Rocket Lab (RKLB) gets called "the next SpaceX" because it builds rockets. What if SpaceX's first earnings showed that rockets are not its rainmaker?

🛰️ Less rocket, more internet: SpaceX's launch business was just 12% of its revenue. Starlink was 55%.

📊 Rocket Lab vs SpaceX: Rocket Lab has a comparable price-to-sales ratio to SpaceX.

🔭 Is it building its own Starlink?: Space Systems is now two-thirds of Rocket Lab's revenue.

Rocket Lab (RKLB) reports tonight, and a big part of its appeal comes down to being "the next SpaceX". However, SpaceX (SPCX) just filed its first quarterly results ever, and it gutted the assumption underneath that idea.

Launching rockets, the thing SpaceX is famous for and the thing Rocket Lab mostly does, was its smallest segment, about US$960 million of a US$7.8 billion quarter, barely 12%. The real engine was Starlink, the satellite-internet subscription business, at US$4.3 billion and 12 million paying customers.

So the "next SpaceX" framing may be aimed at the wrong half of the model. Rocket Lab's most-hyped catalyst tonight is Neutron, a bigger rocket that hasn't flown yet, which doubles down on the least valuable part of what makes SpaceX, well… SpaceX. Yet it trades at a similar sales multiple, without a Starlink to justify it.

Are rockets destined to be the least valuable part of the space industry?

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mitchell_lawler

11h

The smartphone and the smartwatch were both supposed to unwind the mechanical watch. So why has Seiko (TSE:8050) roughly quadrupled in a year?

⌚ The cultural shift: Why Gen Z is slapping mechanical watches onto their wrists in 2026.

📊 Tick, tick, boom: Seiko Group has benefited as Grand Seiko goes global.

I'm a bit of a tech guy. When Apple launched its first watch in 2015, I thought it was a marvel and had to have one, and I've worn a few iterations since. So it surprised even me when I slowly found myself drawn to mechanical watches. They can't track my sleep, push a notification, or tell me the UV index, but that's kind of the point.

Recently I bought an entry-level Seiko, and I enjoy it for reasons that have nothing to do with function. Turns out I'm not alone. This thing was made obsolete multiple times: first by quartz, then by the smartphone, and last by the smartwatch. And yet Seiko has roughly quadrupled in about a year, with Grand Seiko outgrowing the big Swiss names among buyers in their 20s and 30s.

There’s a lesson in this, and it isn't "old things come back." It's timing of a narrative. Somewhere along the way the watch stopped being a way to tell the time and became a way to say something. That shift in what it means happened years before the market stopped pricing it as a relic. That gap, between a thing earning a new kind of value and the crowd still writing it off as a fossil, is paydirt for investors. By the time "actually, it's back" is the norm, the re-rating has already happened.

What's being written off as a relic today that you think has already found its new purpose?

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mitchell_lawler

Cheese is collateral in Italy, $350 million of it, and a heatwave is eating into the value. Which businesses are built for a warmer world?

🧀 Not gouda: An Italian bank holds over US$350 million in Parmesan as collateral. Heat just pushed its energy bill up 30%.

❄️ Setting the temp: The European suppliers that gain as the continent is forced to adapt.

💰 Valuing a cool story: How John_Eric weighs up a cooling story against a valuation.

In the hills of Emilia-Romagna, a bank called Credito Emiliano, or Credem, keeps more than half a million wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano in its vaults, worth more than US$350 million. Not as a quirk, as loan collateral, and it has lent against aging cheese since 1953. This summer, Europe's record heat turned that vault into a problem. Holding the wheels at the right temperature pushed the bank's daily energy use up about 30%.

Extreme heat used to be a footnote you skipped in the outlook. Now it lands in hard numbers, energy bills, harvest dates, crop yields, insurance claims, and it creates real winners, the companies selling the world its escape from the heat. But the catch is the more obvious the demand, the more likely the price already reflects it. So the work isn't noticing that heat matters. It's finding where the market hasn't priced it in yet.

Which company do you think is best built for a warmer world, and is the market already paying for it?

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mitchell_lawler