Being back at 2g of vitamin C every morning, as well as slowing down the cadence made a slight improvement.  It became possible to run every day at 11min/mile & slower without cumulative tendinitis.  It wasn't a slam dunk.  9 minute miles & 180 steps/minute seem to be permanently out of reach.  The pungent smell of soy beans returned.  Spring valley tablets are made in China, probably from soy beans.

 Fortunately, the summer heat makes higher speeds impractical regardless of age.  

The philosophy was to try to get supercompensation from speed work, but after 6 months of various speeds & number of intervals, every combination only reduced speeds in the long term.  Lions may have run their last 6 minute pace.  There definitely needs to be an extended time before the next race in which no intervals will be run.

Effects of aging were most unexpected.  Instead of muscle atrophy, heart attacks, or arthritis, the problem was longer recovery time.  A 50 year old lion has no problem hitting higher speeds than a 40 year old lion, but he won't be running for the next month if he does.  The cardiac & muscle systems actually seem overpowered after 50.

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New flyby.  Are you not entertained? 

 

Some stills from the IPO livestream. Didn't sit through the AI generated binder speeches, but noted G-Shot & Gerst were in the NASDAQ building in times square. Elon was in Starbase. Always late but worth the wait nowadays, Elon had his Jensen jacket on. Better hope The Jensen doesn't switch to plaid 1st. They call her G-Shot now.

 

Gerst & the gang were in NY. We got our 1st peek at the office section of starbase, an actual highrise inside another building, with LED mood lighting. With our 401k only offering VTI, we're all now SpaceX shareholders through index funds, as well as once again twitter shareholders. Elon sold twitter to XAI/SpaceX as fast as he possibly could, even though it's democracy's last hope or something. Now the everything company is planning on acquiring Tesla. It’s getting a lot harder to pick investments with every stonk becoming 1.

 

After all the cynicism on the internet, the amount the IPO was manipulated, it's still hard to go back to work debating methods for stripping trailing whitespace, knowing our day jobs will never even allow us to have kitchens. There wasn't such a large gap between the haves & have nots in the days of the Microsoft IPO. 

 

Makes you wonder if the retirement trigger is going to be a layoff, stonk market crash, or someone else's big liquidity event. On the other side, what keeps all these SpaceX employees from quitting, now that they're all worth 8 figures? Gerst could now buy every type of private jet. They told us in school it was a quest for power. Maybe they see themselves serving a higher purpose that no-one else can replace & that we can't begin to imagine in our mom & pop startups.

 

As seer sucking retail investors, we're not getting any gift shares like the janitors in Hawthorne. Our only profit is the difference between buying & selling. We're only partly involved in mankind's greatest adventure. We're manely in twitter, AI toy of the week, boring, neuralink, or whatever needs to be announced just in time. The others holding the bag with us are not interested in mankind's greatest adventure. They're just trying to make money.

 

Lottery winning employees now face a tough choice. 1 in 5 of them are now worth 7-8 figures. 1 in 50 are now worth 9-11 figures. Sell it all & realize an 8 figure net worth or wait & see if it goes to 9 figures. Could imagine selling just enough to never need to work again if the next stack ranking was tomorrow. What if you already could retire before the IPO? Not uncommon in the industry.

 

They could sell 1/2 & manetain a fixed asset allocation of 50% spacex stonk & 50% cash. No matter what path they choose, it favors employees worth 8 figures more than employees worth 7 figures. What became of all the employees who sold in the previous liquidity events? They're probably not as well off as the true believers. The stack rankings could be based on how many shares they sold, leaving just the ones who were HODLers for the IPO.

 

Pretty sure Kate Tice now owns a lot more horse ranches on the central coast. Jessie Anderson's no longer living in a tiny apartment.  A lot of early employees aged out of the internet.  

 

Maybe if it crashed really hard, in some economic crisis, down to the price that a W2 employee had to pay to exercise their shares, it would be pretty hard for a retail investor who spent 25 years in the industry without ever getting a win to resist. There still might be some value as an aerospace defense play below $20.

 

 

Some faces from the 9 figure club lions gathered from an old documentary.  The spacesuit sewing facility was documented in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMwKwcMdIg

 

They're multimillionaire seamstresses now.

 A big part of the valuation is Elon's skill at engagement.  If they just focused on space or worked behind a curtain like Blue Origin, it wouldn't be nearly as high.  The game is now to constantly pivot & keep up with whatever is currently getting attention.  

Wealth concentration is a lot higher than it was 40 years ago.   The dot com boom was nowhere near as hyper concentrated as the current IPO boom.  Much less than 1% are hitting paydirt now when it used to be more like 10%.  The bar is certainly higher for owning a house than the top 10%.  It's unlikely Elon would have made anything off Zip2 in today's economy.  Lions wouldn't have found employment.  Linux may never have gotten discovered.  The investment money would have all gone to Intel & Microsoft.

Some gootubers have said the dot com boom was a much smaller part of the economy than the current engagement boom, but what lions remember was the dot com boom affecting a lot more people, tales of a lot of hiring just by showing up.

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Lions still believe wealth concentration is an artifact of artificially low interest rates.  That's the easiest distinction between now & 1999.  Believing anything else takes believing Elon is really trillions of times smarter than anyone else.  

Believing the stonk is a good investment really takes believing Elon is going to repeat what he did with Tesla's valuation.  Tesla didn't pivot every week the way spaceX is.  He made most of that value by just making cars, possibly also by predicting the future need for massive energy storage.

SpaceX is being used as a holding company for a lot more predictions than Tesla, so a home run is going to be a much smaller part of the pie than it was. We are such stuff as predictions are made on. 

 

Comparison is the thief of joy. Chances are you knew a lot more Idaho billionaires last month than TX multimillionaires. But it's also why SpaceX/EverythingX pivoted towards making chips & selling datacenter time.

 

Interesting how Micron created so many more billionaires, was more widely distributed, but didn't get any coverage.

 

What are the chances Space/EverythingX really does change names & pivots big time away from spaceflight towards chip making/datacenters? They could eventually find a case for doing it all in space, but more likely it's going to stay down here in our lifetimes.

 

Berkshire Hathaway is kind of precedent for SpaceX to become a holding company that constantly buys & sells interests in whatever the next breakthrough is.  The next dance is neither space, datacenters, chips, humanoid robots, self driving, blockchain, VR, DOGE, social networks, tunnels, language models, or Mars.

Whatever it is, Elon will get front of it before anyone else & whatever they rename SpaceX to, it's always going to have some space component.  EverythingX is always going to have the biggest engagement & engagement is the new wealth. 

At least 10% of the country's GDP, over $3T is now under 1 man. 

 

 

Fun to compare Austin, Starbase, & the mighty AT&T.

 

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Meanwhile, 3 condos for sale in the last 6 months, dear god.  That's exceptional for this area.  The last time that happened was in 2007.  They all looked like recently laid off tech workers who came here in 2000 & 2012.   They'll sell in no time to private equity.  

The villages have a reputation for poor people acting like they're rich.  The lion kingdom has a reputation for rich people acting like they're rich.