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SpaceX IPO drains Bitcoin liquidity for orbital AI dominance

Thursday, May 28, 2026 · from 6 podcasts
Plebchain RadioBTC SessionsBitcoin AndMoonshots with Peter Diam…All-InThe Economist
  • Investors are selling Bitcoin to fund the coming SpaceX IPO, valuing it as a future AI landlord.
  • SpaceX's real bet is on orbital data centers, aiming to solve AI's terrestrial energy and permitting bottlenecks.
  • The public markets are being primed as an exit for AI's early investors via massive, index-included IPOs.

SpaceX’s planned $1.75 trillion IPO has triggered a liquidity vacuum, pulling capital away from Bitcoin and other assets. On Bitcoin And, host David Bennett argues the slide toward $75,000 isn't about macro fears but a tactical retreat. Investors are building cash reserves to buy into SpaceX and the upcoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. The AI infrastructure race is siphoning capital, with semiconductor ETFs now outperforming Bitcoin.

The valuation is staggering: 90 times last year's revenue, per The Intelligence. The prospectus pivots from rockets to a $28.5 trillion market, positioning SpaceX as the physical backbone of AI. Its xAI division lost $6.4 billion last year, but a $15 billion annual contract with Anthropic for its Colossus supercomputer clusters shows the plan. On All-In, Gavin Baker noted SpaceX builds data centers in 66 days, owning the physical bottleneck.

"The SpaceX S1 filing reveals a company that is no longer just a launch provider or a satellite ISP. It is becoming the physical backbone for the AI race through Elon Web Services."

- All-In Podcast

Elon Musk's endgame is orbital compute. Tim Cross of The Intelligence explains that by launching data centers into space, SpaceX bypasses terrestrial power grid constraints and NIMBY protests, powered by free sunlight. The key is Starship slashing launch costs, turning SpaceX into the "Microsoft of space," as framed on Moonshots. This infrastructure play is drawing capital from everywhere.

On BTC Sessions, Simon Dixon argues this IPO rush is a structural exit. He says rules are being changed to allow trillion-dollar companies immediate entry into major indices, forcing passive pension funds to buy at peak prices. Early investors, like SoftBank betting $60 billion on OpenAI, get a liquidity event funded by retirement accounts.

"The $1.75 trillion valuation rests on a claimed addressable market of $28.5 trillion - nearly the size of the total US GDP."

- Alex Wiesner-Gross, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

The broader market impact is a collapse of price discovery. Dave Collum, on BTC Sessions, describes a "stage four cancer" phase where "pumpmentals" replace fundamentals, propped up by Fed money printing. The AI infrastructure buildout, from TeraWulf's gigawatt data center to SpaceX's orbital ambitions, is the latest narrative driving this cycle. Bitcoin miners are pivoting to become power providers for AI, leveraging their grid access to survive.

The bet is that even if the AI bubble pops, the high-performance computing infrastructure remains. For now, the liquidity demands of building a packet-switched solar system are reshaping every other market.

#AI Infrastructure#Markets#Startups
David BennettElon MuskAnthropicOpenAISpaceXxAIBitcoinFederal Reserve

Source Intelligence

- Deep dive into what was said in the episodes

Plebchain Radio
Plebchain Radio

160 – Of Eagles and Condors with Paul Keating and DirectorHodl • May 27

  • Director Hodl and Paul Keating made the film 'Hummingbird' to introduce Bitcoin to off-grid permaculture communities, arguing fiat money undermines their attempts to build alternative societies.
  • The film uses the indigenous prophecy of the eagle and the condor as a framework. The eagle represents a mind-oriented, engineering culture, while the condor symbolizes a heart-oriented, relational culture embedded in nature.
  • The prophecy states the eagle dominated after 1500 AD, but the current era will see a synthesis into the 'hummingbird,' a new human integrating both energies. The film posits Bitcoin as a hummingbird technology.
  • Avi argues fiat money is pure 'eagle' energy that, left unchecked, leads to war and destruction, while the 'condor' represents well-meaning but ineffectual opposition still operating on fiat rails.
  • Director Hodl spent roughly 1,000 hours over two years creating 'Hummingbird,' editing 15-20 hours of footage mostly alone while maintaining a separate film company day job.
  • The film centers on Estella, a Costa Rican land defender whose struggles with banks and agribusiness corporations were directly enabled by IMF structural adjustment programs linked to the fiat system.
  • Bitcoin Jungle in Costa Rica formed when local Kena connected disparate Bitcoiners who had independently arrived in the area, later building an app and integrating with Bull Bitcoin for easy fiat on/off ramps.
  • Director Hodl and Paul Keating initially released 'Hummingbird' on IndieHub to support the platform and its Nostr integration, with plans for a free YouTube release later to reach a broader audience.
  • Avi cites artistic integrity and the hundreds of hours of editor labor as reasons for paywalling his show 'Finding Home' on IndieHub rather than releasing it for free on ad-supported platforms.
  • Paul Keating notes friction and hodler psychology are barriers to value-for-value models, but believes building better rails and achieving scale could make streaming sats as viable as platforms like OnlyFans.
  • Director Hodl's band Shy Kids earned approximately $300 from the Bitcoin-native platform Wavelake, a higher per-capita yield than from traditional streaming services, but the overall audience size remains small.
  • 'Hummingbird' will screen at the Bitcoin Film Fest in Warsaw, with potential submissions to other freedom-oriented traditional festivals to attract viewers outside the Bitcoin echo chamber.
  • The Nostr booth at BTC Prague will be 400 square feet, positioned next to the expo stage. The conference runs from June 11th to 13th, with the Revolution Rocks V4V music festival in Belgrade following on June 19th and 20th.
#Adoption#Digital Sovereignty#Philosophy
BTC Sessions
BTC Sessions

"The Dying Phase of Capitalism” - War and the Trillion Dollar Ponzi | Dixon & Collum • May 27

  • Simon Dixon says the market does not believe another escalation is imminent, citing gold at $4500, VIX at 17, and S&P highs, but notes bond yields above 5.1% on the 30-year and 4.6% on the 10-year are stressing the real estate market.
  • Dave Collum views the SpaceX IPO priced at 100 times sales as fantasy, saying the need to 'jam liquidity' to accept such IPOs signals a dying phase of capitalism.
  • Dave Collum describes the current equity market rally as a gamma squeeze driven by price-insensitive call option buyers, likely sovereign states, creating a trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that will violently unwind.
  • Simon Dixon asserts America is not a sovereign state but is controlled by complexes; the financial-industrial complex partners with Gulf sovereign wealth funds, while China normalized relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
  • Simon Dixon outlines three pillars propping up the market: Fed money printing to lower bond yields, ETF/index inclusion rules allowing trillion-dollar IPOs from day one, and media narrative manipulation around an AI-national security arms race.
  • Dave Collum notes the K-shaped economy is breaking the average American, with credit card debt growing 9% annually for three years while consumer confidence hits an all-time low.
  • Dave Collum applies a physics principle to markets: systems displaced far from equilibrium experience more violent and destructive returns to stability, implying a severe future correction.
  • Simon Dixon identifies three markets China could rugpull simultaneously: stocks via DeepSeek's $45B valuation versus OpenAI's $900B, bonds via Treasury selling, and commodities via gold derivative contracts London cannot settle.
  • Simon Dixon explains BlackRock's dominance stems from controlling ETF flows and Aladdin technology, which dictates institutional capital allocation, while Goldman Sachs was neutered by becoming a retail bank post-2008.
  • Simon Dixon claims Larry Fink, BlackRock, and 21Capital are not allies to Bitcoin; their ETFs, custody services, and Wall Street adoption are scoops designed to centralize control and distract from self-custody.
Also from this episode: (4)

War (1)

  • Simon Dixon argues the Iran ceasefire deal has already been signed, with key players now staging 'theatrics' to craft exit narratives for Trump, Iran, and Israel before a 30-60-90 day implementation.

Business (1)

  • Dave Collum argues modern GDP is not wealth creation but a broken window fallacy, citing World War II production and healthcare costs for aging boomers as examples of false value.

Politics (1)

  • Simon Dixon describes the political system as a mafia-like ladder of corruption: initiation via lobby funding, popularity via unpassable bills, compromise via blackmail, and service to power factions like military or financial lobbies.

Digital Sovereignty (1)

  • Dave Collum warns debanking is the modern equivalent of tribal exile, making survival impossible without access to trade, and sees encrypted tools like VPNs and Signal as incomplete escapes from the digital panopticon.
#Macro#Fed#Markets#Banking
Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News
Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News

Dark Pool, Adult Swim | Bitcoin News • May 27

  • David Bennett attributes Bitcoin's recent sell-off to a liquidity drain, theorizing investors need cash for the upcoming SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs, alongside heavy buying in the DRAM semiconductor ETF.
  • Bitcoin fintech firm Fold secured a $150 million credit facility from Encina Lender Finance to scale its Bitcoin rewards credit card program.
  • Bitcoin miner Iris Energy entered a $1.6 billion deal with Dell for AI infrastructure, projecting its AI cloud contract will boost annual revenue from $3.7 billion to $4.4 billion.
  • Terawolf acquired a Kentucky site for a 1-gigawatt AI data center, with half the capacity targeting a late 2028 launch, as its AI compute revenue surpassed Bitcoin mining revenue for the first time in Q1.
  • At Bitcoin++ Vienna, René Pickhardt argued Lightning and Ark are complementary, with Lightning handling high-frequency payments and Ark solving onboarding, batch settlement, and UTXO management.
Also from this episode: (6)

ETFs (2)

  • A $1.3 billion dark pool sale of BlackRock's IBIT ETF shares coincided with a Bitcoin price drop, marking the largest such trade seen and contributing to eight straight days of net ETF outflows totaling over $2 billion since May 14.
  • Institutional market makers Jane Street and Goldman Sachs reduced their Bitcoin ETF holdings by 70% and 10% respectively in Q1, signaling weakened institutional sentiment.

AI & Tech (2)

  • A multi-university study found leading AI models show a 61% positive bias toward Catholicism in conversion questions while responding negatively to Jehovah's Witnesses and atheism, with religious bias examined in only 0.2% of AI safety papers.
  • DeFi security executives warn the sector is unsafe as AI coding agents become superhuman at finding vulnerabilities, with over $1.1 billion lost to hacks in the past year and a $292 million exploit in April.

Politics (1)

  • Former President Trump endorsed exclusive CFTC authority over prediction markets, calling state officials 'scum' and arguing the sector should thrive under federal rules to keep crypto activity in the US.

Other (1)

  • Stake DAO suffered an ongoing exploit where an attacker minted over 5.4 trillion VSDCRV tokens, highlighting critical operational security failures with single private keys controlling privileged functions.
#BTC Markets#AI Infrastructure#Macro#Regulation
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

SpaceX’ $75B+ Historic IPO, GPT 5.5 Outperforms Polymarket, and AI Solves 80 yr old math problem | EP #257 • May 23

  • SpaceX's IPO filing aims to raise $75 billion at a valuation exceeding $1.75 trillion, positioning it as the largest IPO ever. Elon Musk will maintain super voting rights with insiders controlling 86% of voting power.
  • SpaceX's prospectus outlines a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with $22.7 trillion attributed to Macrohard, its AI-run software partnership with Tesla.
  • Alex Weezner Gross notes SpaceX appears to be abandoning the foundation model space, focusing instead on AI infrastructure and partnering with Anthropic, which now pays $15 billion annually for data center access.
  • Dave Blondon argues the SpaceX IPO gives Musk a public currency for acquisitions, enabling potentially a thousand unicorn-sized transactions and fundamentally altering startup exit capacity.
  • Starship V3 is designed for a target launch rate of once per hour, compared to Falcon 9's current rate of every 2.5 days. Alex Weezner Gross analogizes its packet-switched, orbital refueling architecture to the internet's decoupling of bits from atoms.
  • GPT 5.5 achieved 25% accuracy on the Future Sim benchmark, beating PolyMarket crowd predictions for events like the Super Bowl. Alex Weezner Gross frames this as the worst future state for AI-powered 'psychohistory' predictive models.
  • Selene predicts AI forecasting superiority will collapse the hedge fund and prime brokerage industry into a few mega-funds, creating a 'financial singularity' with extreme wealth concentration effects.
  • A Gallup poll found 70% of Americans oppose local data center construction, with nearly half strongly opposing. Residents cited rising electricity costs, water usage, and environmental damage as primary concerns.
  • Colossal Biosciences hatched chicks using an artificial egg, a step toward ex utero gestation for resurrecting extinct species. The company has 15 species in its pipeline and targets a global egg production market of 1.9 trillion annually.
Also from this episode: (4)

Models (2)

  • OpenAI's new personal finance mode integrates with 12,000 financial institutions, targeting a $12 billion market. Alex Weezner Gross speculates its real monetization strategy will be targeted advertising, following Google's playbook.
  • An OpenAI model disproved Paul Erdos's 80-year-old conjecture on unit distance separations in combinatorial geometry. Alex Weezner Gross emphasizes the model was not just faster but pursued creative, exotic possibilities humans would skip.

Big Tech (1)

  • Chinese AI labs ByteDance and Kuaishou lead video generation rankings due to superior data access from platforms like TikTok, not algorithmic advantage. Alex Weezner Gross notes copyright rules differ in China, enabling this data edge.

AI & Tech (1)

  • Selene's organizational singularity thesis replaces Coase's firm theory with an AI-native architecture centered on an intelligence stack and UDA loop. He claims 80% of current AI projects fail because they cram AI into human-centric workflows.
#Macro#Markets#AI Infrastructure#Enterprise#Education
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

SpaceX's $2T Case, Nvidia's Shock Selloff, America Turns on AI, Trump Pulls AI Order, Bond Crisis? • May 22

  • Andre Karpathy is 39 years old, coined 'vibe coding,' built Auto Research (82k GitHub stars), and leads a new recursive self-improvement team at Anthropic.
  • Friedberg argues AI is entering a utility-focused phase, citing AI solving decades-old math problems and generating viable drug candidates entering clinical trials.
  • Gavin Baker estimates the LLM market could reach $200-400 billion ARR by year-end, excluding large tech companies' internal ROI from improved recommender and ad systems.
  • SpaceX filed for IPO aiming to raise $75B at a $1.75T valuation; Starlink generated $11.4B revenue (50% growth) and $4.4B operating income with 10M subscribers.
  • SpaceX's AI compute business grew revenue to $3.2B (doubled YoY) but had $6.4B operating losses; Anthropic pays $1.25B/month ($15B/year) for Colossus 1 & 2 compute.
  • Chamath says SpaceX's value lies in its terrestrial data center build speed (Colossus 2 in 91 days), AI compute business scaling, and Elon Musk's 'one more thing' civilizational creativity premium.
  • Friedberg argues space-based data centers and Starlink create a backup for civilizational progress, offering an internet alternative not controlled or destroyed by terrestrial governments.
  • Nvidia reported Q1 revenue of $81.6B (85% YoY growth), $58B net income, $48B free cash flow at 75% gross margins, and authorized an $80B buyback.
  • Gavin Baker says the AI semiconductor market is cross-sectionally inefficient, with memory makers at 3-5x PE, Nvidia low, and power/cooling/optical names discounting different futures.
  • Baker notes Nvidia's GPU financing advantage: domain-specific accelerators allow older GPUs to have a 10-15 year useful life, enabling asset-backed loans at rates as low as 6-7%.
Also from this episode: (6)

AI & Tech (4)

  • Friedberg asserts AI backlash stems from perceived power imbalance, foreign state intervention campaigns, and the technology's anti-humanist psychological impact.
  • Friedberg sees AI proliferation as inevitable, akin to the nuclear arms race; slowing US development risks creating an asymmetric power imbalance with China.
  • Friedberg suggests AI regulation should focus on KYC for frontier models and post-harm legal recourse, not preemptive government power which becomes a one-way ratchet.
  • Jason criticizes CEOs like Matthew Prince and Mark Zuckerberg for dystopian messaging around AI-driven layoffs, creating fear that employees are training their replacements.

Macro (1)

  • Baker argues America is relatively advantaged by Strait of Hormuz closure due to energy self-sufficiency, AI leadership, and being the 'best house in a bad neighborhood' of global debt.

Trade (1)

  • Friedberg sees the Trump administration's China visit as performative, yielding only soybean and aircraft sales, with underlying geopolitical tic-tac-toe alignment being the real outcome.
#AI Infrastructure#Markets#Big Tech#Startups
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Intelligence from The Economist

Big boosts to fill: SpaceX’s giant IPO • May 22

  • Tim Cross explains SpaceX plans a $75 billion IPO, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation that would make it a top-10 global company and the largest public offering in history.
  • SpaceX's valuation has grown tenfold in two years and now trades at roughly 90 times its revenue, compared to Tesla's 16 times revenue multiple.
  • Cross breaks SpaceX into three businesses: launch services handling 90% of global payloads, the profitable Starlink internet service, and the money-losing xAI lab.
  • Starlink, with nearly 10,000 satellites and 10 million customers, reported a $4.4 billion profit in 2025, while xAI lost $6.4 billion the same year.
  • Cross says SpaceX's vision hinges on Starship achieving full reusability to slash orbital launch costs below $100 per kilogram, enabling Starlink growth and space-based AI data centers.
  • SpaceX ambitions include factories building 1,000 Starships annually, a 20,000-fold boost to global launch capacity, and an incentive structure for Musk targeting up to a $6 trillion valuation.
  • Robert Guest notes Trump's approval among young men has collapsed from nearly 50% in 2024 to about 30% now, as economic concerns over tariffs and inflation outweigh his masculine branding.
  • Canadian provinces banned American alcohol in retaliation for tariffs, causing US wine sales there to fall nearly 80% in 2025.
Also from this episode: (6)

Elections (3)

  • Guest cites polls showing young men who voted Trump rank having children as a top life goal, but find it economically unfeasible due to his policies on tariffs and the Iran war increasing costs.
  • Guest says young men feel spurned by Democrats, with an Economist/YouGov poll finding over half of Americans see an anti-male bias in the Democratic Party.
  • A Harvard poll shows young men are now swing voters: 33% back Democrats, 25% back Republicans, and 38% are undecided or won't vote.

Society (1)

  • Guest argues expensive housing is a key policy failure keeping young men from starting families, and removing construction obstacles could address their frustration.

History (1)

  • Alexandra Siewicz Bass recounts the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting, where Californian wines beat French classics, sparking a quintupling of American wine exports between 1975 and 1980.

Business (1)

  • Bass says Bordeaux's crisis stems from a bubble of overproduction for Chinese clients that burst after Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crackdown, while Napa suffers from relying on aging baby boomers and Canadian tariff retaliation.
#AI Infrastructure#Markets#Elections#Trade#Startups

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