Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley pals are predicting he’ll come out laughing after a year of record wealth destruction.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently broke the world record for the largest loss of personal wealth in history, losing an estimated $182 billion since November 2021 (another estimate puts the figure closer to $200 billion). But according to Silicon Valley insiders, he could make a big difference this year, thanks to one of his other companies, SpaceX.

These insiders are two prominent Bay Area venture capitalists, Jason Kalakanis and Chamath Palihapitiya, who once earned the nickname “King of SPAC” for their many investments in specialty acquisition companies. Both of Musk’s longtime associates spoke All in podcast about the outlook for 2023. Calacanis’s closeness to Musk was exposed in court when his private text messages to Twitter’s CEO were exposed as part of the Twitter acquisition lawsuit, including his oath of allegiance: “Board member, advisor, whatever…you take my sword.” Put me in the game trainer! Twitter CEO is my dream job.” So they’re probably biased in favor of Musk, but they see one clear way the world’s second-richest person can regain some swagger in 2023.

Asked what the biggest business deal of the year will be, Palihapitiya responded in a podcast, “It’s simple. Starlink will go public.”

Starlink rating

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite broadband arm that dominates the commercial space launch market. It gained attention last year for the war in Ukraine, where its user terminals played a critical role in resisting a Russian invasion, helping troops stay connected to each other and leaders in Kyiv despite attacks on infrastructure.

Starlink’s valuation “will be at least half of SpaceX’s current private value,” Palihapitiya predicted.

That would amount to about $75 billion, host Kalakanis noted. In the middle of November bloomberg said SpaceX was in talks for funding estimated at more than $150 billion.

Musk himself said in early 2021 that Starlink would go public as soon as its cash flow could be predicted “well enough”.

“I think it will go public and I think it will be the best chance we have to open the capital markets in 2023,” Palihapitiya said in a podcast.

As LuckThe Term Sheet newsletter this week noted that “the US IPO market almost died last year.”

This was stated by Matt Kennedy, senior IPO strategist at Renaissance Capital, which provides pre-IPO research. Luck in December, equity capital markets were “the worst since the Great Recession.”

The mask appeared on All in podcast itself several times. In addition to being named Calacanis as a potential new CEO of Twitter, which Musk acquired in late October for $44 billion, the same goes for another of the four “best friends” on the podcast: David Sacks, who, along with Musk, was a member of ” PayPal Mafia” as one of the founders of this firm.

Palihapitiya noted that he is a Starlink customer himself, as is Kalakanis, who said:

“People underestimate THERE [total addressable market] this product. TAMs are non-existing broadband connections, these are second connections, these are connections where the connection did not exist. It’s on vans, buses, in villages.”

For private jet users, Palihapitiya noted that Starlink can provide broadband at a fraction of the cost of other offerings.

But he also gave another reason for the Starlink IPO in 2023.

“Rest” for Musk

“I think the reason is that in order for Elon to have full financial flexibility and do what he needs to do, and – he talked about this in our group, about the difficulties and dangers of margin loans and all this – he is going to create a breather for yourself. This is the easiest and most obvious way for him to do it. This will give him another ton of dry powder.

In the beginning of December, bloomberg reported that Musk’s bankers were considering giving him new margin loans backed by Tesla stock to replace some of the high-interest debt on his Twitter deal.

This followed Musk personally investing billions when he bought Twitter and sold Tesla stock to make it happen.

Last month, on a podcast, Musk reiterated his view that the economy is long overdue for a recession and said, “I would really advise people not to have margin debt in a volatile stock market, and you know, from a monetary standpoint, the powder is dry. You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market.”

This story was originally published on Fortune.com.

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