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LivestreamMenuYears ago, when Tesla went public, I said, “sell, sell, sell,” because I could not see a path to profitability. It was June 2010, and Tesla was a car company — plain and simple. While exciting — I know, because I test drove one early — I was not able to get my head around it. Nine years later, I felt Tesla was morphing into so much more, and I went positive. We caught 96% of the move up. It was one of my best calls. However, Elon Musk never forgave me and endorsed the “tiresome” contraindicator slapstick that has dogged me for years. Even two years ago, I heard that he didn’t want to say hello to me because of that “sell” call. In some ways, I wish I had been willing to be wrong or to change my tune to something very positive. I am true to myself, though, which often makes for misery. I would have liked the dialogue my colleagues have with Musk. Yes, I am jealous and petty, good qualities of a competitive journalist. No, I couldn’t go positive, because I have had the same mission from when I started TheStreet.com in 1995. Total transparency. I was afraid of being wrong, of course. I wasn’t. No matter. It’s too late. It was sure good for readers and watchers, though. That’s really all that matters. I preface this weekend’s column with that story because I wanted you to know that this time around, I am all in. This time around, there is so much more to SpaceX than just a dish company or a satellite launcher, or even an X, which was part of the xAI operation that Musk bought in February. I view SpaceX as a company with some of the greatest optionality of any newly public entity. Every single division is on the come. I love my Starlink, and it costs $100 less, and it is much faster than the cable and wireless company that preceded it. I think that it could be the word processor to the typewriter, and the price of the stock of Comcast , which was CNBC’s parent company before we were spun off into Versant , certainly says that’s a good bet. I don’t know how much it will cost to blow out Starlink so hundreds of millions of people can get it, but how can you turn down a superior product for one-third the price? High-speed data is, as they say in a much hackneyed phrase, table stakes. I cannot, in my admittedly little brain, see how you beat better, faster, cheaper — except perhaps where city buildings block reception. Somehow, I can see every building being wired, though. The lack of a competitive instinct from any of the cable carriers is unfathomable, very similar to Smith Corona Marchant, which filed for reorganization in 1995. It was the gold standard. It makes labels now, and thermal paper. I wish the company had gotten into cybersecurity, buying a Fastly , or an Akamai , or a Cloudflare , when it still had currency. Too late now. It is precisely because it failed to diversify that Starlink can run the global table. Right now, Starlink said it has 12 million subscribers . There are 325 million Netflix subscribers. If it can manufacture disks fast enough and put up enough satellites — maybe it has already? Then, you can see an easy path to those subs. You want to save $100 a month and get better service — the going rate right now. I think everyone who takes Netflix will do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix offered it as some sort of deal. We hear a lot about how Nvidia is on the run because of the chips made by its rivals. The rap has certainly stunted the price of the stock. However, it doesn’t jibe with the facts. Alphabet ‘s Google, for example, pays SpaceX $920 million a month for compute. Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to rent compute. I do not know how much compute is left. I do know that these contracts are extremely profitable. No one ever talks about anyone making money off of Nvidia’s fastest graphics processing units (GPUs). I don’t get it. Those two contracts alone are gigantic, and the Colossus data center, as it is called, might be added for more compute — added with Nvidia. Yes, Musk, too, wants to make his own GPUs, and that story haunts the price of Nvidia stock, too. Maybe one day we will hear about how Musk chose Nvidia over Google’s own chips. The hilarious thing is that so did Google. Can X, formerly Twitter, mean more than it does, a townsquare, or whatever B.S. the previous owners talked about? Yes. Musk can revive direct messages (DM) and make it the safest way to get in touch with your bank. He can use the reams of data he has to come up with programs that work with Meta Platforms ‘ Instagram. We know it was worth a great deal for these reasons, but nothing has really been done. and it’s been handled in a pedestrian fashion. I am sure anyone who worked there will say great things. I know it could be worth more than it is. The creme de la creme is SpaceX’s satellite business. It improves with each iteration. There’s a ton of commerce that’s associated with rockets and satellites, and most of it goes through SpaceX. I know that Musk’s dream of data centers in space seems fanciful, but not if it starts small and works its way larger, with plenty of easy visits to fix them. Those who have put them up are in agreement that it might be easier than you think. I am not going to count it out. I once had a tussle with Musk about how all of our power one day would come from a giant solar field in the northwest of Colorado, something that was supposed to be completed a decade ago. He had a field day when I claimed it couldn’t be done, and I started talking about how the grid wouldn’t support it. This moment was when he infamously called me a hologram and nothing more. That stung. Joined the lash marks. It’s not just data centers, of course. Space stations that work, rockets that crack the barrier of speed, they will all accrue to shareholders. Maybe Musk uses the currency to buy Tesla and become the first true 21st-century conglomerate. That would concentrate everything and end the notion that one is favored over the other. I like that. It also allows Tesla to be able to compete with self-driving and robots under SpaceX’s name. I believe in my friend tech journalist Joanna Stern when she writes in her book, “I Am Not a Robot,” that they aren’t yet ready for prime time. When they are, though, look out, it’s a real bonanza for whoever gets robots right. No need to think that we have to fall prey to the Chinese. Musk is in pole position to get us there. Oh, and don’t forget, the $60 billion call on startup Cursor, the outfit that many young entrepreneurs “write on” to get the best results. I think it will turn out to be worth far more than $60 billion. The press was its usual caustic self this weekend, filled with talk about delusional investors who will have a hard lesson to learn. The articles all read like my dismissal. They could be right. This company, though, is so much bigger and better than Tesla that you have to wonder whether these articles are written by ChatGPT or Claude. Now, none of this would have mattered to me if the underwriters used the tried and untrue path of the typical underwriting, starting at a manufactured low price. Cerebras raised its launch price three times. Figma only once. But both stoked the public, and that stoking backfired. The deals went off too high, brought in more momentum players, and then caused all aftermarket buyers to be in the red. The SpaceX IPO had a fixed price and was handled methodically and superbly. The underwriters, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley , divvied out the stock in a way that kept flippers at bay and made almost everyone a winner. I don’t think the upward drift is over, given that inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 awaits. Lots of funds are benchmarked to the Nasdaq 100. I know the key decision makers on the deal besides Musk. They knew that whoever does the best job stands to get OpenAI and Anthropic when they come public, as well as Microsoft , Amazon , and Meta if they need more capital — as Alphabet did. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Whether it be the orders of Musk or the organization of the competing teams, it was a pleasure to watch this kind of professionalism. Sure, you may argue that Musk insisted on this. But don’t you think the others will, too? And, aren’t you surprised at how much money is around? I know Anthropic, in its holier-than-thou set of press releases, can be extravagant in its claims to be a fabulous cybersecurity company. It didn’t matter to them that insurance companies won’t agree to protect anyone who uses the same company as their cybersecurity layer. It has to be a different company. That kept fortunes on the table for many a follower. What matters to me is that SpaceX was the most ambitious of all the deals. It will now be the template. Claude creator Anthropic is conceivably the most lucrative of the three. It might be making money. Sure, I am worried about OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT, but I am not worried if it is the last deal of its size, because if it fails, it can be ostracized as a wasteful, profligate outlier that won’t mean all that much. I know it is hard to believe how much has changed in a week. We have a peace deal between the U.S. and Iran at hand that could take oil much lower, which already started to happen Sunday evening. The drop in oil supported U.S. stock futures . Crude will go lower than the bears say because there has been some fill-in by countries and companies that didn’t know they had all that much capacity. There will be gigantic works projects, true rebuilds by rich countries that can afford them. At the same time, I can see inflation coming down quickly and bond prices going for a terrific run higher, which means lower yields by their inverse relationship, accompanied by a Federal Reserve chief on a mission to make things more affordable. Kevin Warsh will preside over this first Fed meeting as chairman in the week ahead. I am not saying we don’t have problems. We can’t keep riding the same old semiconductor winners. We do need Apple and Nvidia to step up, and Microsoft to give us proof of life. If we do, though, the summer rally will be here, and the thicket we’ve gone through will be known as the one where the machetes of Goldman and Morgan Stanley were unsheathed. It could have been a horrible week. Instead, it was saved by Musk. He’s a good savior. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long GOOGL, META, GS, NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, APPL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.Read More
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