SPCX is down 23% since its IPO five weeks ago. Here are some key things to watch this earnings season. 1. Starlink subscriber growth Went from 4.6M to 10.3M subscribers in about a year. That pace has to hold. The entire bull case leans on Starlink roughly doubling revenue toward $20B — which means user growth has to keep outrunning the next metric. 2. ARPU (revenue per user) They're intentionally dropping price-per-user to grow faster and fend off Amazon's Kuiper and AST SpaceMobile. That's a smart move — right up until subscriber growth stops outpacing the price cuts. If that flips, revenue growth stalls even while the subscriber count still looks good on the surface. This is the metric people scroll past. 3. Starship launch cadence Elon has publicly said there's "genuine risk of bankruptcy" if Starship can't reach a launch roughly every two weeks. Not a side project — it's the load-bearing assumption under future launch economics and the orbital-data-centre story. Watch the real cadence number, not the roadmap slide. 4. XAI's burn rate. Before the February merger, xAI was burning an estimated $9.5B a year against ~$210M of revenue. That merger is why SpaceX posted a ~$5B GAAP net loss. This earnings call is the first real look at whether that gap is closing — or whether SpaceX just inherited someone else's cash bonfire. 5. Capex pace vs. the war chest There's a reported $119B "Terafab" capex plan on the table. The IPO raised $85.7B. Watch how fast they're actually deploying that capital — it tells you how much runway is genuinely left before they need to raise again or slow down. 6. Free cash flow This is the one that ties everything together. Guidance points to roughly $5B in free cash flow if satellite capex peaks and rolls off on schedule. That number tells you whether Starlink's profits are funding the moonshots sustainably — or getting swallowed by them faster than they can replenish. Why this matters: At ~70x trailing revenue on a loss-making company, there's almost no margin of safety in this price. A PE firm would love to own Starlink on its own. The problem is you can't — it comes bundled with two unproven, capital-hungry bets. This earnings report is the first real data point on whether that bundle is starting to pay off or starting to strain.

Quick timeline: back in 2024, Apple and OpenAI announced a partnership to build ChatGPT into the iPhone. Sam Altman even showed up at Apple HQ for it. Good vibes, big handshake. Then things turned. OpenAI bought Jony Ive's startup for $6.4 billion and started building its own hardware. In the process, it started poaching Apple's people — at least 10 engineers have jumped from Apple to OpenAI. Now Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen secrets: A senior Apple engineer, Chang Liu, allegedly kept his work laptop after leaving for OpenAI and used it to download confidential hardware files. So what should investors take from this? 1. Timing. OpenAI has been circling an IPO. A federal lawsuit alleging systemic theft is exactly the kind of headline that ends up in a prospectus risk section, and discovery could drag on for a year or more. 2. The hardware bet gets shakier. If Apple wins even a narrow injunction, OpenAI could be blocked from using specific designs or manufacturing techniques right before its planned device launch. For a company betting heavily on a physical product, that's not a small risk. 3. This points to a bigger pattern. Apple isn't framing this as one bad actor — it's framing it as systemic. If that holds up, it says something about how aggressively AI labs are recruiting out of hardware incumbents, and how exposed that strategy is to exactly this kind of suit. Bottom line: this doesn't kill OpenAI's hardware ambitions, but it adds real legal risk and a timeline drag right when the company can least afford either.

Here's something nobody tells you before you start investing or building a business: the beginning is going to feel like everyone else is ahead of you. You'll put money into your first stock, and someone in your group chat will already be up 40 percent on something you never even considered. You'll launch your business, and someone else will land the client you've been chasing for three months, or announce funding you didn't know was even possible this early. It's tempting to read this as a sign. Maybe you picked the wrong stock. Maybe your idea isn't as good as theirs. Maybe everyone else just figured something out that you haven't. But this isn't a sign. This is just what the start of any real commitment looks like. You're only seeing the highlight reel. You don't see the losses that came before their win, the pitches that got rejected, the accounts that sat flat for two years before anything happened. Comparison at the start is almost always comparison against an edited version of someone else's story. Investing and entrepreneurship don't reward the person who found the perfect path from day one. They reward the person who stayed on their own path long enough for it actually to work. That's a different skill than picking correctly. It's the ability to keep going before you have any proof you were right. That's what conviction actually is. Not certainty. Just the willingness to believe in your own process before the results show up to justify it.

Most founders fail for one reason: they fall in love with the wrong thing. They get attached to their solution — the app, the feature, the idea they've been building for months. So when the market says "this isn't working," they don't listen. They double down. Because admitting the solution is wrong feels like admitting they're wrong. The best founders flip it. They're married to the problem. The solution is just whoever they're dating this week. Solution flops? Break up with it. The problem's still there, still worth solving — you just need a better way to solve it. Stay loyal to the problem. Stay ruthless about the solution.