SpaceX has raised $1.9 billion in new funding to add to the 2020 records of Elon Musk. Interest in SpaceX rockets has surged since the successful trip of the Dragon Crew to space, and the company now has oversubscription of nearly $2 billion.

Bloomberg reported the funding earlier, citing sources familiar with the matter. The new funding put SpaceX valuation at $46 billion.

Fidelity Investments, a brokerage company was reported by Bloomberg as the one of the biggest participants in the latest funding.

The development followed the multi-billion military space contract the company co-won with United Launch Alliance (ULA), early in the month. CNBC reported that the US Air Force awarded the rocket builders ULA and SpaceX contracts to launch national security missions for five years starting in 2022.

SpaceX and Tesla have been winning against other giants in space and automobile business, and Elon Musk is basking on the glory. Musk recently became the fifth richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $86.5 billion, according to Forbes.

However, it’s Tesla that recorded the surge that pushed Musk up the ladder of world billionaires amidst the growth recorded in the space business. Apart from the space shuttle, Musk has been shooting up internet satellites through the Starlink, and that too, has ignited a lot of interest.

CNBC reported that there are over 700,000 people demanding the Starlink satellite broadband service in the US alone. “SpaceX seeks to increase the number of fixed earth stations authorized under this blanket license from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000,” the company said in an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). 

SpaceX was awarded the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) contract with Boeing, worth $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion respectively, to build a new spaceflight for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), back in 2010.

But now, as Forbes noted, Musk isn’t the only one in the space business. The world richest man, Jeff Bezos has joined the race for satellite internet network with the recent launch of Amazon’s satellite broadband.

While the satellite internet is heating up between the two entrepreneurs, Musk is stepping ahead with SpaceX’s commercial space trips that are designed to offer transport services at about $50 million per passenger.

Analysts said the progress in the space businesses will instigate investors’ interest in the space economy.

“Led by a string of remarkable feats by SpaceX, we are fielding a pace of incoming investor interest in the space economy on a level that may even exceed the autonomous car frenzy of 2016/2017,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a recent note.

SpaceX is working on a bigger spacecraft, the starship to accommodate more people in the future. The Starship vehicle is expected to accommodate up to 100 passengers.

The company is planning to add it to two other vehicles in its Artemis program billed to commence Moon trips in 2024. And as part of its contract with NASA, SpaceX will continue to deliver astronauts to the ISS, increasing the number of passengers up to four in coming months.

According to Forbes, the global space economy is expected to be worth at least $1.1 trillion in 2040, if the current trend is sustained.

If Nollywood had produced a movie with a title “$25 Covid-19 Palliatives for Lawyers”, I might have said that it was not possible. But it seems, anything is possible these days in Nigeria. Yes, a ‘total of 5,839 lawyers have started receiving N10,000 as “their share of the COVID-19 pandemic relief,” Paul Usoro, the president of the Nigerian Bar Association has said’. This initiative was funded by mostly senior lawyers in the nation. It is my hope that our lawyers are not that impoverished to have specifically filled forms for $25!

“These 5,839 younger colleagues constitute the first batch of the 1-4 years Post-Call young-lawyer recipients of these relief funds,” said Mr Usoro.

“I have already received directly and through third parties, including Branch Chairmen, messages of appreciation from the palliatives’ beneficiaries.”

Mr Usoro said the plan is to ensure that all the eligible lawyers receive their share of the relief fund not later than next week, the week of the NBA annual general conference.

“The slight delay in paying everyone is because we have had issues with the bank details of some of the eligible beneficiaries; these are being sorted out by the NBA National Secretariat directly with the lawyers.

“We also had a number of duplicated applications and unqualified applications (mainly lawyers who are overage including 2005 and 2008 Post-Call lawyers). These unqualified lawyers are being weeded out from the list of beneficiaries in order to share the palliatives only to the eligible lawyers i.e 1-4 years Post-Call lawyers.”

“Special thanks also go to the members of the NBA Welfare Committee for their selfless services. Apart from the fact that most of them also donated generously to the fund, none of the SAN members of the Committee accepted or asked for any allowance whatsoever for their Committee assignment.”

It is coming together: China will have to make a call on Apple or even Microsoft as the U.S. continues to cage Huawei. The U.S. government has closed the loophole which has allowed Huawei to get chip supplies for its business. As that happens, the rumored interest from Microsoft and Twitter for TikTok has now included Oracle, the enterprise software giant. The U.S.  had ordered TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell the app in 90 days from Aug. 14.

The Trump’s administration has announced further ‘semiconductor restriction’ that has added nails to Huawei’s coffin.

On Monday, the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in the Department of Commerce announced that the embattled Chinese company and its non-US affiliates on the Entity List have been restricted access to items produced domestically and abroad from US technology and software.

In addition, BIS added another 38 Huawei affiliates to the Entity List, which imposes a license requirement for all items subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and modified four existing Huawei Entity List entries.

The question now is for how long would China wait before it returns fire. China has options but China would also be smart to just chill as the risk is very high for the country.  If it retaliates, the US could wipe out the values of all Chinese listed companies in the country, causing massive wealth destruction for Chinese. I personally do think that is the destination for Trump if he wins reelection.

How would China respond? Ban Microsoft Windows or Apple iPhone? Not really because those would be own-goals to China. For every Windows sold, China makes money because the machines which power Windows are largely assembled in China for Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. Of course, despite the latest re-localization, China remains the lab for assembling Apple products. I think China will just chill – it has met an unpredictable American leader that cannot be modeled by any communist party algorithm. That would be wisdom because any nonsense move, Trump can delist all Chinese companies in Wall Street!

My prediction is that China will not do anything but just hope that Trump loses the election; it needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs it. Yes, if the U.S. extends the Huawei ban to all Chinese technology firms, the sector will freeze in China and the country would not want that. Cadence and Synopsys control the global market for advanced CAD tools for analog chip design at more than 99%, especially for high end chip designs. While Mentor, Magma and others register on the chart, Cadence is the leader. Interestingly, the top five players are Americans. The implication is that this U.S.-China confrontation is asymmetric at the core technology layer.

Uber and Lyft could be in real trouble, pushing them to come together as one company. I have expected them to become one company by next year unless something dramatic happens.

In July 2017, I wrote why Uber and Lyft will merge. I had put the date as 2022. On LinkedIn, the call was challenged: many believed that antitrust/competition regulators would not allow that. Of course, I gave a reason: these pairs battled until they went to parties – Elance/Odesk (now UpWork),  Groupon / LivingSocial,  Sirius / XM, Rover / DogVacay, and DraftKings/FanDuel. I did not see any core strategic advantage in Uber and Lyft that would keep them profitably sustainable, as they battled each other, destroying value in the process.

According to Fortune, the companies may temporarily shut down their ride-hailing services in California as soon as this week.

The move depends on whether a state judge grants them an appeal or more time to reclassify their drivers from contractors to employees, as has been required by law since January. If they lose or if no ruling is made by Thursday, the services said they would go dark in the state until they have the systems in place to pay and track drivers as employees. The services say they’re not ready for the switch, even though they’ve had almost a year to prepare.

“At first I thought this was an empty threat,” said Mark Shmulik, an analyst at brokerage firm AB Bernstein. “But assuming appeals court says ‘no’, I actually do believe Uber and Lyft will shut down temporarily in California.”

[…]

If voters don’t pass Prop 22, Uber and Lyft likely would pull out of rural areas, which typically have low demand, and raise prices in the state’s urban areas to offset the extra costs. Uber may also try to push more drivers to work for both its rides and food delivery services to reduce costs, Shmulik said.

The risk for these two companies is simple: if California makes this happen, the probability of other states pushing for the same ordinance goes high. And if that scales across America, the business model of Uber and Lyft collapses.