Justin Sacks MD MBA FACS

Brick by Brick. $TSLA

Elon Musk just said something that deserves far more weight than it’s getting. “How come we’ve not found any aliens? Trust me, I would know. We have not.” That’s not a fun question about UFOs. That might be the most unsettling thing ever said by someone who would actually know. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Trillions of stars. Billions of habitable worlds. Civilizations with billions of years of head starts on us. And nothing. No signal. No probe. No artifact. Not even wreckage. The math says the galaxy should be so saturated with intelligent life we couldn’t miss it if we tried. Instead, every instrument we’ve ever pointed at the sky returns the same answer. Silence. Fermi asked the question in 1950. Where is everybody? Seventy-six years later, the answer hasn’t moved. Nowhere. Musk understands what that silence almost certainly means. They didn’t make it. Not one of them. Musk: “There is a certain probability that is irreducible that something may happen to Earth. Despite our best intentions, despite everything we try to do, there’s a probability that some external force or some internal unforced error causes civilization to be destroyed.” Irreducible. Not a risk you engineer away. Not a threat you legislate out of existence. Not a problem that disappears with enough funding or enough time. A certainty that only needs enough time to collect. Asteroid. Supervolcano. Engineered pandemic. Nuclear exchange. AI alignment failure. Or something no one alive has thought of yet. The specific threat is irrelevant. The number never reaches zero. We treat civilization like gravity. Like a permanent condition. Like it will always be here because it’s been here for every second of every life we’ve ever lived. The universe owes nothing to anything it built. Every civilization that ever arose on another world probably felt the same certainty we feel now. Looked at their own sky. Assumed tomorrow was guaranteed. They’re the silence. Musk isn’t building toward Mars because he’s bored or chasing legacy. He looked at the Fermi Paradox and reached the conclusion most people refuse to. Single-planet species don’t last. Not one. Not ever. Not across enough time. Mars isn’t an escape plan. It’s a second copy of everything humanity has ever built, thought, felt, and remembered. One copy of something irreplaceable isn’t a strategy. It’s a bet that nothing goes wrong on an infinite timeline. That’s not optimism. That’s negligence. The silence isn’t a mystery to solve. It’s a message we’re refusing to read. Every dead civilization had this conversation. Their own skeptics. Their own voices saying there was no rush. That silence is what “no rush” sounds like a billion years later.

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous, not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.” — Ann Druyan

13 for me. What about you?

$TSLA I've sold the last of my Tesla position. Tesla has been in a weird place for me for a while. I love the product. I am enamored with how amazing FSD (in a HW4 stack) is, and how excellent the vehicle is. My wife and I aren't likely to buy any vehicle that isn't a Tesla, and I'm already thinking of that nice upgrade (3-4 years from now) for my '22 Model 3. I also would love to own an Optimus at some point. I love the vision, the vertical integration, and wouldn't bet against Elon. Yet the stock is not the company. Tesla has always traded at a premium, but that premium is increasing over time. That's fine if it's in anticipation of significant future acceleration, but it's questionable when that happens. On the call, they stated, “over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of AI, software and fleet-based profits,” but were effusive on the dates. That's probably for the best, as Elon timelines usually need to be extended. Gross margins have improved, and the P/FCF looks like it's improving, but with the CapEx they're needing to do, this ratio will soon be negative. I don't mind buying a stock with extreme multiples, but I see easier opportunities with clearer runways for acceleration elsewhere. Tesla hasn't been a meaningful position for me for over a year, but I'm out for now. I'll still be rooting for the company (and shareholders) even while hoping the stock comes down to more reasonable levels where the R/R fits my portfolio better.