SpaceX Financials, Chimpanzee Civil War, Self-Driving Safety, Ferrari
TL;DR
SpaceX is throwing off serious cash, but xAI is dragging the combined P&L deep into the red — The Information reports $18.5 billion in revenue, nearly $8 billion in EBIT from launch + Starlink in 2025, and a nearly $5 billion net loss after folding in xAI and roughly $13 billion of AI capex.
Alex Tabarrok’s framing on AI labor is the cleanest idea in the whole news block: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week are mathematically similar — The hosts linger on his point that the real fight is distribution, not just productivity, with historical context that annual work hours in the U.S. fell from about 3,000 in 1870 to 1,800 today.
The chimpanzee civil war story landed because it felt uncomfortably human — A once-cohesive 200-chimp group in Uganda split after key male bridge figures died and a new alpha rose, leading to coordinated lethal raids and at least 24 deaths, which the hosts instantly read as a metaphor for tech industry factionalism.
Ferrari’s magic, per Acquired’s Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, is that it’s both a luxury brand and a sports franchise — The show highlights Ferrari’s absurd scarcity math (330,000 lifetime cars sold vs. 400 million fans), then pivots to Goldman Sachs data showing used Ferrari prices down 7% YoY and non-hybrids still outperforming hybrids.
UCLA geneticist Alex Young brought both technical depth and personal stakes to embryo selection — He argues polygenic embryo screening is becoming genuinely useful for diseases like type 1 diabetes and Alzheimer’s, says UK Biobank-style openness mattered enormously, and reveals he lost collaborators and a job offer after advising Herasight while also navigating cancer treatment himself.
Firefly CEO Jason Kim gave the most cinematic pitch of the day: the moon is 'the ultimate high ground' — He touts Firefly as the first commercial company to land successfully on the moon, says Blue Ghost 1 ran 14 days of surface ops, and lays out a roadmap of far-side, volcanic-region, and south-pole lunar missions plus commercial imaging around the moon using Nvidia Jetson hardware.
The Breakdown
Opening volley: Artemis splashdown and a stacked guest lineup
TBPN opens in full bit mode, then quickly settles into a packed Friday rundown: UCLA’s Alex Young on polygenic embryo selection, Firefly Aerospace’s Jason Kim, Grüns founder Chad Janis after a $1.2 billion Unilever exit, plus more. The immediate live event hanging over the show is Artemis 2’s return — a 13-minute, 24,000-mph re-entry ending with a 5:07 p.m. Pacific splashdown off San Diego, the first astronauts back from the moon in over 53 years.
SpaceX financials: huge core business, huge AI bill
The hosts dig into Corey Weinberg’s Information scoop: SpaceX generated $18.5 billion in revenue, while the combined SpaceX-xAI entity posted nearly a $5 billion loss after SpaceX acquired xAI in February. Their read is basically, “of course” — SpaceX’s space business is highly profitable, xAI is aggressively unprofitable, and IPO buyers may be underwriting Musk’s latest vertical-integration bet just like Tesla investors did before.
What stands out is the scale mismatch: xAI capex is nearing $13 billion, about 50% more than rocket and satellite divisions combined, while SpaceX’s launch and Starlink businesses still produced nearly $8 billion in EBIT in 2025. The hosts also point to the launch market still being supply-constrained, which is why they’re eager to ask Firefly how fast the orbital economy can actually grow.
AI work, holidays, and one very weird detour into time management
Alex Tabarrok’s essay becomes the day’s cleanest intellectual exercise: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week can represent the same aggregate reduction in labor, with the difference coming down to how work is distributed. The hosts like the “white-pill” version of the future — more holidays, shorter weeks, and an AI dividend — while still noting the obvious caveat that creative destruction still destroys real communities.
Then the show swerves into TBPN-style chaos, with one host joking that the real productivity hack is waking up so early you’re effectively starting your Monday at noon on Sunday. It’s a goofy aside, but it keeps the segment from turning into a dry labor-econ lecture.
Chimpanzee civil war becomes a mirror for tech politics
A Wall Street Journal story on a chimp split in Uganda absolutely grabs the desk. A group of about 200 chimps fractured after several socially important males died and a new alpha took over, with the split complete by 2018 and more than 24 apes dying in coordinated attacks since.
The hosts immediately read it through a Silicon Valley lens: bridge figures disappear, hierarchy changes, mimetic rivalry escalates, and suddenly former allies are raiding each other. They also ask the uncomfortable ethics question the article leaves hanging — at what point do researchers stop “observing” and intervene?
Ferrari: the luxury brand that behaves like Manchester United
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s Wall Street Journal piece tees up Ferrari as something richer than standard luxury scarcity: a company with just 330,000 cars sold in its entire history but 400 million fans worldwide. The hosts clearly enjoy the framing that Ferrari “weaponized Italian contradictions” and fused Hermes-style exclusivity with a global sports fandom built on Formula 1 mythology.
But they don’t leave it there. Using Goldman Sachs’ Ferrari residual value tracker, they argue the company may be flirting with the same overproduction mistakes it once escaped: used Ferrari values are down 7% year-over-year, non-hybrids are outperforming hybrids, and the truly limited cars are still the only ones showing real resilience.
Alex Young on embryo selection, backlash, and cancer
The interview with UCLA statistical geneticist Alex Young is the most substantive stretch of the show. He explains how IVF screening has moved from older tests like PGTM and PGTA into the polygenic era, made possible by cheap sequencing and giant datasets like UK Biobank, and says embryo selection can materially lower risk for diseases like type 1 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and some complex diseases.
The human part is what sticks: Young says his involvement with Herasight cost him collaborators on a Nature paper and a job offer from a top U.S. university, and he also reveals he’s a cancer patient who had to preserve fertility before treatment. That personal experience seems to sharpen his view that medicine is often too protocol-driven and not patient-centric enough.
Firefly’s moon pitch: commercial lunar missions are already here
Jason Kim brings pure aerospace energy. He says Firefly is the first commercial company ever to land successfully on the moon, broke the responsive-launch record with a 24-hour Space Force mission, and now wants to turn lunar operations into a repeatable business with Blue Ghost missions to the moon’s far side, a volcanic dome, and the south pole.
The most memorable line is that “the moon is the ultimate high ground,” which neatly captures both the national-security framing and the commercial ambition. Kim also says Firefly is putting Nvidia Jetson hardware into lunar orbit for on-orbit processing and commercial imaging — a very 2026 sentence.
CoreWeave praise and the Grüns hypergrowth story
Before the next guest, the hosts note Nick Carter’s victory lap on CoreWeave as the company keeps signing giant AI infrastructure deals and making the earlier “ticking time bomb” discourse look too glib. Then Chad Janis walks through Grüns’ sprint from idea to $1.2 billion Unilever acquisition in just over three years.
His story is extremely tactile: the original product came from staring at a gross greens powder at his dad’s house, early prototypes were tested on a quarter of his Stanford class, and for the first 6-8 months workers literally hand-packed sticky gummies into pouches because the machinery didn’t exist. Janis says the scariest moment was nearly running out of inventory and having to cut marketing spend by 93% overnight to protect subscribers — which tells you how much of the business was just operational discipline, not vibes.