SpaceX

Sierra

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 now brings in well over $10 billion a year from more than 8 million subscribers and has quietly become the part of the business that funds everything else.

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.

Sierra

Companies pay Sierra to run their customer service with AI agents instead of hiring rooms full of humans. The agent talks to your customers over chat.

It answers questions. It processes returns.

It updates subscriptions. Here is the clever part.

Sierra charges based on outcomes, not seats. Brands pay when the AI actually resolves a problem, not just for having the software installed.

That pricing is unusual. Most software charges a flat monthly fee no matter what.

Sierra only gets paid when the bot does the job.

SpaceX

In 2001 Elon Musk was already rich from selling Zip2, and the eBay deal that would hand him roughly $180 million after taxes for his PayPal stake was still a year away. Most people in that position 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.

Sierra

Bret Taylor had already done the impossible twice. He co-created Google Maps.

He later became co-CEO of Salesforce, chaired Twitter's board during the messy Elon Musk takeover, and became chairman of OpenAI in late 2023. Clay Bavor spent 18 years at Google, most recently running its Labs group.

The two friends left their big jobs in 2023 to build something together. They picked customer service on purpose.

It is the least glamorous corner of software. Their logic was simple.

Companies hate their support costs. Customers hate waiting on hold.

AI that actually resolves problems could fix both sides at once. They launched Sierra in February 2024 with $110 million from Sequoia and Benchmark.

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.

Starlink passed 8 million subscribers and well over $10 billion in annual revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Sierra

Sierra went straight for big brands, not tiny startups. SoFi, Ramp, ADT, Sonos and Brex signed up early.

By 2026 it said more than 40% of the Fortune 50 were customers. The trick was trust.

Enterprises are terrified of an AI bot going rogue and insulting a customer. So Sierra built guardrails and let each company control exactly how the agent behaves.

Bret Taylor's contacts did the rest. When the chairman of OpenAI calls a Fortune 500 CEO, they pick up.

Sierra hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in November 2025, seven quarters after launch, and $150 million by February 2026. In April 2026 it launched Ghostwriter, which builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

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.

Sierra

Everyone is building AI customer service agents right now. Decagon has raised at a multi-billion valuation.

Salesforce, ServiceNow and Intercom all shipped their own agents. Sierra is not the cheap option.

It sells premium AI to giant companies that move slowly. The bigger risk sits underneath the product.

Sierra does not make its own AI models. It rents them from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

If those model makers decide to compete directly, Sierra's edge gets thin fast, and its co-founder chairing one of them only makes that question louder. A $15.8 billion valuation on roughly $150 million in revenue leaves almost no room for a stumble.

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 — more than 8,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries, and the business that funds much of the rest.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It has flown repeatedly, including full orbital-profile flights and booster catches.

Sierra

The core product is the Sierra AI agent. It is a branded customer service bot that companies deploy on their website, app, and phone lines.

It handles the boring stuff. Order tracking.

Refunds. Password resets.

Account changes. Sierra also built its own tools to test and monitor these agents so they do not make things up.

In 2024 the company added a voice version that talks to customers on the phone. In April 2026 it added Ghostwriter, a tool that builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

The whole pitch is one AI agent that carries your brand's name and never sleeps.

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)

Sierra

Sequoia Capital and Benchmark wrote the first checks at launch in February 2024, $110 million between them. Greenoaks Capital then led both the $175 million round in 2024 and the $350 million round in September 2025.

In May 2026 Tiger Global and Google's GV led a $950 million round at a $15.8 billion valuation, with Benchmark, Sequoia and Greenoaks back in. That takes total funding to about $1.6 billion.

That is partly the product and partly Bret Taylor. Investors bet on founders who have already built billion-dollar things.