SpaceX

Anduril

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Anduril

Anduril flips the traditional defense business model. Instead of cost-plus contracts where the government pays for development, Anduril invests its own capital in R&D and sells finished products.

This means they own the intellectual property and can sell the same platform to multiple customers — the US military, allied nations, and potentially commercial clients.

Revenue comes from hardware sales (drones, autonomous vehicles, sensor towers), software licensing (the Lattice operating system), and service contracts for deployment and maintenance. The company has won contracts with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, US Special Operations Command, and allied militaries including the UK and Australia.

The venture-funded approach lets them move at startup speed. While Lockheed might take 7 years to develop a new system, Anduril can prototype in months and iterate based on field feedback.

The trade-off is massive upfront investment — they've raised $3.7 billion in venture capital to fund this approach.

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Anduril

Palmer Luckey was already famous — and controversial — before Anduril. He founded Oculus VR at 18, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion at 21, and then was fired in 2017 after a political donation scandal.

He was 24 years old, already worth hundreds of millions, and suddenly had nothing to do.

Luckey teamed up with Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner who had previously worked at Palantir and as a member of the Trump transition team's Department of Defense group. They saw the same problem from different angles: the US military was spending billions on outdated technology from legacy contractors (Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing) while China was rapidly modernizing.

The Pentagon's procurement process was broken — it took 10-15 years and billions of dollars to develop and deploy new weapons systems.

Anduril was founded in mid-2017 with a radical approach: build the technology first with venture capital, then sell finished products to the government. Traditional defense contractors get cost-plus contracts — they bill the government for development costs plus a margin, which incentivizes slow development and cost overruns.

Anduril said: we'll fund our own R&D, build the product, and sell it off the shelf. If it doesn't work, we eat the cost.

The name comes from the reforged sword of Aragorn in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — a weapon that was broken and made new.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Anduril

Anduril's growth strategy is classic disruption — enter at the low end of the market with cheaper, faster products and expand upward. They started with border security (relatively low-stakes) and moved into counter-drone systems (active combat relevant), then into autonomous vehicles and munitions (core defense).

International sales are a major growth vector. Anduril has contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence, the Australian Defence Force, and other Five Eyes allies.

The AUKUS defense pact between the US, UK, and Australia specifically calls for technology sharing in areas where Anduril specializes.

The Ukraine war was an inflection point. It demonstrated that small, cheap, autonomous drones could be decisive in modern warfare — exactly the kind of systems Anduril builds.

Suddenly, every military in the world wanted what Anduril was selling, and wanted it fast. The company's order backlog reportedly exceeds $10 billion.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Anduril

The ethical debate around autonomous weapons is constant and unavoidable. Anduril builds systems that can identify and engage targets with varying degrees of human oversight.

Critics argue this is a step toward fully autonomous killing machines. Anduril maintains that a human is always "in the loop" for lethal decisions, but the line between "in the loop" and "on the loop" (supervising but not directly controlling) is blurry.

Recruiting is both an advantage and a challenge. Anduril pays Silicon Valley salaries and offers startup equity, which attracts top engineers who might never consider working for Raytheon.

But some engineers refuse to work on weapons systems on principle. Google famously dropped Project Maven (a Pentagon AI contract) after employee protests.

Anduril leans into the controversy — they explicitly look for people who are comfortable building defense technology.

Scaling manufacturing is the next hurdle. Software companies scale effortlessly.

Hardware companies that build drones, missiles, and autonomous vehicles need factories, supply chains, and quality control at defense-grade standards. Anduril is building a massive manufacturing facility to produce thousands of autonomous systems, but transitioning from prototype to mass production is where many defense startups fail.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Anduril

Lattice — an AI-powered operating system that fuses sensor data from multiple sources into a single real-time picture of the battlefield. Think of it as the central nervous system that connects all of Anduril's hardware.

Ghost — a family of small autonomous aircraft (drones) designed for surveillance, electronic warfare, and strike missions. Ranging from handheld to medium-altitude.

Anvil — an autonomous counter-drone system that physically intercepts enemy drones by ramming into them mid-air. Yes, a kamikaze drone that kills other drones.

Sentry Tower — autonomous surveillance towers originally deployed on the US-Mexico border for border security, using AI to detect and classify objects and people. Altius — a family of tube-launched autonomous munitions that can loiter over an area and strike targets with precision.

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)

Anduril

Andreessen Horowitz has been the most prominent backer, leading multiple rounds. Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm) invested early — Trae Stephens was a Founders Fund partner before co-founding Anduril.

General Catalyst, Valor Equity Partners, and 8VC (Joe Lonsdale, another Palantir co-founder) also invested. The Series F in 2024 valued the company at $14 billion.

Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and Sands Capital participated in later rounds.