This is WILD!
The most important story coming out of the SpaceX IPO this morning is not the $1.77 trillion valuation but it is about Juan Hernandez (Save this).
Juan is a welder who got a phone call from a friend about a job at a company he had never heard of.
He said yes anyway, showed up, worked there for ten years, rose from the factory floor to supervisor, and held on to 6,500 shares the entire time.
When CBS asked him this morning how much he stands to make at opening, he said approximately $880,000.
Tom Mueller, Musk's very first SpaceX employee, tells a version of the same story.
He met Musk through an amateur rocket club, was convinced to do something exciting, and says it was one of the best decisions he ever made.
In those early days, he says, the team simply believed they were going to change the world and then went ahead and did it.
Juan and Tom are not alone.
SpaceX has approximately 13,000 employees who hold equity and analysts estimate today's IPO will create somewhere between 600 and 1,000 instant millionaires across the workforce from engineers and software developers to machinists, welders, and operations staff.
The engineers and executives at the top of the stack are looking at life changing numbers of a different order entirely.
Senior vice presidents and long tenured rocket engineers with large equity grants are expected to walk away with $10 million to $50 million or more depending on their vesting history.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's President and COO who has been building this company alongside Musk for over two decades, is expected to become a billionaire on her equity stake alone.
All of that wealth from Juan's $880,000 to Musk's trillion came from the same source.
A group of people who believed that if nobody built a truly reusable rocket, humanity would never leave Earth, and decided that was an unacceptable outcome.
Thank you, @elonmusk for building a company where a welder who didn't know your name in 2016 is worth nearly a million dollars this morning.
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
𝐕𝐃𝐇: 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐇 𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐂𝐀𝐍’𝐓 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐀 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐀’𝐒 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐌 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐈𝐓𝐒 𝟐𝟓𝟎𝐓𝐇
Victor Davis Hanson wasn’t asked for comfort and he didn’t offer any. A survey of American patriotism ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary found Democrat affection for America in the low double digits, independents in the low 30s, and Republicans in the high 60s. His diagnosis, asked about what drives the gap: this is what K-through-master’s-degree indoctrination produces, and it has three distinct causes.
First, ignorance. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐧’𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐣𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲. They’ve been taught that American slavery was uniquely monstrous while knowing nothing about the vastly larger Muslim slave trade, the Brazilian market, or African tribal slavery that preceded the transatlantic trade. One lens, one story, zero comparison.
Second, social conformity. Jesse Watters’s street interviews tell the story: when interviewees express contempt for America and are pressed to give a single concrete example, “𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦.” They know which answer earns approval in their environment. They have no idea what they actually mean. Express anti-American sentiment on a campus or in a peer group and you signal the right tribal affiliation. Understanding is optional.
Third, parochialism. VDH calls it “snobbish” but it’s accurate: “𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵? 𝘏𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘕𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢, 𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢, 𝘌𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘌𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦, 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘯? 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦.” The elite anti-Israel protesters who travel to the region stay at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. They don’t go to Gaza or Lebanon. They curate outrage through the safest available lens.
His conclusion: after years of turning education into therapy and ideology, we have produced a generation that is, as he puts it, “𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵.” They feel deeply. They know nothing.
𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝟐𝟓𝟎 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠.
🚨 WOW! Dr. ALVEDA KING just said it PERFECTLY on Capitol Hill
"I still have a dream. I dream that one day we will move beyond black power and white power and embrace GOD'S power and human dignity!"
"I reject the notion that Americans who hold traditional Christian beliefs should be treated as THREATS or TERRORISTS simply because we disagree with a prevailing political thought!" 🙏🏻
"I dream that Americans will one day see each other, not as enemies, but as neighbors. I dream that we will hear each other, see each other, and recognize that every human life has value from the womb to the tomb and beyond."
"We are as scripture teaches, one blood, one human race. And if we remember that truth, we can build a future worthy of the sacrifices made by those who came before us."
"We must speak out for truth and against the forces that would manufacture hate, fear, division, and violence simply to line their pockets and further their political ambitions."
"God bless America, God bless you!"
🇺🇸🇺🇸👏🏻
Elon Musk just explained why artificial intelligence cannot physically survive on Earth.
In a conversation with Jamie Dimon, Musk bypassed the romance of space exploration entirely.
He answered with physics.
Musk: “I think we can do probably somewhere around 1 terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth, but we can do 1,000 terawatts or more from the Moon.”
One terawatt. That is the thermodynamic ceiling of this entire planet.
Every nuclear plant. Every solar farm. Every grid upgrade humanity can possibly build. All of it maxes out at one terawatt of AI compute.
Earth is no longer a canvas. It is a bottleneck.
So Musk is looking at the Moon.
Not for flags. Not for footprints. For leverage.
Musk: “Because the Moon has no atmosphere and about one-sixth Earth’s gravity, you can use an electromagnetic accelerator… You don’t need to use rockets to do AI data centers into deep space from the Moon. You can literally just shoot them like a railgun type of thing.”
He is not describing a research outpost. He is describing a frictionless manufacturing hub on a celestial body.
Mine the lunar surface for raw material. Build solar arrays and thermal radiators on-site. Construct an electromagnetic railgun. And fire AI superclusters directly into the vacuum of deep space.
No supply chain from Earth. No atmosphere to fight. No fuel to burn on exit.
A thousand terawatts. A 1,000x multiplier on the physical limit of human intelligence.
And the Moon isn’t even the endgame.
Musk: “We can build a self-growing city on the Moon faster than we could do so on Mars.”
The Moon is the factory floor. Mars is the civilization.
Musk: “If you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life and where you could walk outside without a spacesuit type of thing.”
Musk: “I call Mars a fixer-upper of a planet, but it’s got a lot of potential.”
A fixer-upper. That is how the richest man on Earth talks about an entire planet. Like a house with good bones and a bad roof.
The rest of the industry is fighting over zoning permits and year-long environmental reviews to plug in a single server farm.
Musk is building a magnetic launcher on the Moon to fire compute into the cosmos.
For ten thousand years, humanity looked up at the stars and saw mythology.
Musk looks up and sees bandwidth.
We thought the ultimate purpose of spaceflight was exploration.
It was always infrastructure.
Earth was never the destination. It was the incubator.
Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI.
The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace.
They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up:
Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it.
Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived.
Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead.
The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much.
Uber's story is even worse...
Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April.
Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems.
Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.
The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money.
Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote:
"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."
This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans.
Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative.
Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing:
AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs.
The stock market rewarded every company that said it.
Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up.
But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill.
Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools.
Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible.
Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone.
And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control.
The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.
This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.
$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work.
What do you think?
Bill Maher's New Rule monologue is rarely more on point than this
Maher discusses the rise in antisemitism between Far Left and what @SteveDeaceShow calls the Halal Right
'Israel was founded on the idea that antisemitism made a Jewish state a necessity because Jews would never be safe without one, can you honestly not listen to this rhetoric (of the radical haters recently) and not see how that turned out to be true'
Bravo @billmaher, thank you for calling this out so elequently
This July 4th, America turns 250 years old.
And somewhere along the way, I think a lot of people forgot just how unbelievable that really is.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men put their names on a document knowing it could get them hanged for treason. They weren’t influencers. They weren’t celebrities. They weren’t protected by money or comfort. They were risking everything for an idea that had never truly existed before — that free people could govern themselves.
Think about the bravery that took.
No guarantee they would win.
No guarantee they would survive.
No guarantee America would even exist a year later.
But they believed future generations deserved freedom more than they feared death.
And for 250 years, generation after generation kept defending that idea.
Farmers left their fields to fight.
Young men stormed beaches knowing many wouldn’t come home.
Families buried sons under folded American flags.
Workers built this country with blistered hands through wars, depressions, disasters, and impossible odds.
We didn’t get here because life was easy.
We got here because Americans refused to quit.
That’s why it bothers me when people act like this country is just some accident that appeared overnight. Freedom is fragile. History proves that. Nations collapse all throughout time when people stop appreciating what they inherited.
You don’t have to believe America is perfect to understand it’s worth protecting.
And maybe that’s part of the problem now.
We’ve become so distracted by outrage, division, politics, and nonstop noise that we barely stop to appreciate the fact that against all odds… this experiment actually survived 250 years.
That should mean something to all of us.
Because long after politicians are gone…
long after headlines disappear…
America still belongs to the people living here, raising families here, working here, and hoping future generations inherit something worth saving.
We should still be teaching kids about courage.
About sacrifice.
About the men at Lexington and Concord.
About Valley Forge.
About the people who crossed oceans with nothing but hope.
About every generation that carried this country forward when it would’ve been easier to give up.
That story matters.
Especially now.
250 years later…
and the American story still isn’t finished.
Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined.
Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”
One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.
Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.
Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.
Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.
They conquered until they collapsed.
America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.
And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.
Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”
Almost unprecedented?
It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.
The Marshall Plan wasn’t foreign aid.
It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed.
America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership.
Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a generation.
Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.
Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.
A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it.
That’s not policy.
That’s a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything.
You’re being told a story right now.
That America is the villain of history.
You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms.
Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”
Every nation on earth has dark chapters. Every single one.
The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it.
And when nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.
Musk: “The history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.”
Probably right.
China has historically built walls, not fleets.
But the real question isn’t about borders anymore.
We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.
AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.
If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?
The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?
Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.
Billions lifted out of poverty.
All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.
And carries no guarantee of being repeated.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.
It was what it didn’t do after.
Israel is building tiny robots inside your body.
Researchers at the Technion have developed DNA origami nanorobots, programmable microscopic machines (just 100 nanometers wide) made entirely from DNA.
These tiny “robots” navigate through the bloodstream, detect specific cancer cell markers, and then deploy a targeted toxin directly into tumors, while completely sparing healthy cells.
In recent trials on aggressive cancers, they’ve shown incredible precision and effectiveness.
This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s Israeli innovation turning the body into its own battlefield against disease.
From the lab bench to potentially saving millions of lives worldwide.
Proud every single day. 🇮🇱
#StartupNation #IsraeliInnovation #Nanorobotics #DNAOrigami #CancerTreatment