🛰️ $1.11B A Month. One Client.

In a gold rush, sell shovels. Every SpaceX launch runs on parts from public companies trading far below the IPO hype. See the 3 picks our analyst named. Get the Free Report.

One customer just agreed to pay SpaceX $1.11 billion a month to rent computers.

That's roughly $37 million a day. For chips, not rockets.

CFO Bret Johnsen dropped this Thursday at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia conference. Deal signed earlier this month, revenue switches on December 1.

At that monthly rate, one contract is worth about $13 billion in annual recurring revenue.

Which is why Johnsen says management has "even more conviction" about hitting a $100 billion ARR run rate by year end.

Quick translation: run rate means December's revenue multiplied by 12. It does not mean $100 billion lands in the bank this year. Worth knowing before anyone gets carried away.

The catch? Most of these hosting deals run 90 days, plus an optional 90 more. Six months, then back to the table.

That's on purpose. Johnsen's logic: you don't want to constrain your own products for years because you gave the compute away forever.

Less revenue visibility, more flexibility. Pick your poison.

SpaceX ends this year with just over two gigawatts of computing capacity on the ground. Next year's target is five to 10 gigawatts.

Everyone wants AI chips. Almost nobody has an electrical grid that can feed them. SpaceX builds enormous complicated infrastructure for a living and acts as its own general contractor, which turns out to be a very handy skill in 2026.

The one input it can't manufacture: Nvidia chips. It uses them exclusively and is leaning on that relationship to keep its allocation flowing.

The money math: $30 to $50 of revenue per watt expected next year, with current deals near the top end. Johnsen reckons payback on the hardware takes under a year. A GPU starts earning almost immediately. A launch tower earns over several decades.

Current tenants include Anthropic and Google.

The long game is data centres in orbit, where it's minus 450°F and sunlight is free. No cooling bills, no real estate, no permits, no grid queue.

First orbital-compute satellites launch next year, with serious deployment in 2028. SpaceX plans to reuse the V3 Starlink satellite bus, swap the comms payload for computers, and add solar.

All of it rests on Starship being fully reusable. A recent flight stuck a precision ocean landing of the second stage and the vehicle was recovered, so engineers finally got to inspect a flown heat shield.

For investors, the split is simple. The hosting cash is contracted and starts December 1. The orbital story is a very expensive maybe.

Things worth watching: whether those six-month contracts get renewed, whether two gigawatts really becomes five to 10, and whether Nvidia keeps saying yes.

The last "10x bigger than the iPhone" claim anyone laughed off was the iPhone itself. Even Nvidia's CEO is on record calling this "the next biggest opportunity after AI." Get the free briefing here.

Trump's surgeon general pick owns tobacco stocks.

Not one company. Three.

Nicole Saphier, nominated to be America's top public health official, disclosed investments in Philip Morris $PM ( ▲ 0.68% ), Altria $MO ( ▲ 0.28% ) and British American Tobacco $BTI ( ▲ 0.69% ).

The surgeon general's warning is printed on the side of the product. Awkward.

The rest of the disclosure reads like a hospital waiting room's vending machine:

And those are just the ones named. The filing says "among others."

Saphier has pledged to sell, no later than 90 days after confirmation. So the tobacco and soda problem has a stated expiry date.

Pharma gets softer treatment.

She said she would partially divest from Bristol-Myers Squibb $BMY ( ▼ 0.17% ), Johnson & Johnson $JNJ ( ▼ 0.29% ) and Pfizer $PFE ( ▲ 0.25% ).

Partially. Meaning some of it stays.

The disclosure doesn't explain why those three get a different rule, and that's the gap the Senate will probably poke at first.

Almost nothing, directly. A nominee dumping a few personal positions doesn't move Altria's dividend or Coca-Cola's volumes.

What it's worth watching is the messenger. The surgeon general's real power is the megaphone, the advisories, the warning labels, the "this is bad for you" headlines that stick to a category for a decade.

Whoever holds that job sets the tone on tobacco, ultra-processed food and sugary drinks. Consumer staples investors have sat through that movie before.

Which makes Saphier's own business interesting. She's a radiologist and former Fox News contributor who founded Drop Rx, which sells "doctor-formulated" herbal supplements. A public health chief with a supplement brand is a story that writes itself.

Her confirmation hearing is scheduled for Sept. 16.

It's Trump's third attempt at filling the role, after the first two nominees failed to get enough Senate support. Third time is either the charm or the pattern.

Stripe tried to buy PayPal. The deal died.

Buyout firm Advent International teamed up with PayPal's own rival for a takeover, and it fell apart.

So now CEO Enrique Lores has to fix the payments giant by himself.

The Wall Street Journal laid it out on Friday: remake the parts of the business that have been limping for years, launch new features, and slash costs.

That last one is already in motion. Last week PayPal cut around 600 jobs in India, roughly 10% of its workforce there, as part of an ongoing global restructuring.

Cost-cutting is the easy half of any turnaround. It's the half you can do with a spreadsheet.

Here's the piece Lores keeps circling back to: Venmo is wildly popular and barely makes any money.

Everyone uses it. Nobody pays for it. It's the friend who's always at the party and never brings drinks.

Then there's the original PayPal checkout button, the one you've been scrolling past at online checkouts since roughly 2015. Lores wants better user experience and fatter rewards to get people clicking it again.

Translation: bribe you back.

The market's verdict so far is a shrug. Shares ticked up 0.88% to $53.78 in afternoon trading.

That's a move of about 47 cents. Polite applause, not a standing ovation.

The thing worth watching is the mix. Layoffs flatter the next few earnings reports and cost nothing to announce. Making Venmo actually earn its keep is the bit that changes the story.

A buyout would have handed shareholders a premium and handed the mess to somebody else. That exit just closed behind them.

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