Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave, 2026's Unicorn Economy, and the 10X Paradox

Thomas Laffont: So the markets are back. We can see that the unicorn economy on average since September of 24 is up 70%... So AI is dominating fundraising. What's kind of interesting in this slide is you can see the share continues to increase. So multiple years in a row now that AI is increasing its wallet share of fundraising. But the composition of that funding has changed. If you look at the unicorn factory, which really peaked in the Zurp era of 2021, we've now really normalized at a much lower level pre-COVID. So mathematically, if you put both together, you can see that the funding per unicorn has increased 5x since 2021. So we have fewer unicorns that are each raising more.

Thomas Laffont: The first thing that pops out when we look and study SpaceX is that the number one driver correlated to the valuation of SpaceX is cadence of launches... But there's another fundamentally different ratio that I want to point you to, which is, what if we took the valuation, we divided it by the number of launches, what would that look like? Well, you can see it was kind of in a fixed range for a while, and then it really started to move up. And we believe that markets are rational, and so we started thinking, well, why is it that the market is valuing SpaceX higher on a per launch basis when it's launching more than when it was just starting out? And my fundamental view, and we'll kind of call this our co-true framework, is that the reason is that the quality of SpaceX's business model increases the more you launch. So in phase one, which we call pre-constellation, you're just trying your rockets. And we know rockets are hard. And maybe you have a few government customers, and that's a one-time revenue business and it's unpredictable. Then you get into your initial ramp, and now you might have one constellation. Well, it's an end market, and it's a recurring revenue business. The more satellites you put up, the more subscribers you have, the more revenue, et cetera. Now you can move from ramp into scale. Now you don't just have one constellation, you have multiple constellations. And ultimately, we believe that a wide variety of companies and governments and militaries will want to own their own constellations so they can control their own destiny. So now you move into being a scaled business, which ultimately becomes a platform. And platform means not only do you have many more customers in your core business, but you also have new businesses. It could be space data centers. It could be the optionality of the moon and Mars and other space applications.

Thomas Laffont: The data showed us that if you're a unicorn, the odds of you one day becoming a decacorn are about 8%. If you're a decacorn, so that means you're over 10 billion, the odds of you becoming $100 billion company, not much better, 8% to 13%. But how interesting that if you're a centacorn, 100 billion or more, The odds, and by the way, we're putting in public and private companies, you now have a 31% chance of having had a 10x. This kind of flies, in my opinion, in different than maybe we would have expected. And if we look at how quickly these companies are creating value, this is a chart that I kind of added at the last minute because the data is so fresh, but you can see it typically takes multiple years to go from 500 billion to a trillion of market cap. Well, something happened very recently in the public market, which is that not only did we have three companies do it in the same year, but we had two companies do it in a matter of weeks.

Thomas Laffont: We believe that it's about $140 billion today. It'll be about 300 billion this year and it'll double in 2027. So where is that revenue coming from? Well, if we break it down, we can see we kind of estimate three key pillars to this industry. One we know, consumer. Number of subs times an ARPU, that gives you your consumer revenue. One that I think a lot of people forget, but it's ads. We estimate currently that about 1/4 of the ads served by Meta and Google are AI enabled. We think that penetration will eventually go to 100%. That's 150 billion. And then obviously we all know about the breakthroughs in enterprise and what Cloud Code and Codex are doing inside of those businesses. So if you add all these together, you get a good sense of the size of this ecosystem.