NEWS: He came from Mexico and welded rockets for SpaceX at $28 an hour. His stock is now worth almost $1 million.
Juan Hernandez joined SpaceX as a contract welder in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reports. When he went full time, the company gave him $10,000 in stock that vested over five years. He bought more from every paycheck.
In 2020 he started selling small pieces of the stake, back when SpaceX was worth $36 billion. That money bought properties around Texas, where he and his wife now run a small real estate business.
The shares he kept are worth around $880,000 at the IPO price.
"It's put me in a comfortable position for life."
These days he welds rockets for Blue Origin. The SpaceX stock comes with him.
ELON MUSK: "One of the things I found over time is that, in terms of like recruiting people to the company, or having people work with the company, their individual abilities, their intellectual capabilities matter a lot, but it also matters if they have a good heart. It's not just about whether somebody has, you know, certain IQ or whatever, but like a good person that matters, that matters a lot."
Elon Musk was working at the SpaceXAI office until 2:45am tonight, leading from the front. Many engineers were still there grinding through the night.
This is real leadership.
Not sitting in a boardroom.
Not managing from a distance.
Not just giving speeches.
Elon is pushing the mission forward when most of the world is asleep.
That kind of work ethic is why his companies keep doing what others call impossible.
The more you watch Elon Musk, the more obvious it becomes that this was never just about money. He could have walked away years ago and lived in total comfort for the rest of his life. Instead, he chose constant pressure, sleepless nights, and one impossible mission after another. He does it because he genuinely believes humanity can achieve so much more if we push ourselves harder.
He is 54 years old and still working with the intensity of someone half his age. Grinding until 3am at the office, working every waking hour seven days a week. People keep betting against him, and he keeps winning. You can disagree with him on things, but you cannot deny the level of dedication, sacrifice, and belief he has put into pushing humanity forward.
History is repeating itself once again.
Godspeed, SpaceXAI.
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗
SpaceX is only ~200 satellites away from having launched as many satellites as the rest of the world combined
(despite giving the rest of the world a 61-year head start)