TheRealSalDePaol🅰️@DepaolaSal
Let me talk about instant gratification and why it's destroying retail investors in $ASTS and honestly in life in general.
We live in a world where people can't wait for anything. Amazon same day delivery. DoorDash in 30 minutes. TikTok in 15 second clips. Swipe left, swipe right. Next. Next. Next. And people have taken that same energy into investing and it is genuinely one of the most destructive things I've ever watched happen in real time.
Here's what's wild to me. AST SpaceMobile went from $2 to $130. Let that sink in. $2 to $130. And now it's sitting at $74 and people are acting like the company is failing. You bought at $2 and you're complaining at $74? That's a 37x return and you're on X posting about how management lies and misses timelines? Be serious.
But let's talk about those timelines because this is where people really expose how little they understand about engineering, manufacturing, and what it actually means to build something that has never existed before.
AST SpaceMobile is not building an app. They're not dropping a software update. They are hand-building the most complex commercial satellites ever put into low earth orbit. Satellites so large, so technically advanced, that when you look at the BlueBird specs compared to anything else up there, it genuinely looks like science fiction. These things are pushing the absolute boundaries of what human engineering can do right now. Abel Avellan has been sleeping on the production floor. Let that image sit with you for a second. The CEO. Sleeping on the floor of the factory. Because that's the level of commitment happening behind the scenes while retail investors are posting bear takes from their couch.
And yes. They've missed timelines. You know who else missed timelines? Every single space company in the history of space. Every single one.
Elon Musk said people would be on Mars by 2025. It's 2026. Not even close. He's now saying 2030, which he'll probably miss too. SpaceX has missed more deadlines than I can count. Starlink missed timelines. Falcon Heavy missed timelines. Starship has been "almost ready" for years. And what's SpaceX worth right now? They're targeting a $2 TRILLION IPO valuation. TWO TRILLION DOLLARS. So the next time someone tells you ASTS missed a launch window so it's over, remind them that the greatest space company ever built missed virtually every major deadline they ever set and they're worth $2 trillion.
Amazon's Kuiper? Late. Blue Origin? Chronically late. New Glenn just put a BlueBird satellite in the wrong orbit. These are the best funded aerospace organizations on planet Earth and they can't hit a deadline. That's not failure. That's the nature of operating at the edge of what's physically possible.
What AST has accomplished is actually extraordinary when you look at it objectively. They went from a startup nobody believed in to having AT&T, Verizon, Rakuten, Orange, Telefonica, TELUS and 50+ of the world's largest mobile operators signed as partners serving nearly 6 billion subscribers. They got FCC approval for a 248 satellite constellation. They secured prime contractor status on a $151 billion Golden Dome defense program. They have $2B+ in cash, $1.2B in contracted commitments, and just filed a patent that could multiply their spectrum capacity by 3x to 10x making their already extraordinary spectrum position worth potentially $6.8B to $17B in added value in the US alone. And they did all of this while building something that has literally never been built before.
But the bears and the impatient want results now. Today. This quarter. And if they don't get it this quarter they're done. Moving on. Next.
That's not investing. That's gambling with an impatience problem layered on top.
Real investing requires understanding what you own, having conviction in the vision, and having the patience to let world-changing companies actually change the world. It took Amazon 10 years to be taken seriously. Netflix was a joke for years. Tesla was the most shorted stock on earth before it went up 10,000%. The pattern is always the same. Visionary company. Massive execution challenges in uncharted territory. Impatient retail investors exit. Institutions accumulate. Company delivers. Stock re-rates violently upward. Retail watches from the sideline.
Don't be that retail investor.
If you don't understand engineering timelines, if you've never built anything complex in your life, if you've never managed a manufacturing process for something that's never been made before, maybe pump the brakes before you post your bear take about a company whose CEO is sleeping on the factory floor to make sure a $30 million satellite is perfect before it goes to space.
Because once it goes up, it's up. Forever. You don't get to patch it. You don't get to recall it. You have one shot. And that's exactly why they take the time they take. And that's exactly why the bears will be wrong.
Patience isn't weakness. In investing, patience is the entire game.
$ASTS 🛰️
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