SpaceX Financials, Does AI Increase Unemployment or Leisure, Chimp Civil War | Diet TBPN

The news on Artemis II is exciting. Today is splashdown day. If you've been tracking it, it's been over a full week at this point. It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right, NASA said, of reentry and splashdown with the first astronauts from the moon in over 50 years. After an epic trip to the moon and back, it's landing day for the 4 astronauts of NASA's Artemis II mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon. A fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth's atmosphere at about 24,000 miles an hour will subject them to degrees and temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit with only their heat shield for protection. Feels fast.

Feels like they just left.

Yeah, it does. So if you're looking to actually track the, the mission, the Artemis II Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10th, at 8:00 PM Eastern. Eastern, 5:00 PM, 5:07 Pacific. Splashdown is in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, not far from here. Returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are the NASA astronauts who we followed, and they seem very, very happy. They just woke up for landing day.

Very exciting. What is the exact splashdown time?

5:07 PM Pacific. Nice. We'll be tracking that. In other space news, SpaceX has some financials going out in the Information today. SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion loss last year from AI spending, but they generated $18.5 billion in revenue, two people familiar with the figure said. This is from Corey Weinberg in the Information. The financial figures include xAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February. The net loss as well, as other financial figures that consolidate SpaceX and XAI's performance haven't been previously reported, but now they are here.

Yeah, I think everyone was expecting this.

Yeah.

SpaceX, very profitable company, bought, acquires a very unprofitable company.

Yep.

Combined.

But new opportunity and all in the pursuit of vertical integration. And so SpaceX has closely guarded its financials as it prepares for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time. The loss figure shows that investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of high-performing commercial space and telecom firm. But that's sort of been the space, been the Tesla model for a long time. Elon has always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and growing to finance the next piece of innovation. Ashley Vance has an interesting deep dive on the Tesla semi-truck factory. He went and saw it rolling off the factory line, which was one of those projects that has been rumored for a very long time, announced a very long time ago, but seems to be getting off the ground. Tesla's spent heavily on chips and data centers to power XAI, with capital expenditures for the division nearing $13 billion. So lots of CapEx. That was 50% more capital spending than the rocket and satellite divisions combined. It is crazy how quickly you can spend a lot of money on a data center versus, you know, you'd think a satellite manufacturing facility or a rocket manufacturing facility would be the most expensive thing, but it is in fact not.

Yeah, what's that other, what's the company that Deleon backed?

The satellite bus company in—

I'm forgetting the name of it, but like wildly profitable. Yeah. It's been pretty astonishing to see space companies, which you would just assume would lose money indefinitely, actually figuring out ways.

Was it EnduroSat?

EnduroSat, yeah, EnduroSat. And when we talked to the founder of EnduroSat, it did sound like there was a lot of really important manufacturing, but it wasn't at the level of like buying tools from ASML and spending $100 million on a single machine. I think ASML's lithography machines are up to like $400 million and there's a huge backlog. So the chip expenditures can get really, really high. SpaceX's core business of selling rocket launch services to governments and companies as well as selling its own Starlink satellite internet services together generated nearly $8 billion $8 billion in EBITDA, in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and stock-based compensation in 2025. So $8 billion EBITDA, that is a fantastic number for SpaceX, a very, very solidly profitable business there at the core. The two space-related divisions are intertwined with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon 9 launches carrying Starlink satellites rather than other companies' payloads. And I saw another piece about how there's still way more demand than supply just in the launch market broadly. A lot of companies have spun up with big plans to put things into orbit. We talked to a founder yesterday who's doing a new GPS system in low Earth orbit. And so there's a lot of demand for launch and Elon and the rest of the space industry seemingly can't make rockets fast enough. I'm excited to talk to Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace about the launch market broadly, going to the moon and what else Jason has planned in the orbital economy, the lunar economy, the space economy. Overall, including its AI division, the company generated just over $6.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA. SpaceX's depreciation of chips, rockets, and satellites was among the largest expense, topping $6.6 billion. Other large costs were stock-based comp and interest expense, which neared $2 billion. For SpaceX bulls, the company's allure is its dominance in the commercial space market, where it sends by far the most payloads into space, lapping competitors. Although we've seen some good stuff out of Rocket Lab and also Blue Origin recently, but there's no question that SpaceX has a dominant hold on the launch market. That could further its ability to catch up in the AI race in the coming years if it can bring down the cost of launching solar-powered data centers into orbit, as Musk has said he wants to do. SpaceX is hosting investor meetings this month and sending invitations to a 2-day IPO pitch. A sales pitch in southern Texas and Tennessee, where it launches its new rocket and is building data centers, respectively. In February, Musk orchestrated the merger of SpaceX, his crown jewel, and XAI, the AI model company he founded to rival OpenAI. The company combined— the combined company is planning to go public in June, which will be a very, very exciting time for the market. And we'll be covering it, of course, on the show. There's more back and forth about XAI, David Sachs is happy that XAI is the first AI company to challenge Colorado law requiring it to censor truthful answers if they could have a differential impact on protected groups. He wants the First Amendment to apply to AI. And so Sachs has written about this and talked about it on the All In podcast. In other XAI news, XAI approached Black Forest Labs about licensing its AI image technology in recent months, but the startup declined, Wired has learned from Max's Zeff. The company's had a similar deal back in 2024, but Black Forest Labs is now trying to focus on training AI models to power robots and smart glasses. That's very interesting. So it appears that Black Forest Labs was sort of serving as like the Midjourney to the Meta vibes powering that first Grok Imagine mode. But maybe there was a consideration of, well, if you're going to be working with this company but also in competition with them because they're training new models, maybe you want to go and carve out a separate niche that's more defensible.

Also, Elon had shared, I think, earlier this week or late last week that they are training a new version of Imagen in Colossus 2.

Yeah, exactly. Black Forest Labs has 70 people and is taking on Silicon Valley's giants. And this is from the HumanX conference in San Francisco. It's in Wired. You can go and read it. Max Zeff has the report. Alex Tabarrok had an interesting debate around the unemployment rate and how things might shape up with AI developments. He writes AI, Unemployment, and Work, trying to square different efficiency gains and how this might impact the economy and the future of work. So he says, imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. And I agree, that would be completely unprecedented. We really have never had more than 10% unemployment for any sustained period of time.

Yeah, Great Depression was something around 30.

Yeah, it did get high, but in the modern era, even during COVID I mean, brief spikes above 10, but in general.

Yeah, so I'm saying like worst it's ever been.

Yeah, this would be bad. So then he says, now imagine I told you that AI was gonna create a 3-day work week. That sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet, to a first approximation, these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours. So even if you think AI is gonna have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It is not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that position is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general-purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example. This would naturally have that effect. So you could just have more bank holidays, more government holidays, and sort of ramp towards a lower, like a shorter workweek essentially. Nor is this argument purely theoretical. So he shares some historical facts here. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%, from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800 hours. Hours fell, but employment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact, in 1870, about 30% of the person's entire life was spent working. People worked, slept, and died. Today it's closer to about 10%. That feels very low, but when you think about it, you know, if you're working 40 hours a week and there's, what is it, 160 hours in a month, in a month, in a week, 24 times 7. Can I do that in my head? Oops.

What is it?

I typed the wrong number. It's 168. Yeah. So 40 divided by—

Never do mental math while podcasting.

So 23, 24% of just a normal work week is spent working if you're working a 40-hour week. And then, and then of course you don't work until you're 18, roughly, maybe 20, right? If you're in college and then retirement. And so that pushes it down to something like 10% on average according to this report. What do you think?

I mean, doesn't this still depend on how many days you have in a week, right? Because like I have more days in my day, right?

Oh yes, yes, because you've manipulated time.

Yes.

Yeah, yes. What time did you wake up today? 4 AM? 3 AM?

Yeah, 1 AM.

2 AM?

1 to 5 is my first day.

Yeah.

And then I go to sleep and then like 5 to 10 is my second day. Yeah. And so on, you know.

The real trick is just waking up so early that you're waking up at noon the day before. So if you wake up at noon Sunday and start your Monday, then you're just way ahead of everyone. People are waking up at 4 AM. You're up at noon the day before, you're good to go. And then you need to go to sleep at like—

They don't want you to know this.

They don't want you to know this.

Rick Ross talks about this.

Yes. Thus, in the past 100 years or so, the amount of work in a person's lifetime has fallen by about two-thirds, and the amount of leisure, including retirement, has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There's no reason we cannot do it again. I like this. It's a bit of a white pill. There's a lot of fear about unemployment, and this is sort of a different path. It might require government intervention. It might require a new social contract or new— just new holiday creation from the government. But it certainly seems possible. There's some reactions to this. Alex is more correct than incorrect, but he glosses over an important caveat. The difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable. If there's one thing we've learned over the past decades is that even welfare-improving changes such as increases in international trade and technological progress do result in distributional effects, even often severe ones like Rust Belt cities and deaths of despair. It's not all nice Milo Minderbinder where everyone gets a share, or to put it another way, Schumpeter's creative destruction still involves destruction. And so people are going back and forth on this, but it does set one perspective on a positive outcome.

Fact-checking myself, the most commonly cited peak US unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 24.9%. I thought it had gotten— got up to the 30s, but—

well, there's a fun article in the Wall Street Journal, a very bizarre article about a deadly civil war that tore apart a group of chimpanzees in Uganda. Not exactly a fun article, but it's gripped everyone, and everyone is wondering what is going on here with these Monkeys. A chimp group's success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests.

So slow news week. Very slow news week when the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a deadly civil war among chimpanzees.

It's just, it's just a crazy thing. I don't think many people knew that this was even possible. But let's read through it and try and understand what's going on. A rare and deadly civil war has broken out between two factions of chimps in Africa, according to new research. The dispute erupted in what was once a cohesive group of about 200 chimps whose ties stretch back two decades. It just took three years for them to turn on each other, according to a new study in the journal Science. We've known for a long time that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors, said primatologist John Mitani, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and—

Go Blue!

—study co— and a study co-author. It turns out they will do this even when those neighbors are former friends and allies.

So I'm just reading this from the lens of the technology industry.

Yes. Many, many cases. There is, this is potentially a metaphor. For 20 years, the chimps of Uganda's Kibale National Park were living the good life by being together, Mitani said. They helped one another, dominated and killed apes from neighboring groups, expanded their territory, and boosted their babies' transmission. Of survival. But in 2015, the group started splitting into two clusters. Several male chimps who had bridged cliques within the larger group died from disease, weakening social ties. Around the same time, a new alpha male rose to dominance. Changes in the dominance hierarchy can fuel more aggression and tension, said Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and study co-author. As aggression escalated, the factions drifted into separate areas of of the park. By 2018, the split was complete. This is— it's interesting, it took like 10 years to do this full study, but by 2018 the study was complete. The two groups had no remaining social or reproductive ties between them. The last chimp infant with parents from different groups was born in 2015. What was once the center of the group's territory became a border which chimps patrolled, the researchers found. Then the hostilities began in earnest. Members of the smaller group of the two groups launched coordinated lethal attacks on the other, aiming to kill rival adult males. By 2021, these raids had expanded to target younger apes, averaging several infant deaths a year ago. So since— devastating. And there's, there's a video here of the encounter between these two rival groups and they're fighting it out. So more than 24 apes have died as a result of the conflict. That's horrible. The true death toll is probably higher given that so many chimps, there are so many chimps in a large area, some deaths go unrecorded. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split.

But sorry to jump in, but this group of apes has been studied for, sounds like, over 10 years now. Yeah, got to intervene. At any point did they think like, hey, let's break it up? I don't know. Is that the ethical thing to do, to let them continue to fight? At what point do you step in? How many apes, how many chimps need to die before, hey, let's stop the research project and step in?

I don't know, it's an important question.

Tyler, we may have an assignment for you this weekend.

I think you need to hop on a plane. Let's see if there's any more about this. I mean, there is, like for a lot of these studies, observation, you want to be hands-off and not putting your finger on the scale, I guess, but—

Number one comment, put any 200 humans together and the same thing will happen. You only need 20 humans if it's an HOA.

It's a little Stanley Milgram prison experiment vibes.

It's very, I think it's very Girardian, right? Because you have the two warring groups, memetic rivalry, right? They're exactly like each other. You got to fight it out until you have the scapegoat.

Yeah, that's true. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split and subsequent violence among chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1970s. But the findings have long been debated because most of the observations were in an area where humans regularly fed the chimps, altering group makeup, size, and aggression. So maybe you should be feeding the monkeys to keep them happy, I guess, or the chimpanzees. With these chimps, researchers aren't certain what prompted the split, but said it's possible the apes were victims of their own success. The group grew large, and even though resources were abundant, the chimps may have perceived increased competition for food and mates. The once smaller of the two chimp groups is now the larger one because its members have killed so many rivals. They observed more lethal attacks. It's an ongoing conflict, they said. And the conversation is ongoing in the—

I think actually this does make sense that it got too big, because you have this idea of Dunbar's number. So you have 150 people. The group of chimpanzees gets above 150, it's at like 200. And then you have the kind of war story.

Is this the calling you think?

Because you can't know everyone, right?

Chimps can't know each other. Would Dunbar number be the same for chimpanzees as humans? I wonder if anyone's ever studied that.

I mean, you assume that there's some lineage there that it stays relatively similar.

Yeah, Jane Goodall passed away last year and had an obituary in the Wall Street Journal that was very interesting. I think we touched on it briefly, but we can go through a little bit more of it. Jane Goodall always remembered the first time a wild chimpanzee took a banana from her outstretched hand. In that moment, she would often say the chimp, a grizzled male she had dubbed David Greybeard, welcomed her into a community of humanity's closest living relatives. It opened a relationship with wildlings that in due course upended scientific misconceptions about chimpanzees and turned her into a global icon of conservation. As an untrained young woman in the summer of 1960, she first ventured into the forest of what is now Gombe National Park equipped with little more than a notebook, a pair of binoculars, and almost infinite Patience for 5 months, though, the wary creatures evaded her. If in fact no one had ever been able to study them at close hand, by winning Greybeard's trust, she gained entry to the troop of wild chimps that became the focus of her life's work. The chimps had accepted me, and gradually I was able to penetrate further and further into a magic world that no human had ever explored before, the world of the wild chimpanzees. She died of natural causes in California last year. John? Yes.

Why is no one talking about Ferrari?

Because the, the good folks over at Acquired—

Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal— are in the Wall Street Journal today. They are writing about why Ferrari is unlike any other luxury brand, according to the hosts of Acquired. Yeah. They say the business of Ferrari looks simple: make fast cars and not too many of them. On the surface, this strategy of scarcity and tantalizing exclusivity seems remarkably similar to the classic playbook of other storied luxury brands, as if Ferrari's cars are just Hermès bags and Rolex watches on four wheels. But Ferrari has something that Hermès and Rolex could never cultivate: hordes of screaming fans who worship the brand from the time they can say vroom vroom. Few teenagers hang posters of Birkin bags in their bedroom, but droves of them have the sight of F40s and Testarossas seared into their brains long before they can get behind the wheel. Despite selling a grand total of 330,000 cars.

So they have more than 400 million fans worldwide, and no company has a higher ratio of people who know about its products to people who actually own those products. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of superfans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive. I like—

just to put the 330,000 lifetime sales into context, Ford sold 2.2 million vehicles just in the United States last year. Last year. Wow. And that 330,000 number is global over the lifetime.

Yeah. When Enzo Ferrari established his eponymous company in 1947, wow, creating a luxury brand was the furthest thing from his mind. He was obsessed with building the world's fastest cars to conquer the booming world of auto racing. To do that, he also built a clever business model. Like many of his rivals, he built cars for his own racing team and sold them on the side. Unlike Mercedes and Ford, whose racing garages and consumer car factories might as well have been located on different planets, the same Ferrari employees in the hills of Maranello, Italy, built substantially the same cars, whether they were selling them to customers or racing them at Le Mans. The model created a beautiful feedback loop. Scuderia Ferrari's success in Grand Prix races stoked greater awareness and desire for private client road cars. The profits from those clients' sales fueled the research and development that turbocharged La Scuderia's performance back on the track. It was a fantastic strategy through the 1950s and '60s, filled with F1 championships and notable clients. But by the time Enzo died in 1988, the business was struggling. After a 50% sale of the company to Fiat in 1969, Ferrari was losing money and furloughing workers due to a misguided strategy of overproduction. Even more unfathomable today is that the cars were just sitting there at the dealerships waiting to be sold. Can you imagine Ferraris that you could drive off the lot? Yeah, that is not the case today. The company's future was very much in doubt when it found a savior in Enzo's one-time protégé, a blue-eyed Italian aristocrat with a steady hand to pull off a U-turn at Ferrari. 15 years earlier, He was the young Ferrari team manager who had engineered the Prancing Horse's last run of Formula One dominance. To the Tifosi in their unmistakable Ferrari red, he was so popular that he could have run for President of Italy. He left Ferrari in 1977, rising to chief executive of a drinks company and organizing the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He traveled the world and mingled with the elite by the time Fiat's Gian Gianni Agnelli brought him back to Maranello as chairman and gave him a specific mandate: rescue Ferrari by any means necessary. So the visionary saw immense potential lying in the wreckage of Ferrari's road car business. Instead of positioning the product as a domesticated race car, he realized that this was Ferrari's chance to sell something less tangible but infinitely more valuable: the fulfillment of every fan's childhood dream. Childhood dreams. Rather than driving off a lot, clients could fly to Italy and take their cars out for a rip around the test track that Michael Schumacher practiced on the day before. The interiors would be made of leather that rivaled Prada's. Unlike Ferrari's untamed beasts of old, you could enjoy driving them somewhat regularly without fear of breaking down on the way to the store. The engines could still rocket drivers to 200 miles an hour on a moment's notice, but now they would be signed by the craftspeople who made them. By pursuing the counterintuitive strategy, he transformed Ferrari into a new kind of company, like Hermes smashed together with Manchester United. Other luxury brands manufacture desire through scarcity. Other sports teams benefit from shared emotional attachments. Ferrari does both. It breeds a mass fandom that somehow makes the company's most exclusive product even more valuable. By 1997, the business had returned to meaningful profitability for the for the first time in years despite making fewer cars. He slashed production from 4,561 cars when he arrived to just 2,289 2 years later. Once he put his strategy in motion, Ferraris were no longer sitting around like Fords. Suddenly there was a waiting list to buy them. In the decades since then, it has become clear that his innovation dug a moat around the company that no competitor has been able to cross. To this day, other racing teams may pass Ferrari on the track, And other carmakers may challenge Ferrari on the road, but no business can offer luxury, maniacal freedom, and nearly a century of unbroken sporting heritage all rolled into a product that's rarely seen but instantly recognizable on any street in the world.

Processing that article personally, I feel like they're back in the exact same spot that they were before that turnaround where they're making too many cars. They're making cars that people don't want. Even, even the F the F80. Yeah. Like the hardcore fans, the people that may not even own a Ferrari but are just like fans of the brand. Yeah. Across the board, like whether you're— you could buy an F80 or you're just like a hardcore fan, like nobody's like that excited about it. I just think it very much feels like they've lost their way. Well, folks, it's been a fun week. Yeah, it's been a great week. We hope you have an incredible weekend.

Yeah. Ahead, leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at TBN.com and we'll see you on Monday. 11 AM sharp. Goodbye.