Trillion Dollar Space Stocks?

Let’s talk about The Space Revolution, the single clearest, most obvious next multi-trillion dollar economy that we need to catch with our investment buckets. Our biggest wins in my investment career have always come when we are some of the earliest investors to start putting our investment buckets in front of burgeoning trillion dollar economies.

We did it with The App Revolution going back all the way to Apple in 2003 as I recognized that iTunes and the iPod were precursors to being able to carry around apps on what I used to call a MacMiniProForYourPocket. We did it with Google on its IPO with its aggressive approach to creating new platforms. We did it with Facebook and several other app stocks. The App Revolution became a multi-trillion dollar economy over the next 18 years after I started investing in it. I spent 2003-2013 predicting at the top of my lungs that The App Revolution would become multi-trillion economy. Along the way, I was ridiculed for being a dreamer, for being naive or being hyperbolic.

I feel like that’s the case case right now whenever I write about my uncontained confidence in The Space Revolution as The Next Big Thing. One of the reasons I brought up The App Revolution is because I see so many parallels between it and The Space Revolution.

What made The App Revolution happen was that, by 2008 when Apple released the first iPhone, the costs and size of the chips and hardware that companies use to make computers had shrunken exponentially even as the technology that those chips and hardware enabled had grown exponentially to the points where the smartphone was inevitable. And then, as I kept saying over and over for years — we just had no idea all the different kinds of genius services and applications that those smartphones then enabled. Having a mini computer in your pocket enabled GPS services to go with you everywhere which enabled Apps like Uber and Lyft. It also enabled social media to know even more about your interests and to be able to target you ever more (LINK). Having GPS services proliferate made the costs and technologies of GPS go exponentially in different directions which then enabled someone to create apps that track your dog when it gets out. Having ever easier access to being able to book travel helped fuel a boom in traveling. We can’t ever predict all the brilliant ideas that people will have to create services and applications for society whenever there’s a new global platform (electricity, the phone, the Internet were all similarly technology platforms that went global and enabled endless services and applications for society). Blockchain and open transparent private Internet is another new platform worth exploring of course.

But dollar for dollar, if not pound for pound (zero gravity in space, get it?), I’d suggest that The Space Revolution is the next great platform that will have the biggest impact on society as a platform for new applications and services. We just don’t know what ideas for, say, new video services that people will come up as the cost of sending things to space drops exponentially. We don’t know what different kinds of satellites that do provide what as-yet-unheard-of services for society when people can send satellites that are 1/100th the size but have 100x more processing power than those satellites we were sending up into space just ten years ago. Wait another ten years and imagine just how far advanced the small satellites technologies will be vs how low the costs will be? What kinds of new satellites will be sent out to other planets? What kind of factories will be built and building what in space? What kind of hotels and tourism services will be provided in zero gravity when the cost to go to orbit above the Karman line for a family of four is maybe just 3 or 4 times more expensive than a trip to DisneyWorld?

The impact on our society in the next eighteen years because of the platform that space provides for new innovations, new ideas, new businesses, new services and new ways of making money in The Space Revolution is probably every bit as big as the impact on our society over the last eighteen years from smartphones, tablets and The App Revolution.

When I first bought Apple, Apple’s market cap was just about the same as what Rocket Lab’s market cap is right now. When I first bought Google, Google’s market cap was just $25 billion or just a little less than what SpaceX was worth when I first invested in it two years ago. Apple and Google are now worth about two trillion dollars each (Apple’s worth $2.5 trillion and Google’s worth $1.9 trillion now). While I’m not sure Rocket Lab or which other Space Revolution companies are going to be the Apple and Google of The Space Revolution, I am here to tell you that there will indeed be several trillion dollar companies in the space industry eighteen years from now. Our job is to find them and invest in them and to hold onto them as The Space Revolution develops.

Long-time followers of mine know that even as we bought Apple at a split-adjusted 20 cents a share back in March 2003 or Google at $45 back in August 2004, that these stocks did not go straight up over the next eighteen years even though you might have to squint to see some of the pain that long-time holders of these stocks have had to deal with along the way. That is exactly how The Space Revolution stocks will play out too — they certainly won’t go straight up from here and there will be weeks, months or even years in which space stocks struggle. But I can not find another sector in this world (or this universe) that has these kind of clear and obvious trends that are already kicking in to make a new multi-trillion dollar industry right in front of our eyes.

What could go wrong with this vision for a multi-trillion dollar space industry in the next 15-20 years? Space debris is the single largest possible impediment to The Space Revolution becoming a multi-trillion dollar industry, other than maybe a complete economic collapse which would also obviously impede the investments necessary to create the virtuous cycle of more investments making technology better and costs cheaper. It’s a good thing I’ve got a solution for cleaning up space debris called the SKTLS cryptocurrency.

Originally published on October 22, 2021