SpaceX S-1 财务拆解：Starlink 盈利，AI 烧钱

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 194th Weekly Dose of Optimism. I’m emailing you from beautiful Utah, where I attended the Abundance Institute Gala last night and got to talk nuclear with Oklo’s Jake DeWitte and General Matter’s Scott Nolan, and where I’ll be spending today at the state’s Operation Gigawatt Conference.

It’s hard not to feel the optimism in the mountain air. When we started writing the Dose a few years back, nuclear was a controversial dream. Today, we’re heading into the Memorial Day Weekend that kicks off the summer during which multiple new reactors will go critical for the first time.

Plus, you’re about to read one of the most action-packed Doses in Dose history.

Things are moving fast, and mostly for the better. Happy Memorial Day Weekend, y’all.

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(1) Retatrutide Stuns In Phase 3 Obesity Trial

Eli Lily

Yesterday morning, Eli Lilly reported topline results from TRIUMPH-1, the Phase 3 trial for retatrutide in adults with obesity and at least one weight-related comorbidity. Here’s a summary of the results from Superpower founder and peptide enthusiast Max Marchione:

• 28.3% bodyweight lost on 12mg over 80 weeks
• 70.3 pounds on avg. or 31.9 kg
• 45.3% of patients hit 30%+ weight loss (this is bariatric surgery territory)
• 30.3% weight loss (85 lbs) at 104 weeks in higher-BMI patients
• 65.3% of 12mg patients dropped below the obesity BMI threshold
• 19% loss on 4mg over 80 weeks (47.2 lbs) with fewer dropouts than placebo (4.1% vs 4.9%)
• significant drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, non-HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and hsCRP
• no cardiac or liver signals

These are bariatric surgery results in a shot, with a bunch of freebies thrown in.

People have been excited about reta on social media for a while, but it’s still gray market, so this is a key step towards getting it to the general public, and just an astonishing set of results. People are losing 28.3% of their bodyweight, or 70 pounds, in less than two years!

For context, Zepbound (tirzepatide) tops out around 20-22% weight loss in its big trials, and the previous-generation Wegovy (semaglutide) at around 15%.

Retatrutide is the first triple hormone receptor agonist (GIP + GLP-1 + glucagon). We previewed this back in Dose #175, in our piece on grey-market peptides and Gen3 GLP-1/GIP/glucagon agonists. The author of the essay we covered, Not for Human Consumption, called these drugs “the holy grail of weight loss medications” before any of them had a Phase 3 readout. Now one of them does.

This is Lebron-level. Unbelievably hyped out of the gate, and then exceeds the hype.

As with all of these miracle drugs, there are positive side effects beyond weight loss. Retatrutide reduced osteoarthritis knee pain by an average of 75.8%, with more than 1 in 8 patients reporting they were completely free of knee pain at the end of the trial. LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. 72% of prediabetic participants returned to normal blood sugar levels. Seven more Phase 3 readouts are expected this year, including diabetes, sleep apnea, chronic back pain, and cardiorenal outcomes.

Get ready to get hot and healthy. It’s Reta Summer (in 2027).

(2) Colossal Biosciences Hatches Chick From Artificial Eggs

“Before we named the stars, before we mapped the atom, we asked ourselves an impossible question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

On Monday, Ben Lamm's Colossal Biosciences announced that it has hatched 26 healthy chicks from a fully artificial egg, an oval printed shell coated in an oxygen-permeable membrane that lets an embryo develop from poured-in yolk to pipping bird, without a biological eggshell. Researchers crack a freshly laid fertilized egg, pour the contents into the artificial shell (Colossal adds ground-up calcium back in, because the embryo eats the shell as it grows), and watch through the top window as eyes form, vasculature spreads, and, 18 days later, a chick taps its way out.

Real scientists will tell you (and MIT Tech Review's Antonio Regalado dutifully did) that growing birds outside the shell isn't new. A Japanese group hatched quail in 1998. Katsuya Obara hatched chickens under transparent plastic film in 2024. Colossal's marketing is, per Regalado, "pure Hollywood." Which is kind of fair but too clucking cynical.

Colossal’s real engineering advance is the membrane, which lets the embryo pull enough oxygen from ambient air that the system doesn't need supplemental gas. Previous shell-less methods did, and chicks tended to die. I like the version in which the chicks live, Regalado.

While this experiment was on a chicken, we have plenty of those. Colossal likes to de-extinct. Its stated goal is the 12-foot, 500-pound South Island giant moa, which laid four-liter eggs no living bird is large enough to surrogate. Colossal staff are reportedly already calling the prototype scaled-up version the "salad spinner." More immediately, the artificial egg is a tool for genetic rescue of endangered birds and, as per our discussion in Dose #186 with not boring capital portfolio company Neion Bio, a substrate for transgenic chickens producing therapeutic proteins in egg whites at a fraction of mammalian cell culture costs.

This is the first member of what Colossal calls its "exogenous development" family. Up next: artificial wombs for marsupials.

With this chicken breakthrough, it feels like humans have crossed a road.

(3) SpaceX Launches S-1

For the entirety of its existence, human civilization has lived on a single celestial body: Earth. The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale. By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.

On Wednesday, SpaeX dropped what may have been the most highly-anticipated S-1 in the history of the planet (until Anthropic files later this year). You can read it here.

Financial highlights include:

• Revenue: $4.69B (run-rate ~$19B)
• Operating loss: $(1.94B), but Adjusted EBITDA of +$1.13B
• Connectivity (Starlink) prints cash: $3.26B revenue, $1.19B operating income in just the first quarter. Its revenue is growing ~50% per year, and profitability is growing faster.
• AI is losing money for now…: $818M revenue, $(2.47B) operating loss in Q1. Capex on AI alone was $7.7B in Q1, more than Space ($1.05B) and Connectivity ($1.33B) combined, by far.
• But has the monster TAM: AI infra, consumer subscriptions, digital advertising, and enterprise applications - the AI segment - has a company-estimated TAM of $26.5 trillion, which seems small when you consider the size of the universe and the potential to spread Enterprise Applications throughout it.