WTI crude just fell 3.2% to $84.88. Brent down 3.4% to $87.33. 👀
Lower oil = less inflation = Fed gets softer cover to cut. The Iran deal might've just handed crypto its real catalyst. Follow the oil.
Good thread. The xAI escalator mechanic is the thing most retail buyers completely missed. Twitter investors rode two forced conversions straight into the largest IPO ever. Wild structure.
For twenty years the only people who could own a slice of $SPCX were Musk's inner circle and a handful of venture funds.
On Friday that door blew open to everyone. The new owners think they bought a rocket company. They bought something far bigger and stranger. Let's dive in 🧵
The SpaceX IPO did the thing almost no mega listing does. It cleared the hype. $135 offer price, a valuation near $1.75 trillion, the largest IPO ever recorded, and a deal structure that handed roughly 30% to retail when the usual allocation runs 5 to 10.
The book was oversubscribed by more than 400%, so most retail orders got trimmed or skipped. A decade of locked access opened in a single morning.
Here is the part the price action skips. SpaceX is five businesses wearing one ticker. The company does not disclose a revenue split, so treat the percentages below as estimates, not gospel. The shape is what counts.
🛰️ STARLINK
Roughly half the business, and the reason SPCX trades like a tech name instead of an aerospace one. Satellite internet sold as a monthly subscription to homes, ships, planes and militaries. Recurring revenue is the whole game here. It turned a launch company with lumpy contract income into something with a predictable cash base, and it is the single line that justifies most of the valuation.
🚀 LAUNCH SERVICES
Maybe a quarter of revenue and the part everyone pictures when they hear the name. Falcon 9 reusability gutted the cost of getting to orbit and left SpaceX flying the majority of the world's payloads. Commercial satellites, NASA science missions, national security launches. It is a real cash business, but it is no longer the main one.
🛡️ STARSHIELD
The defense arm. Secure satellite constellations and comms built for the US government rather than your living room. Smaller slice, higher strategic weight. This is the line that makes SpaceX a national asset and gives it pricing power that a pure commercial operator never gets.
👨🚀 HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
Crew Dragon, astronaut transport, ISS resupply. A small share of the dollars and an outsized share of the credibility. When you are the only American company flying people to orbit, that reputation feeds every other contract you bid on.
🔭 STARSHIP & THE AI WILDCARD
The optionality bucket. Starship, lunar and Mars ambition, the long-dated R&D that may pay off in a decade or never. And the piece a lot of Friday's buyers missed entirely: SpaceX absorbed xAI in February. Grok and the compute build sit inside this same ticker now.
You bought rockets and a frontier AI lab in one click.
So what did 30% of retail actually buy at $135? A subscription internet business, the world's dominant launch provider, a defense contractor, a human spaceflight monopoly, and an AI bet, priced at roughly 110 times trailing sales with no profits to lean on. Elizabeth Warren already sent the SEC a letter calling the valuation detached from the financials. The pop says the market disagrees, for now.
FIFA was never a sports org. It was a cartel with a trophy. The World Cup was just the liquidity event. Same structure as every ponzi, just with better branding and a Swiss address.
FIFA spent 24 years running a $150 MILLION bribery operation across six continents.
The man who brought it down was a 400 pound informant who recorded his colleagues while wearing an adult diaper in Trump Tower.
FIFA was founded in 1904 to govern world football. By the 1990s, it controlled a sport watched by half the planet. It awarded World Cups. It brokered billion-dollar broadcast deals. It operated from Zurich with a staff of over 400 and virtually zero external oversight.
The man who ran it was Sepp Blatter. A Swiss former tourism official who became FIFA president in 1998 and held the role for 17 years. He won four re-elections. He was effectively untouchable.
The corruption was not hidden. It was structural. FIFA officials and sports marketing executives took bribes and kickbacks in exchange for the television and marketing rights to international tournaments. World Cups. Copa Américas. Gold Cups. CONCACAF Champions Leagues. The rights were for sale. The buyers knew it.
The scheme stretched from 1991 to 2015. It involved officials across South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States. It touched confederations on every continent. Nobody inside FIFA stopped it. Nobody inside FIFA tried.
The man who broke it open was one of the most corrupt officials of all. Chuck Blazer. Former general secretary of CONCACAF. FIFA Executive Committee member from 1996 to 2013. His nickname was "Mr. 10 Per Cent." He took a commission on everything.
Blazer lived in a $18,000-a-month apartment on the 49th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan. He rented a second unit next door for $6,000 a month. It was for his cats. He ran up $29 MILLION in credit card charges during his tenure. He kept a parrot. He held a standing table at Elaine's on the Upper East Side, his driver waiting outside.
He weighed over 400 pounds. He got around Manhattan on a motorised scooter. In November 2011, two federal agents, one FBI, one IRS, followed him down a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. They caught up to him and gave him a choice. Cooperate, or go to prison for tax evasion.
Blazer cooperated. He became a government informant the same month. He signed a deal with the Eastern District of New York and began recording conversations with fellow FIFA officials. He met with prosecutors 19 times between December 2011 and November 2013.
At the 2012 London Olympics, Blazer invited FIFA colleagues to his hotel room and secretly recorded them using a microphone hidden in a keychain. Back in Trump Tower, FBI agents affixed a listening device to his body while he stood in his apartment in an adult diaper.
In November 2013, Blazer appeared in a Brooklyn courtroom in a wheelchair. He pleaded guilty to 10 federal charges. Racketeering. Wire fraud. Money laundering. Tax evasion. He admitted to taking part in a $10 MILLION bribe scheme to help South Africa win the 2010 World Cup bid. The plea was sealed. Nobody outside the courtroom knew.
The $10 MILLION had been disguised as support for an "African Diaspora Legacy Programme" in the Caribbean. It was wired in three instalments from a FIFA account in Switzerland to accounts controlled by Jack Warner, then FIFA vice-president and president of CONCACAF. Warner's son, Daryan, had earlier collected a briefcase containing $10,000 in cash from a South African bid official at a hotel in Paris. He flew it straight back to Trinidad.
For two more years, the investigation expanded in silence. Blazer's recordings gave prosecutors a target list. The FBI, the IRS, and the Eastern District of New York built the case. On May 27, 2015, they moved.
At 6 a.m., Swiss police entered the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich. Rooms started at $900 a night. Seven FIFA officials were arrested in their bedrooms. Hotel porters held up white bed sheets in the corridors, trying to shield the men being led to police cars. It did not work. The Associated Press filmed the whole thing.
Hours later in Brooklyn, Attorney General Loretta Lynch unsealed a 47-count, 164-page indictment. Fourteen defendants. Nine FIFA officials. Five sports marketing executives. Racketeering conspiracy. Wire fraud. Money laundering. The charges described a 24-year criminal enterprise. Four individuals and two corporations had already pleaded guilty in secret.
Blatter was not among those arrested. Two days later, on May 29, he was re-elected FIFA president for a fifth term. Four days after that, on June 2, he announced his resignation. He had held the job for 17 years.
On December 3, 2015, it happened again. Another dawn raid at the same hotel. Two more FIFA officials arrested. A 92-count superseding indictment charged 16 additional defendants. The total number of people charged reached 41.
In October 2015, Coca-Cola, Visa, McDonald's, and Budweiser, four of FIFA's biggest sponsors, publicly demanded Blatter resign immediately. Blatter's lawyer replied that his client "respectfully disagrees" and would not step down. FIFA's ethics committee banned him for eight years. It was later reduced to six.
Blazer never testified. He died on July 12, 2017, at the age of 72. Rectal cancer, diabetes, coronary artery disease. He had been banned from football for life by FIFA in 2015, the same organisation he had looted for two decades and then helped dismantle from a hospital bed.
By the time the case wound down, 27 individuals had pleaded guilty. Two more were convicted at trial. Four corporations entered guilty pleas. The DOJ recovered over $201 MILLION in restitution. Jack Warner, 80 years old, is still fighting extradition from Trinidad.
Blatter and Michel Platini were later charged with fraud by Swiss prosecutors over a separate $2 MILLION payment. They were acquitted. Twice.
💥JUST IN: $61 Billions into Bitcoin ETPs. $27 Billions into gold ETPs. Now Gold holders are selling $10 Billions of theirs to buy more Bitcoin.
The rotation everyone was waiting for already started.