$ASTS: Midterms = REVERSE UNO

issues, but really changed the narrative for AST was the fact that SpaceX decided to then go directly into the mobile business, which I think for anyone who's held AST for a long time. This was viewed as a positive thing. It's like, okay, Elon Musk is now taking his mask off, he's showing his cards and he wants to compete against the M&O's. And so to a logical thinker, you would say, okay, well, this makes AST much more important to the incumbent M&O's. And so, not only will AT&T and Verizon work with AST, but most likely T-Mobile will as well. So this is a positive thing. But what did not come to fruition or the thing that countered that was the fact that I think in the hedge fund world and maybe institutions as well. And I think it's important to outline that AST is a heavily retail-owned stock. And so while you and I may think that institutions care about AST or they're shorting and they're negative, I learned last week from a pod guy, a lot of people in T-MT actually don't care about AST. They view it as a curiosity of sorts like it's a retail stock. And we've seen that over the last few weeks where on days where there's been a lot of retail heavy selling, you know, in other names. AST has suffered more. For example, if you look at Rocket Lab, Rocket Lab has a lot more institutional support, so it doesn't have as much volatility. And of course, because they're acquiring a medium which pro forma that company generates significant EBITDA in an environment like this, the quality of earnings is much higher than a company that doesn't have earnings yet. But the reason why I point this stuff out is that the institutions that do know AST typically are going to be there's a few bulls out there but there are also a lot of guys who are short. And so when SpaceX decided to get into the mobile business, this became a very lazy trade. It was easy to short AST. It's like, okay, Starlink is going to come in and they're going to SpaceX is going to create Starlink mobile and they're going to take some amount of share from the MNOs here in the US. And you've got like all these SpaceX fanboys are like, oh my God, that's so easy. He's going to disrupt the industry without actually thinking through the details of having to build a threshold network, having to stand up towers, having to get low band spectrum, which is ultimately what they did. You know, I'll talk about that a little bit. But the lazy trade was, hey, I'm going to go along SpaceX and short these MNOs and maybe I'll short AST as well. And that was an easy trade to put on, right? Because SpaceX is unstoppable, right? I mean, you've got this guy who is Elon Musk as a midband from a regulatory standpoint. He's friends with a friend in car. He's also when the Republicans had the Senate in the house, he's pretty well protected, right? So he's got regulatory support. He's supported a lot of politicians who got elected. And so he's got a lot of favors to call in. Of course, he's close to Donald Trump. And so if you're an institution, that was an easy trade, right? It's like, okay, I'm going to short AST because they're going to be in that loser. Like because the MNOs are going to be losers. They're going to lose some chair. And then AST, it's a small company and who knows if they'll get anything right in. And the lazy refrain was that, well, SpaceX is going to hold back their launch. And anybody who competes against SpaceX is going to get crushed, right? That's a very easy thesis to pedal. And so that was the lazy trade. Well, now that we've had, I mean, I'm not a political expert, but this past midterms, I mean, this is probably in my experience, this is one of the worst defeats I've seen in quite some time, right? I mean, I think we all know. And it's Donald Trump had the AI trade and innovation going, he had all these things going for him, right? High stock markets were reaching new highs and just a lot of positive things going his way, right? And then he decided to pull the trigger on attacking Iran, causing oil to spike, creating global uncertainty. And of course, I think for anybody who's Republican, if you voted for Donald Trump, it was about making America great again, like pulling back from focusing efforts internally, pulling aid from to foreign countries, and not getting involved in foreign wars, right? And deporting legal immigrants and putting up the board, protecting the borders. But I think when I looked at some of these exit interviews for people, it's like there were Republicans who were voting for Democrats and then some of the things they could say is like, we didn't want to go to Iran. Price oil is high and so inflation is high, the cost of living is brutal. The promise of deporting people never happened. And I have friends, that was watching this older gentleman, he was like, I have friends in Canada and I visit there often, and I just never noticed why we're building them. And so there's a whole host of reasons why I think this has been a complete about faith. So I think Iran, obviously, was the big, was the straw that broke the camel's back. But now that we've had this glue tsunami, where does that leave us? What now? And so obviously Trump is still president, and that's very powerful. But I think even he knows, he was interviewed by the New York Times this evening saying that as opposed to all the rhetoric that going into this midterms where he's saying, if the Democrats get elected, that's going to be a great depression and all this stuff. Now he's coming back with hat and hand saying, I'll work with the Democrats and we'll figure something out, which is what you would expect for many rational person. But now that we've had the Democrats completely sweep the House and Senate, the big one, which we could talk a little more granularly, but in Texas got switched from red to blue, where Governor Abbott lost. And so it's pretty insane. That's where all the actions going on for Elon Musk with Starbase. But then also this little company is the space mobile of Midland, which is what inspired me to tweet out the picture of Abel. I think this was taken in 2023, maybe 2022, with his cowboy hat on, which I think is a good reminder that Abel is a, he's the epitome of the American dream, he's an immigrant from Venezuela, he came for a better life, he became a U.S. citizen, started this company and is employed a ton of people and is putting America first in terms of being, bringing technological change and innovation to the wireless industry. And so this is a guy who's building this massive dream and changing the world out of Texas. And so I think it's an interesting counter to what Elon Musk is doing and how he's gotten to the political influence he has. I mean, you've got Elon Musk who's heavily politicized, right? And then you've got Abel, who is heads down and he's very quiet and he has friendships across aisle and he's focused, right? He's focused on building this company, which is his dream. And so, yeah, what does it mean? So now that the Democrats are in power, I think the narrative changes, right? So before the long space, in short, MNOs and short, you know, AST trade, that's not so easy anymore. And what do I mean by that? So let's think about where Musk is coming from, right? So he paid, what is it? $474 million in this midterm to influence the election and completely cropped out on that, right? It's not as if I don't think that money even helps, right? Like the revolving has got blown out, right? And so where does that leave him? So he has, you know, whether you believe it's justified or not, I mean, I'm just speaking very frankly, he's got a massive target on his back, right? Like the congressional scrutiny on SpaceX and Musk has gone up, is going to go up through the roof, right? And so anything he does that is unscrupulous that is nefarious, there will be there will be a ton of focus on that, right? And so before I think he had carte blanche to operate very freely, where he had regulatory and political support. And so he could pretty much do what he wanted. Whereas now he has to be very careful, right? He, what I mean by that is, for example, I think it was Blue Mithal had, has already started inquiry into this whole star shield, star link incident in Ukraine. And of course, you know, I'm not, I'm not here to tell you what exactly happens. I know one knows, right? Like there's been a lot of forward finger pointing between Donald Trump, the administration and Elon Musk. And then Elon Musk came out later and was like, yeah, we did it, but it was for these reasons. So in previous iterations, if there was a Republican Senate and House, that probably that, that, you know, inquiry probably wouldn't have seen the light of day, right? But now it's going to definitely see the light of day. I mean, you even have Republicans who wanted to find, get to the bottom of it, right? Because this is our, this is the, the US military and then also allies in question, right? Who rely on this system? People want to know what happened, right? But this is just, you know, an example of the inability to operate without scrutiny, right? And so that's going away. Similarly, I think Senator Warren and Kassar, I think his pronouncing his name, you know, they had started inquiry about what the competitive implications are of SpaceX buying AcroStar, which in the previous regime, as a, you know, yesterday before the elections, it wouldn't matter. But now it actually kind of does, right? So these things, they, they're not necessarily, you know, deal killers or they're not going to stop things from happening, but there's going to be roadblocks, right? And there's going to be, there's going to be some limiting factors that are going to be introduced, right? Where he's not going to be able to operate as freely. And so, you know, there, there is a, if I want to be conspiracy theorists, there is a, and I had thought about this briefly, but, you know, it's like, okay, you know, a lot of mosques trying to get into, by the way, as I'm speaking, ASD6 mobile is going positive overnight. So, yeah, but a lot of mosquit, if I, if I wanted to create like a, on the one hand, this is America and it's like, yeah, no one's doing this stuff. But on the other hand, it's like, oh, if you're the most powerful person in the world, you could totally try to do this stuff, right? And so, you know, there's been these troublemen of considering buying boost mobile. And you always have to ask yourself, why is stuff leaking? Right? Why are these articles getting leaked and who are their sources? And, and I could put together an narrative where he's leaking this boost mobile transaction, trying to put some pressure on the MMOs. And if I was like a really devious person, maybe, and this will, this will make the conspiracy, they're as happy. But what if Elon Musk tried to show the MMOs that he had ultimate power and he's like, hey, you know what, I'm going to, at the Cape, I'm going to stop F9 launches for six weeks and see how they feel about that. Which I personally don't believe he's doing that because I do believe that they are prepping for the Starship launch in January. And so they've taken some time to reallocate people and then we've got, it looks like F9 is going to restart launches on November 29th. And so I think we'll see our launches shortly after that. But you know, these are things in the back of your head where if you have, if you're a Elon Musk and you have political power and you've got support, these are things that you could, you know, in the back of competitors' mind, maybe he is doing that. You can start, you know, racking your brain, coming with these potential scenarios that are plausible, right? But in this new world, this new political world, that's going to be really tough to do. And there's going to be a lot more scrutiny. And the reason why this is important is that, you know, let's take a step back. So what is Elon, what does he want to do? Or what's on his agenda, right? One is building data centers and getting spot pricing and and that's like the engine of growth for near term for SpaceX, right? All the revenue, growth, like billions of dollars every month, which we're not around as of last year, but they are now because you've got customers like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, that's all that gravy train might be coming to an end, two degree, right? Like, I mean, not saying that what's already built is going away, but if you expected, I'm just making numbers up. And if you're expecting 60, 70, 80% year-over-year growth in data center buildouts, but now you've got all these states that have turned Democrat who are like, hey, we need to slow down on on this stuff and really figure out the environmental impact is and if this is sustainable, I don't know, maybe space, again, I'm just making these numbers up, but it's just for illustrative purposes. If your revenue growth is going to be 60, but it goes down to 30% because you can't build these data centers as quickly as you wanted, how does that impact SpaceX's valuation, right? And so that gravy train maybe comes to end or I don't know, maybe because there's less data centers, maybe pricing goes up and that's good, but there's a lot of implications here, right? And so the whole idea, for example, SpaceX merging the Tesla, that's going to get a lot more regulatory and antitrust review, right? Even though on the one hand, these are not, you know, there's no, it's not a horizontal merger, it's a vertical merger, but even then that's going to, that's