BREAKING SpaceX News!

Dear Reader,

This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.

Happy Monday. Today is Monday, May 25th. Oh my goodness — the 25th already.

Big news first.

We finally have the ticker symbol for SpaceX when it comes public.

The filing aims for June 12th — mark that on your calendar, though it's not set in stone yet.

The symbol will be SPCX.

The Satellite Story Nobody Is Telling

I've been digging into the satellite industry this past week, and the numbers are remarkable.

In 2025, Starlink — SpaceX's satellite division — did $11.4 billion in revenue.

The next biggest competitor, Viasat, did $4.6 billion.

SES did $2.9 billion.

EchoStar $1.4 billion. Eutelsat $1.2 billion. Iridium $872 million. Globalstar $273 million. AST SpaceMobile $71 million.

Starlink is bigger than all of them combined.

So the question I started asking is: why is satellite such a big deal all of a sudden?

Where is all this demand coming from?

The Answer Is Warfare

As a classical historian, I'm always focused on great power competition.

How do great empires lose their position — and how do they stay strong enough to fight off challengers like China?

Under Trump's first term, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis — they called him Mad Dog, which really doesn't do him justice, he's more of a philosopher — started studying our military and realized something important.

We were fighting 21st century wars with 20th century weapons.

One of the things he nurtured was called Project Replicator — the idea that we need to be able to replicate drones at massive scale.

And you can see exactly why that matters right now.

Ukraine has held off Russia in large part because of cheap drone production.

Iran is causing us serious headaches with $10,000 drones.

The future of warfare is swarms — thousands of drones all working together like a beehive, making decisions in real time, identifying targets, moving at speed.

The Race Between the US and China

Right now there is a race between the United States and China to see who can get to coordinated drone swarms first.

And the key to making that work is satellites.

All of these drones have to talk to each other.

They pull data from satellites to make decisions together in real time.

The country that can do that fastest — that can transmit, process, and act on that data faster than the other side — wins.

One of the first lessons of history is this: success in warfare is based on speed.

Blitzkrieg means lightning war.

Alexander the Great. The Mongols. Caesar marching across Gaul.

The military that uses technology to move fastest is the one that wins.

Period.

The Company We Are Discussing Tomorrow

There is a private company — still private, which matters a lot — that has built software that compresses and moves satellite data faster.

Think of it as shrink-wrapping the data so it gets where it needs to go at maximum speed.

They are already partnered with Nvidia, Viasat, Intel, HPE, and Ericsson.

And they have a partnership with US Space Command.

These are not small names.

Viasat is the second-largest satellite company in the world after Starlink.

And here is what makes this particularly interesting.

SpaceX is coming public at $1.5 to $2 trillion.

Elon's early investors got in at a fraction of that — $100 billion valuations, making 10x, 20x, 30x their money.

This company is still private.

You can still get in at the private company price.

We are going to break the whole story down tomorrow at our webinar at 1:00 PM.

I think this is one of the most compelling private market opportunities I have seen in a long time.

I hope you will join us.

Anyway, that's all I have.

Have a wonderful day.

“The Buck Stops Here,”