Episode Details

This episode looks at the investors who were already sitting in the best seats long before SpaceX became a $1.7 trillion story — specifically, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, which put roughly 30 billion yen into SpaceX in 2019, when most of the world was still skeptical that Starlink could become a real business.

It traces how OTPP became the kind of organization capable of making that bet: a cautious pension fund that rebuilt itself from the ground up around 1990, hiring people who had taken serious losses in real markets and understood, at a visceral level, what risk actually feels like.

There's a closer look at Olivia Steedman, the civil engineer and finance professional who wrote the check. The episode reflects on how her engineering background — a way of seeing airports, highways, and infrastructure projects — may have been exactly what let her look at Musk's satellite network and see not spectacle, but coherent, next-generation infrastructure that nobody else could replicate.

There's also a frank look at the FTX loss: around 10 billion yen, nearly all of it gone. Against estimated SpaceX gains of 1.7 trillion yen, it registers as noise — but the point isn't the math. It's that even a team of this caliber pulls up wreckage sometimes, and what separates them is continuing to show up anyway.

A quiet look at what a fifty-times return actually requires: years of waiting, a real tolerance for failure, and a commitment made at the moment when almost no one else believed.