Gavin Baker owned 15% of Nvidia and 10% of Tesla sub-$2 billion. His biggest regret won't be either. It'll be the price you'll pay for SpaceX after the IPO.
"A company like this comes once in your career. Thank God I took it. Plenty of people didn't."
His analog: British East India Company. Empire scale, not tech scale.
The setup:
- 10,000 SpaceX employees could have sold every 6 months for a decade
- Almost nobody did
- Secondary pricing is a decade underpriced
Baker on the Elon-Anthropic partnership: "Four months ago it didn't exist. Then it made sense. Everyone has a price."
Incumbents realign around SpaceX gravity when it moves.
The IPO doesn't price the company. It prices the last window.
Gavin Baker: "The Magnificent 7 will go from $10-12 trillion to $50-100 trillion. But one or two of them will go extinct."
His foundation-model survival list is short:
- Google — search-plus-Gemini flywheel
- Meta — Llama + ad-revenue self-funding
- xAI — X + Tesla data footprint
Anthropic, OpenAI, everyone else — Baker treats them as commoditized.
His FOMO warning: "Application SaaS is done. If you went all-in on crypto and SaaS in 2021, don't repeat the trade."
On AGI: "Elon says 3 years. I say 5 is safer."
On regulation: "The leading labs weaponized fear of China. There's going to be no regulation."
The math he keeps quoting: $12T → $100T is 8x. But 1-2 die means winners take 30-40% of the total, not 14%.
Baker's frame: no regulation + AGI in 5 years + Mag 7 8x = biggest enterprise-value transfer in market history is happening right now.