from launching rockets to launching what could be the biggest IPO in history.
The critical breakthrough that's needed for us to become a space-bearing civilization is to make space travel like air travel.
Elon has always run the engine of this company at the red line.
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
SpaceX has made a confidential filing for an initial public offering a year on.
We look back on the day Donald Trump tariffed the world and why Polaroid is making a comeback in a digital age.
But first we have to talk about Blue Owl Capital, and if you haven't heard of it, that's okay, because it's not a bank for the everyday person.
It's a private credit bank where firms lend directly to businesses outside the traditional systems.
The thing is, its investors are trying to pull billions of dollars out of Blue Owl.
So now it's limiting how much money they can take out.
Kerry Leahy is an economist at Columbia University in New York.
Kerry, who are they?
Sorry for the pun.
Can you explain what Blue Owl is?
I don't know if I did a very good explainer there.
And who invests?
Well, it is not a bank.
And by a bank.
You define it as an institution that has insured deposits and has a backstop from the Fed as a lender of last resort.
So they are independent.
They are prone to the vagaries of the marketplace and their investor base.
And that's why they're referred to as a non-bank.
They tend to invest in credits that are less than optimal.
So they're much like a junk bond fund in the regard of what they actually lend to.
And while they get a lot of lending through equity and their partners, they do receive some money increasingly from retail investors.
And one of the difficulties they run into is that retail investors have been unhappy with their performance of the fund and have demanded to get their money back.
And they put caps on that.
So the amount of money people can get from the fund is severely limited.
And most investors in the US and the retail level expect to get instant gratification, which they are not getting from retail banks in this sector.
Now, how typical is it for funds like this to limit withdrawals?
It's fairly typical.
They take the page from the venture capital industry, where you're locked in maybe not for 9, 10 or 11 years, but you've been locked in for quite some period of time.
And I would think in general you can't really get your money very easily unless you are willing to wait about three to six months.
Those loans are not easily tradable.
Would it be right to say it's like trying to sell a house in a hurry?
Absolutely.
The word illiquid becomes very prevalent in these kind of marketplace.
And these are institutions who are getting the money from private credit and private finance.
They couldn't get it easily and they're not considered to be high-quality credits, and they're a wide variety of industries and they're packaged together and then they're sold to investors.
So it's really a kind of illiquid asset, and of course it gets even more illiquid when the markets worry about spillover effects.
Well, do you think this is an isolated issue with one firm or is it something that could spread?
It's certainly not isolated with one firm.
It certainly could spread.
There is a limit to how bad the run could be, because there's a limit to how much funds you can take out.
But what people are particularly worried about is the other half of the equation, which is the so-called spillover effect.
And that could be quite large.
And to follow the words of Jamie Dimon.
He says when you see one cockroach, you may end up seeing some more.
And I think that's what the worry is in the marketplace is that, while this is necessarily by itself a big event, it's like subprime.
It's only 1% or 2% of the total market, but that was enough to set things afire.
Yeah, we don't like cockroaches.
All right, let's move on.
Let's get the sound of a SpaceX liftoff.
3, 2, 1, ignition.
That was back in 2025 and now it's potentially going to take off on the stock market too.
On Wednesday, it made a filing for an initial IPO, an initial public offering which would let its shares be traded on the stock market.
The value of SpaceX is expected to surpass $1 trillion once it goes public.
Dr Greg Autry is the Associate Provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy at the University of Central Florida and he says investor interest in the space economy is already building.
Of course, you've got the satellite building with Starlink, which has been an amazing product in itself.
That, I think, opens the possibility for SpaceX, who's now basically the world's largest satellite manufacturer, to do a variety of other satellites.
Elon's clearly talked about data centers in space, but there's no reason that he couldn't build constellations for other people, should they choose to make that decision or go into Earth imaging and other profitable areas of satellites themselves.
There's also a lot of opportunities for service.
Starlink, of course, is a communication service in addition to being a satellite constellation.
Then, of course, they chose to do the merger with XAI, which surprised even me, I think.
But I think it's clear that this is going to be an everything company to some extent.
Now, you spent years studying the business of space.
What has SpaceX done differently that's allowed it to dominate in this sector?
First of all, just be super ambitious, super assertive.
And Elon has always run the engine of this company at the red line.
Several times he's come close to blowing up and he essentially has no fear, but he executes with brilliant business strategy and drives his people to work harder than anybody else in any other industry.
So if the IPO goes ahead, what does that change about how space is financed?
How big of a moment is this for the commercial space industry?
I can tell you it's already a big deal.
I spend a great deal of my time working with investors who are either in the commercial space industry or going and talking in London and or New York to people who are top level investment bankers and family fund managers and such who have avoided space.
But I talked to them for other reasons and they were previously not interested in space.
But the last set of meetings I've had in London and New York in the last month they were very interested in space.
SpaceX relies heavily on NASA and defence contracts, but what happens when a company like that is also answerable to public shareholders?
Does that make things a bit more difficult?
Yeah, well, they are the largest commercial launch provider in the world.
So if a company from Malaysia or Israel or Europe decides they want to launch a satellite, there's a better than 50 chance they're going on a SpaceX launch anyway.
And that isn't U.S. government business.
The US government certainly helped them as an anchor customer and remains their largest single customer, as well as being the largest single customer of the space industry globally.
So I don't think that the IPO changes that relationship, as much as it will force strictures on the company regarding disclosures.
We'll know a lot more about which of their product lines make money and which don't.
And perhaps we'll figure out for sure whether things like rocket reusability are giving them the big margins that I personally think they are, because they've never passed on the benefit of that to the consumer.
Now, you mentioned this exciting talk really about space based data infrastructure.
You've got satellites, even data centers.
How realistic is that, though?
Well, you could dismiss it.
And there are a lot of smart people in the space industry who are, in fact, dismissing.
The data center idea is impractical, particularly involving the cooling of the data centers.
But many of those are the same people that dismissed everything else that Elon has done in the past.
And in that case, it's not just Musk.
You've got Bezos.
You've got Eric Schmidt from Google going all in on the space data center.
So far be it from me to bet against Bezos, Schmidt, and Musk.
Dr. Greg Autry there.
With me now, Ben Tarnoff, co-author of Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed.
Ben, thanks for joining us.
I really like the book name.
Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Now we just heard a very optimistic take on SpaceX's growth there, but should we cast a critical eye on this?
Because how should we understand SpaceX when it comes to the broader Musk ecosystem?
Well, I think what's interesting about SpaceX is the extent to which the revenue model increasingly relies on Starlink.
When you look at Starlink, the satellite internet service that SpaceX operates, They account for between 50 and 80 of the revenue of SpaceX and nearly all of its revenue growth.
So this upcoming IPO, which the latest reports actually suggest that SpaceX could seek a valuation of more than 2 trillion, which is an extraordinary number,
Really, the only path to fulfilling that kind of valuation runs through Starlink.
If SpaceX goes public, what does that mean when you have a strategically important company that's got the satellites, got defense, has got communications and they're all effectively controlled by one man, Elon Musk?
Well yeah, I mean that's already the case, in particular, when you think about the importance of a company like SpaceX to modern militaries and the role that Starlink plays, particularly in warfare as it's waged now.
When you think about the importance of drones, that has really increased since the Ukrainian conflict.
Starlink is actually quite integral to the use of drones because it's required for navigation and guidance.
So, I mean, going public Musk will retain control over the company.
They will probably pursue a so-called dual class share structure in which he retains voting shares.
But being a publicly traded company, his power will be diluted somewhat.
He'll be accountable for certain reporting requirements and so forth.
Yeah, it'll bring more transparency to the company, won't it?
Certainly.
And this is historically why he has not liked being publicly traded company.
I mean Tesla famously, is a publicly traded company, but he does it when he has to, but it's not his preference from a managerial perspective.
So why now?
Well, there are a couple narratives here.
I mean, I think one obvious one to mention is that Musk is very interested in AI as a technology.
This has long been the case.
He co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman back in the mid 2010s.
And Musk has his own AI company, XAI, which was folded into SpaceX, in fact, earlier this year.
But it is widely considered to be a laggard in the AI race.
It lags behind SpaceX. the top model creators like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
It's burning about a billion dollars a month trying to catch up.
So one way to understand the IPO of SpaceX is that it will unleash more capital for Musk to pursue his AI ambitions.
All right, really interesting.
Ben Tarnoff, co-author of Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Kerry Leahy is still with us.
Have you marked your calendar for an IPO date, Kerry?
I would say they're going to be able to get something from the SEC.
They hope within about a week to two weeks.
So it'll be coming soon.
A lot of salesmanship is going to be going on.
Yeah, for sure.
We also had some numbers out from Tesla today.
Sales are up, but some expected better.
Some also say it's the worst sales quarter in years.
What did you make of it?
Well, the sales were up, but the expectations were something better than that based on the price action.
So there's still an industry that's caught twixtions between where it's had difficulty introducing new models, which is a hallmark of the market automobile industry, not necessarily the electronics or tech industry.
But then again, if we're going to be living with 100 a barrel oil, that would be very good for any EV and he's got one of the more popular ones.
So I think the market was looking for more.
They didn't get it and I think all they can really hope for right now is just wait to see if something internally can happen, meaning they get a popular new model or higher oil prices start building interest in the product again.
Yeah, that would be good, actually, not having to go to the pump these days.
It's so expensive at the pump.
Gary Leahy, thank you.
Stay right there.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.
Waiting for a long time.
President Trump declared his so-called Liberation Day by introducing sweeping tariffs across the world, kickstarting huge changes in global trade and turbulence on stock markets.
Mr Trump said tariffs raised tens of billions for the US economy.
But the US Supreme Court recently ruled those specific ones were illegal.
The president responded by announcing a new tariff regime.
We spoke to people from the Democrat-leaning city of Gainesville in Florida, a traditionally Republican state.
We need the tariffs.
It's all going to come together.
I think he is trying to run the country like a corporation or a business, and what makes sense for a corporation or a business to make profit doesn't make sense for people in a country.
He's successful because he's a businessman.
And I think economically, when you give him time, he's still got two and a half years to go.
Every country imposes much higher tariffs on us than we do on them.
Do your business here.
Make your things in America.
Now Kerry.
Today, Donald Trump's administration brought in new, up to 100 tariffs on some imported drugs.
Any shifts in the pharmaceutical market from that?
Not really.
Basically, I think the industry thinks that Trump, given his reputation, is going to use that threat as a lever to get people to the bargaining table.
And then additionally, there's probably going to be, as has been in the past and in this and other industries, substantial exemptions.
So it isn't abundantly clear that the tariffs will actually take hold, and they may not at all if firms come to the table and cut their prices.
Because, going into a midterm election year where oil prices are definitely up, gasoline and heating oil prices are going to be sky high, as are natural gas.
You don't want to have another reason to worry about inflation.
And if you makes the average individual's drug bill goes up by another 5% or 10%.
That's just not good news for his party come November.
Do financial markets react to tariffs anymore?
Not as much as you would have thought because, in part, one of the reasons why people worried about a 30 percent effective tariff rate is probably closer to 12 percent now.
Well, that's significant compared to history, where it was closer to one or two percent five years ago.
It's just not giving you any certainty.
All he's doing with trade now is creating uncertainty and probably a lot of extra work by firms trying to figure out all the rules.
All right, Kerry Leahy, economist at Columbia University in New York.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Now in a court case.
Earlier this week, Meta and Google were found liable for harming the mental health of one of their younger users and deliberately making their platforms addictive.
The BBC's Gideon Long has been exploring if social media companies should and can be brought into line.
This is a landmark moment.
It will reverberate.
I'll tell you this if the jury had returned to know, the champagne corks would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta.
Lawyer, Mark Lanier, talking outside the courthouse following last week's verdict in the case involving Kayleigh, a 20-year-old woman, and Meta and Google.
It's been described as a tobacco moment for big tech, similar to when cigarette companies were forced to acknowledge their products were harmful.
Meta and Google deny the accusations against them and have said they will appeal.
The court case dealt specifically with Kayleigh, who said that she became addicted to social media platforms as a child and that it seriously impacted her mental health.
But hers is just one case, and it's still not clear that social media impacts all young people negatively or that the negatives aren't outweighed by positives.
Victoria Goodyear is a Professor of Physical Activity, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
It's not clear cut so we don't have a consistent pattern in the evidence that basically says that it causes harm or it promotes benefits.
At a population level, the evidence doesn't support that there is definite or definitive harm.
But individual level cases.
There is some evidence and the challenge is, if we wait for better evidence, this could also cause harm.
And we've seen countries around the world, starting with Australia, but many other countries are now following suit, saying that they are going to ban social media platforms for young people.
Do you think the evidence is there to support that kind of policy?
Not yet.
I don't think the evidence is there yet.
If blanket bans aren't the answer, then what is?
Clara Chapaz is France's ambassador for tech and artificial intelligence.
She's working closely with President Emmanuel Macron on implementing a French social media ban for under-15s, but also on encouraging companies to make practical changes to their platforms.
The European Commission has started an inquiry on TikTok infinite scroll saying that this fails to protect minors.
As a result of that, TikTok is acting and changing their functionalities.
So each company needs to go and assess what are the risks that I'm causing to underage kids.
And what are the specific reforms and regulations that you think are needed to bring big tech into line?
Well, I think the first thing is the below 15 ban.
Why?
Because that gives everyone families, children themselves, teachers a simple rule whereby they can say OK, I know, this product is bad for a kid under a certain age.
With thousands of cases against big tech already filed in US courts and at least 30 countries considering bans on social media for teenagers like Australia's, it does seem that change is coming.
Laurie Schott's 18-year-old daughter, Anna Lee, took her own life in 2020, and Laurie blames social media for making her daughter feel inadequate about the way she looked.
When the verdict came out in Kayleigh's case, Laurie was outside the court and had this message for everyone involved
Let's fix this.
Big Tech, us.
Let's make this world a better place.
But parents, we need you to join in with us because it stops today.
Big Tech, your gig is over.
That reporting by Gideon Long.
Now, when Polaroid collapsed in the early 2000s, it looked like the end of instant photography.
It was bankrupt, production halted and its last factory was abandoned.
But a group of enthusiasts stepped in launching the impossible product project, now reborn as Polaroid.
So, in an age of smartphones and AI generated images, why go back to something slower, more expensive and more limited?
I put that to Polaroid's CEO, Dan Dosa.
Everything was gone.
The chemistry for the film was gone.
The machinery was gone.
Distribution channels were gone.
The company was shut down.
So it was This impossible project tends the name of resurrecting it all.
Twelve years later, we are a thriving company selling films in every continent of the world.
Making cameras, we'll sell about one and a half million cameras this year.
All of that from this start point of being a bankrupt company.
And we're in a situation now where everybody's talking about this analogue revival, people going back to older technologies and wanting to stay away from their phones.
So what are you seeing in terms of demand?
What are you seeing in the market right now?
The market is growing.
You know, I think people sort of saw it as a trend, maybe even a short term trend.
What's become apparent and we talk to a lot of consumers and we know it from our sales data as well is that this is more of a permanent need to sort of balance the over digitized world that we live in.
And just to be clear, we're not anti-digital in any way, shape or form as a company.
We obviously exist. embrace digital in many ways to give the best consumer experience that we can.
But there's this need that has emerged to find things to do where you can put your phone down, put your tablet down and click out of social media and go and do something and create something and make something and have an experience.
And the other great thing about it, of course, is that the world continues to get more digital, as we all know, and the latest innovations, iteration of that seems to be ai and counter-intuitively almost.
As the world gets more digital, there's more need for things like polaroid and, by the way you know, it's not just polaroid, it's it's board games and it's it's real books, and it's stationary and notepads and things to write on, and it's uh records, of course, vinyl and, and so a lot of these Categories, ourselves included, instant photography included is a sort of balancing in this over digitized world.
And that's what we're seeing.
And it's what's driving the market into very, very strong growth.
So who's buying these cameras today and what demographics are you targeting?
The users that we've had kind of consistently through, certainly from when we resurrected the business, is our photographers and artists, and we continue to collaborate with contemporary artists and photographers around the world and it's a huge part of our business.
The audience that's emerged perhaps over the last five, six, seven years is this younger audience.
This is not our research.
This is sort of more public domain research.
But we know that, you know, two thirds of Gen Z are actively trying to manage their screen time.
I'm going to put my devil's advocate hat on just for a minute, just because I know some people.
They do question this whole analog revival, because a lot of people they take a Polaroid photo and then immediately they're going to post it on Instagram or whatever social media platform they use.
So the analogue object essentially becomes the digital content.
So do you think that that really changes the trend?
Do you think that that's people just maybe showing off for social media?
I like that.
I'm not sure if that's the right answer.
I'm fine.
We're fine with that, I think, as a company.
You know the fact that you take the time to pick up the camera, to walk outside to pose a shot, to take a shot, and it's so much more of a real life ritual, of something which takes you away from your phone for five minutes or an hour or a couple of hours, if you kind of go out on a walk to take some good photos and then, you know, by all means come back and share those photos.
I think We very much.
As I said, we're not anti-digital in any way and we're just trying to sort of help people to take a break from digital and do something different other than look at a screen.
So I think I'd much rather people shared a...
Polaroid picture that they've taken out in the wild, as it were, versus sharing something that they just managed to kind of screenshot from their phone, or something like that.
I think we're not against that at all.
I think we're just trying to provide that balance.
I wonder what that means for competition for you, because obviously you've got the likes of Fujifilm's Instax cameras.
Would you say that that market is going to get maybe even new competition coming into the market instead of certain brands who've been around for a long time?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, as you say, Fuji and Instax is in the category.
We truly respect them as a company.
They're a great company.
They have a very different product to us.
It's a much more sort of almost digitized version of what we do.
There's a very specific Polaroid aesthetic.
Obviously, Polaroid is the original instant photography brand, which has allowed us to kind of pick up some of the innovation from before and be ahead of the game, we think, when it comes to the aesthetic look of our photographs and the way that our hardware works, and we're working really hard on innovation.
I don't either dismiss the fact that people will come in, nor are we particularly, of course we're worried about it from a commercial perspective, but i think it's positive, i think, the fact that the category is growing into a very substantial category, and you see it when you walk through retailers.
Now retailers start to focus on instant photography and our distribution has continued to grow through all sorts of different retail channels.
But Where do you think the most lucrative part of the company is at the moment?
Does it come from the cameras themselves, the film or maybe the accessories that go with them?
We're really focused on the film and the hardware and making them better and better and better.
And I think we've had incredible success at that.
We're working already on our next generation of film.
We're on our sort of third generation, soon to launch fourth generation of cameras.
Just that we're clear the investments that we're making and the investments that we have made over the last 10-12 years this has not been a hugely lucrative business thus far and of course we're not saying that we're not commercially minded.
But we're much more focused on our company purpose and enabling consumers to take this break from digital than we are on thinking too much about how lucrative the business can be in the future.
I mean Polaroid used to sell enormous quantities of film in the 90s, but obviously today the landscape is very different.
As you said,
But do you ever think that that could get back to that or close to it?
We're investing to the kind of market demand.
We've been in a strange situation, certainly in my career, where demand has outstripped supply substantially over the last few years.
In other words, our business has grown much faster than we had predicted.
So we've been short of product and we're investing to solve that.
And we'll have solved that actually in the next six months.
We're actually building our first business. new machines as a company for 50 years.
So it's a really, really fun time to be able to do that and to be able to invest for that growth curve.
That was the Chief Executive of Polaroid, Dan Dosa.
And that is it from World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
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I'm Leanna Byrne.
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