions of dollars just to build a giant rocket that's similar to spacex's starship which can take massive payloads to space things that are like the size of the space shuttle or like send a bus to space you know think about think about that like how big could what kind of things would you send into space if you could just think dream that up

And that's what they're trying to do. Whether it's through a single launch or multiple launches, that's what Blue Origin is trying to do. Isaac Mintoo is a wealthy entrepreneur, growing at Forbes, $1.9 billion.

wild, right? Polaris program, two more missions to fly with SpaceX. So the Polaris program was what I was talking about before where they send people to space. The first one was the capsule. The dragon had a giant window at the top of it, which hasn't been done before. The second one, he did an EVA where he walked outside of the ship, kind of just like pop the top off. It was in a vacuum. So like everybody inside

The, the capsule was also in the vacuum of space, climbed out of it, looked around a little bit. Cool. And then he went back in. It was really, really wild. No one's done that before other than like a NASA astronaut or a Russian astronaut or something like that. So Jared was the first person to do that privately. He bought the ticket. Basically he bought his own ticket to fly to space. And then he goes on to say the future of the players program is a little bit of a question mark right now.

It may wind up on hold for a little bit. We'll have to see. But overall, I'm just super passionate about humankind's future among the stars and what's approaching because it's going to arrive a lot quicker than probably many of us think. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

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What's he talking about? It's going to happen soon, right? Next 10 years, even Starship, SpaceX and Starship will be in a place in the next year or so where they can start taking payloads to low earth orbit, maybe make it around the moon in the next few years and land on the moon within three, four years. Get to Mars. Elon wants to get to Mars in five years or so.

like send his giant rocket to Mars with some stuff in it. I don't know what the stuff's going to be, but it'll probably be supplies for a later mission or some, some science equipment. We're not sure. Um, but here we go. Shockingly, the government does do business very differently than the rest of the country. It says Isaacman, um,

And that's true. Cost reductions enabled by using reusable rockets will allow us to experiment in really grand ways. So basically any of these reusable rockets, they can fly to space, drop off their cargo, and then fly back down to earth, refuel, and then fly back up possibly the next 24 hours, 48 hours. So the cost reductions for that, because there's not as much prep work either. So even though

People think a lot of the cost is like the actual rocket launching. A ton of cost is from the ground systems, the people working there, getting this place prepped. So in like manufacturing a new rocket every time is just stupid and silly.

So toss when those rockets into the ocean, it's not a good thing. Uh, but now if with fully reusable rockets, like the Falcon nine and now the starship and, uh, Boeing super heavy rocket as well, it's gotta be a completely different game changing, um, flight pattern for all these rockets. So yeah, Jared is gonna be the head of gonna be the head of NASA, hopefully in the next, uh, administration he's gonna go for. I mean, he's gonna do it. It's like, of course he's gonna get it, but there's.

There's no doubt that he's going to take that position and run with it because he is absolutely like he's perfect for that job. I don't see why he wouldn't be perfect for that job. Also, if you're here right now, live, uh, leave a comment. I want to know, or leave a, leave a chat. I'd like to know, um, what you think about Jared Isaacman and also, you know, the next administration, because I think it's going to be kind of crazy. I think it's going to be wild. What happens with the next president?

iteration of our government and the next iteration of nasa because it's it's an iterative process everything changes all the time with nasa so uh but it hasn't changed a lot in a while so um it's it's going to be a pretty huge change once jared gets his hands on the reins there another thing elon is even richer

Elon Musk's net worth tops $400 billion, a historic first. Elon Musk, whose wealth has been turbocharged since President-elect Donald Trump's win last month, became the first person to reach $400 billion net worth, latest milestone for the world's richest individual. Elon's been the richest guy for on and off for a long time.

but now he's $400 billion. Like what? He's going to be the first trillionaire. I think he or his successor will be the first trillionaire because all the automation that he's making with Tesla, SpaceX is a huge one, but I think Tesla's robots and AI are going to bump it up even higher. Maybe we'll get up to $700 billion, but

That's wild to think about, the first trillionaire. Now, the most recent catalyst was an insider share sale privately held SpaceX who boosts Musk's net worth by roughly $50 billion. Could you imagine selling off shares of your company? And by the end of the day, or by the end of the sell time, you're like, oh, I just made 50 bill. That's incredible. Like, this guy, he's so wealthy. It doesn't make any sense. Like, $50 billion. Do you know what that looks like? I don't.

Could you imagine? I mean, a million dollars in like one dollar bills. That's an that's an insane amount of money, insane amount of dollar bills. But four hundred forty seven billion dollars. That's wild. Musk's one day wealth jump of sixty two point eight billion is the largest on record. Help propel the combined fortune of the world's richest five hundred people above ten trillion dollars.

Also for the first time according to the index, the group's net worth are similar in size to last year's combined gross domestic products of Germany, Japan, and Australia. So these people have 500 people have more money than Germany, Japan, and Australia. That's wild.

Musk added 218 billion to his net worth since the start of 2024 as well. That's a nice, nice fact. $218 billion to your net worth. Of course, he doesn't walk around with like $218 billion in his pocket. It's all mostly stock. Um,

But he, yeah, I just want to share this with you over $400 billion in net worth. I want to share this with you to show you that Elon isn't just stagnant. He continuing to make money. So off shares and SpaceX, even if he like, he's always going to have a controlling share. He's always going to have power at SpaceX, but if he can continue selling shares, he's

Making the money because he needs to make that money so he can leverage it so he can build more starships so he can launch more star links so the star links can make him more money so he can build more starships so he can launch more star links. Then it keeps going. And then he's going to get launch partners with NASA, private industry. People will eventually go on Starship too. So he's selling shares of SpaceX so all these things can happen.

uh xai too it mentioned something about x8 on here meanwhile the valuation the value of his artificial intelligence startup xai has more than doubled to 50 billion since it last raised money in may and that's gonna xai is gonna kind of supercharge everything that elon touches um so i thought that was an interesting tidbit video cannot play to a network issue whatever i got network and here's another cool thing about tesla cyber truck has gotten approval in china saw your merit

On X, breaking news, Tesla Cybertruck has passed the specification declaration of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and is expected to enter the Chinese market in the near future. CYFoxcat on X said that, and Sawyer just retweeted it. Well, retweeted.

It's always a weird thing. Like just shared it. They shared it on their timeline, but that's wild cyber trucks out there in the wild. I see it in the wild all the time. I drive past it all the time. Like that thing's wild looking compared to like a regular car. So I could see in China when they're building up

the Cybertruck over there, building up the presence of the Cybertruck. Like there's going to be some crazy social presence on it on X and all the other platforms out there. I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of YouTube videos, a bunch of different shorts and different TikToks about it too when they see it the first time. Because it is a wild thing to see. If you haven't seen it in person, it's like, whoa, that thing is strikingly weird. It's like, where did this come from?

So one more little tidbit here, another SpaceX thing. And this is, this is for the future of SpaceX. I know this is a SpaceX heavy episode, but I wanted to let you guys know about the Cybertruck and Elon's big wealth here, but Starbase wants to, or SpaceX wants Starbase to become its own little city. So they're about 20 minutes ish away from Brownsville. It's down this long road that nobody ever goes down if you don't go to Starbase and

There's a beach at the end of it, really cute little beach. But really nobody ever goes down there other than to work at SpaceX or to look at Starbase and look at the rockets and things. Like right on the road, they're right there. So there's some things that this could help with SpaceX.

So here's a little bit of this Cameron County from Kathy Leaders, the general manager of Starbase. To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting the Cameron County call-in election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley. So it looks like taxes, things like that. Trevino, who's

The local judge said our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all the statutory requirements, and then we'll go from there.

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and they work really close together trevino and spacex they work very close together uh judge eddie trevino um top elected official in cameron county so more than likely if they did the paperwork properly this is going to pass easily i mean cameron county needs the tax dollars so making it into a city and like certain things happen the county has to provide certain services i'm not exactly sure what those services are but also spacex has to pay certain different things to the county

and to the state if they are a city so it's basically like starbase city like that's what like you name it a city that's crazy more than 3 400 full-time with spacex employees and contractors work at the starbase site according to a local impact study issued by trevino earlier this year so there aren't many people that live there but there's always about 3 500 to 4 000 people at starbase like in and out all time so it's a small city if

You could call it a city because most of those people visit during the day and then they all take off at night. It's I mean, there are, it does count. They do kind of work around the clock there, but there are different shifts and it's always busy. But out of those 3,400 people, um, full-time employees half go in the morning or thirds, I guess, and do three shifts or whatever. So they have different shifts throughout the day. So if they are a city, like I said before, they'll do different taxes and

they'll be treated differently than just like a project that Elon Musk is working on down at the down at the middle of nowhere. It really is the middle of nowhere, too. It's like you don't want to go down there if you don't have to. And it's there's no resources anywhere. There's no bathrooms. There's no like convenience stores. There's no gas stations. So it's out in the middle of nowhere. But there's thirty four hundred people there, you know, throughout the day, which is kind of wild to think about, because in a city of like

couple hundred thousand people of Brownsville. There's people all over the place all the time. But when you go to Starbase, there are people there, but it's very desolate. So I don't know how like becoming a city works or like what you need. Like what are the, what are the qualifications? Like, do you need a population of certain amount of people in order to become a city? Cause it looks like maybe SpaceX might have that amount. I don't know. They might, but 3,400 people is not that big of a city, man. I grew up in a town where,

a little bit smaller than that it's not that many people just saying so that's all i have for today everybody i want to thank you for becoming uh part of this program thanks for showing up today and hanging out and being part of the elon musk podcast you can check out our website elonmuskpodcast.com where we have all of our audio podcasts posted up you can also check out

the Elon Musk podcast on any podcast platform that you're checking out, any audio platform. And also stay here on YouTube. Hit the subscribe button and the like button if you like this kind of content, because not only will it show you my stuff, it'll show you stuff from other people that make Elon Musk content that you might not be aware of. So thanks again, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other. And I'm out of here. Take care.

I got it. I don't even have an end screen. I never have an end screen. I should probably make one of those. Huh? There we go. There we go. That's kind of the end screen right there. All right. Bye everybody.