The IPO had priced at $1.77 trillion.

He had read the S-1 on the plane. All 847 pages. Starlink was real — $4.4 billion in operating profit, the only number in the document that didn’t require a footnote about future assumptions. Everything else was a promise dressed as a projection.

Mars. Orbital data centers. A million satellites. xAI catching competitors it was currently losing to by $6.4 billion a year.

The market had looked at the one real thing and priced the rest of the promises at face value. That was not analysis. That was belief.

He understood belief. He had been short it for eighteen months.

What he could not find was its opposite. The thing that didn’t need belief because it simply worked. The thing you could own the way you owned a building on Main Street — because it was still there in the morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after the disruption that was supposed to end it.