From the PayPal Mafia to the SpaceX Mafia: The next wealth-generation machine is already brewing.

I recently came across an article online titled "SpaceX's 'Age of Discovery': Rockets, AI, and Musk Through the Eyes of a Former Executive."

The article describes the experience of a former SpaceX executive who joined the company and participated in a series of major milestones. Through many vivid and touching details, it reveals to readers the unimaginable hardships SpaceX encountered along the way, uncovering the blood-and-tears story behind SpaceX's miracle.

The article does not dwell heavily on SpaceX's commercial value itself, but two details left a deep impression on me. These details made me think of a more magnificent future and broader investment opportunities that SpaceX may spawn.

• "Most of these entrepreneurs come from within SpaceX, in their 20s and 30s, with exceptional engineering skills and a unique understanding of the industry's underlying logic. Hong Lide calls them the 'SpaceX Mafia.'"

This passage means that under SpaceX's arduous growth process and Musk's "extreme" management style, a group of highly capable employees with unique insights were forged. Many of these employees left SpaceX and started their own ventures.

There is a very famous saying in Silicon Valley: the "PayPal Mafia."

It refers to the fact that after PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, most of the founding team and early executives left, but they stayed in close contact, investing in each other, recommending talent, and sharing resources, forming a powerful interest community.

This group is hailed as the most successful entrepreneurial community in Silicon Valley. They founded or invested in many tech companies that changed the world. Typical representatives include:

‌Elon Musk‌: Co-founder of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink;

‌Peter Thiel‌: Founder of Palantir, Partner at Founders Fund, first external investor in Facebook;

‌Reid Hoffman‌: Founder of LinkedIn;

‌Steve Chen, Chad Hurley‌: Co-founders of YouTube;

‌Max Levchin‌: Founder of fintech company Affirm;

‌Jeremy Stoppelman‌: Founder of Yelp.‌‌

Investing in companies is often about investing in people.

People with a strong entrepreneurial background are likely to achieve glory again in the future. The history of the "PayPal Mafia" after leaving PayPal is a vivid testimony.

In my view, SpaceX is a far greater company than PayPal. Employees from such a company are very likely to work miracles again.

The protagonist of the article, Hong Lide, and his fund are already investing in startups founded by former SpaceX employees.

This is also a point other investors should pay attention to when evaluating projects.

• "Hong Lide divides the aerospace industry chain into three layers:

Upstream: Construction and launch of rockets, satellites, and space stations

Midstream: Satellite control and data transmission

Downstream: Application layer, with Starlink being the most obvious case

Their fund's investment logic is to find entrepreneurs on the 'SpaceX chain' and the 'Android chain.'

The former builds supporting services along the SpaceX platform, while the latter develops independently in the market opened up by SpaceX."

When I saw this, I thought of some A-share companies that have been hotly hyped recently because they are part of SpaceX's supply chain. But they only account for a very small proportion of SpaceX's industrial chain.

The industrial chain depicted by the author is much more comprehensive, more detailed, and more specific.

In addition, the article also mentions a detail:

The Falcon 9 has reduced the cost of payload to orbit from $10,000-20k per kilogram to $3,000. And the latest data shows that the Falcon Heavy has further compressed this cost to $1,500.

The Starship's goal is to reduce the payload cost to below $100 per kilogram.

I believe that with time, the likelihood of achieving this goal is very high.

If launch costs fall to this level, leaving aside the enormous commercial value of SpaceX itself, the opportunities that a brand new physical world — the space world — can offer are sufficiently attractive.

By then, building factories and workshops in space will truly no longer be a myth.

What are the benefits of building factories and workshops in space?

Let's take some common examples:

Space is a vacuum, space has microgravity, space has an inexhaustible supply of solar energy. These conditions alone will allow humans to build factories and manufacturing processes in space that are completely different from those on Earth.

That would completely reshape all manufacturing on Earth in space and restart the industrial revolution in space.