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On Estonian nuclear, solar’s land use, and Kristi Noem’s mining gig
On carbon removal funding, Chinese nuclear, and Hawaiian solar
Copper and Impulse Labs have taken their patent fight to court.
Welcoming the world’s first clean energy trillionaire.
SpaceX is now a public company. The rocket and satellite maker’s shares began trading this morning, surging 19% from their initial price of $135 to more than $160 at the market close. With the sale, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire; his wealth has roughly tripled since President Donald Trump won re-election in 2024.
I’ll let other observers judge the IPO’s success, the firm’s long-term prospects, and the meaning of a world where we now have trillionaires. So I will make a few other points:
I remain agog at Musk’s ability to raise enormous amounts of cash from public equity markets to do hardware and manufacturing development. To some degree, the idea of a venture-backed firm doing hardware engineering — or what some now call “deep tech” — is Musk’s most impressive creation. The SpaceX IPO raised $75 billion today. That money will now go in part to scaling and commercializing rockets, factory equipment, and allegedly, at some point in the future, orbiting data centers.
Let’s not forget how crucial the U.S. government is to Musk’s story. In the world of climate, energy and manufacturing, we wail about financing’s “missing middle,” the elusive type of investment that can help scale and deploy early-stage technologies by bridging the gap between expensive venture capital and cheap bank lending. But this is at least partially a solved problem. SpaceX and Tesla survived the valley of death with government help: The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office (which the Trump administration has dubbed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing) extended a $465 million loan to Tesla to build its Fremont, California, factory in 2010; NASA’s 2008 commercial resupply contract gave SpaceX guaranteed offtake for its Falcon rocket. Neither firm would likely have survived without those key injections of financial certainty.
To some degree, Musk has already made his mark on the American economy by creating a new culture of manufacturing engineering. I cannot recommend enough my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Emily Pontecorvo’s report on the new cadre of climate tech founders who came up at SpaceX and Tesla. As it happens, I spent Wednesday touring a clean energy factory founded by a Tesla alumnus, and I was struck by how many signs of Musk’s bottlenecks-focused management approach were visible, even at a company seemingly run more humanely than Musk’s famously “hardcore” firms.
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To that point, Emily and Matt asked a number of clean tech executives who worked for SpaceX or Tesla what they learned from the experience. Their responses are fascinating; you can read them in full here. These comments from Justin Lopas, the COO of Base Power, stuck out — he was asked the “one thing” he learned from working for Musk:
You can get way more done in a day and can move way faster than you think. This does not mean necessarily more hours (although solving any hard problem requires that too), but instead being thoughtful about sequencing work, not accepting delays from suppliers or external counterparties without solid rationale, parallel pathing, accelerating critical learnings to early in the project, etc
To step back, one irony of Elon Musk’s situation — at least to me — is that relatively few American politicians are eager to talk about what has actually driven his wealth. I’m not just talking about his firms’ reliance on public financing, although that counts too. I mean Tesla itself. Although Musk now describes that business as a “robotics company,” it is and remains an electric vehicle and battery manufacturer. (It recently began high-volume production of the Tesla Semi, a potentially game-changing long-haul electric truck.) After today, Musk’s Tesla stake makes up less than half of his wealth, but, still, he would not be a trillionaire without EVs, solar panels, and batteries.
But that is not a particularly convenient fact. That Musk is a clean energy trillionaire remains unpalatable to Republicans, who would prefer to cast EVs as an inferior substitute made to satisfy government mandates. And Musk’s antisemitism, far-right politics, and gleeful destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development — not to mention Tesla’s violation of labor law — have obviously destroyed his reputation among Democrats.
Yet his elevation to a 13-digit net worth nonetheless marks a new era in American capitalism. The richest Americans in history have almost always been oilmen: John D. Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire by creating the Standard Oil trust; when he died in 1937, his net worth of $1.4 billion represented 1% to 2% of the country’s gross domestic product. In the 1960s, J. Paul Getty became the country’s richest person by negotiating Saudi and Kuwaiti oil concessions. Yet Musk became a billionaire not by harnessing commodities, but through his mastery of software, hardware, and clean energy.
Musk’s fortune now exceeds 3% of U.S. GDP. He is the richest American in history, judged as a share of national production. And it was electricity, lithium, and modern factory production — and, if you wish, the kerosene and methane that fuel SpaceX’s rockets — that got him there. As the science fiction writer William Gibson almost said, the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed in your retirement portfolio yet.
Many thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend.
Plus SAF, another SPAC, and more of the week’s biggest money moves.
With SpaceX’s historic IPO dominating headlines this week, Heatmap turned its attention to the impact Elon Musk’s protégés have had on the climate tech landscape. Right after we published the story, an underwater geothermal startup founded and staffed by SpaceX alumni announced a sizable Series A, with its founder telling TechCrunch that his “experience at a very hardcore company like SpaceX” helped shape his approach to this new endeavor.
In other news, one of the biggest players in the sustainable aviation space, Twelve, opened its first commercial fuels plant and is preparing to begin supplying low-carbon jet fuel to Alaska Airlines later this month. Meanwhile, the battery sector saw two SPAC announcements: In a bid for survival, Factorial Energy officially went public this week through a SPAC merger, while ZincFive announced plans to do the same later this year. And finally there was some positive news for Germany’s heat pump market, as the startup Galvany raised fresh funding to simplify the end-to-end process of buying, installing, and operating a heat pump.
Drawing from an increasingly familiar playbook for Musk alumni, Endurance Energy founder and former SpaceX engineer Andrew Redd applied the lessons he learned from the rocket company’s notoriously “hardcore” culture and rapid pace of development to something completely different. Now that he’s pivoted away from rocket tech, Redd wants to harness geothermal energy from underwater volcanic activity, and his startup just raised a $54 million Series A to make it happen While a growing crop of geothermal startups including Fervo and Zanskar are focused on tapping into the heat beneath our feet, no other company in the sector has sought to develop the resource beneath the ocean floor.
There are good reasons for that, of course. Offshore infrastructure is notoriously difficult and expensive to build, maintain, and repair, and saltwater is corrosive. But if Endurance can crack the code, Redd told TechCrunch he thinks the company could unlock about 6 terawatts of geothermal energy in the coming decade.
Investors seem to be convinced: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the startup’s latest funding roundSeries A, its second capital raise since launching less than two years ago. Other backers include First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. EnduranceThe startup is initially targeting remote islands, where electricity costs are often far higher than on the mainland. It’s already launched an initial pilot off the coast of Tonga, which still gets about 80% of its electricity from imported diesel.
Twelve, one of the best capitalized sustainable aviation fuel startups, opened its first e-fuel facility in Washington State this week. The demo plant has officially started production, and the company’s strategic partner and investor, Alaska Airlines, expects to begin using it on commercial flights as soon as this month. The plant’s launch comes roughly two years later than originally planned, a delay that’s hardly unusual for first-of-a-kind industrial projects like this. Last September, Twelve raised $645 million to complete buildout of the facility, as well as to jumpstart development of future plants, which it says will be orders of magnitude larger.
The company’s process begins with renewable-powered electrolysis. Using a proprietary catalyst, Twelve’s electrolyzer splits apart CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant at a lower temperature than conventional approaches, making it better suited to running on renewable energy. The company combines the resulting carbon monoxide with hydrogen to create a syngas, which gets refined into sustainable jet fuel. Airlines can blend the resulting product with conventional jet fuel (the Federal Aviation Administration allows a maximum 50% blend) to create a drop-in replacement that requires no engine modifications.
To cover the cost premium of SAF, Twelve and Alaska partnered with Microsoft. The tech giant is buying SAF certificates — essentially carbon credits — from the project to help offset Scope 3 emissions associated with employee travel. “We are seeing strong demand from the corporate offtake side, not only for employee travel, but also for freight and logistics,” Twelve’s CEO, Nicholas Flanders, told me. “Everything from pharmaceuticals to data centers use a lot of air travel.” There are also some policy tailwinds — the European Union now has a sustainable fuels mandate that requires the use of synthetic e-fuels like Twelve’s beginning in 2030.
The plant also comes online at a moment of heightened volatility in the jet fuel market. As my colleague Alexander C. Kaufman noted in Wednesday’s morning newsletter, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has led to soaring fuel prices, prompting domestic refiners to ramp production to record highs. By contrast, Flanders argues that SAF offers customers greater price certainty via long-term offtake agreements. “You can fix the cost of our key inputs like electricity and CO2 and so that actually makes it a more attractive project from a project financing perspective,” he explained.
SPACs are back. But this week, it’s not just another pre-revenue nuclear company that’s looking to get to market as quickly as possible. Solid-state battery startup Factorial Energy, which has yet to develop a commercial product, has merged with the blank check company Cartesian Growth Corporation III, netting it $100 million at a $1.3 billion valuation.
The company was upfront about needing the SPAC to stay afloat after racking up losses since its founding in 2019. Factorial’s SEC filing states that prior to this new capital, “its liquidity wasn’t sufficient to fund twelve months of operations.” Yet it does have real traction in the industry — Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Hyundai, and Kia have all made strategic investments, looking to use Factorial’s tech in their electric vehicles to achieve higher energy density, longer range, and faster charging.
Solid state batteries typically use a solid electrolyte in place of the flammable liquid electrolytes found in conventional lithium-ion cells, but Factorial is starting with more of a hybrid approach. Its initial design relies on a “quasi-solid” gel-like electrolyte, which allows it to use an energy dense lithium metal anode while preventing the needle-like dendrite growth that predisposes solid-state batteries to short circuit. Factorial is manufacturing these cells at a pilot plant in Massachusetts, while working on a prototype with a fully solid electrolyte that could offer even greater performance gains.
Factorial isn’t the only battery company with SPAC news this week. ZincFive, a nickel-zinc battery producer, also announced plans to go public via SPAC in a deal expected to close in the second half of this year. Unlike Factorial, however, ZincFive is already making money, selling its batteries to hyperscalers and other data center operators as a backup power solution to bridge the gap in between when the power goes out and when the backup generator turns on. As the company’s CEO Tod Higinbotham told Bloomberg, “We have the backlog. We have the capacity. We have the demand. We really need capital.”
Navigating the maze of consumer clean energy incentives and coordinating home energy upgrades is hardly a U.S.-specific challenge. Just a few years ago, heat pump sales in Germany were falling precipitously despite generous subsidies and proven tech. One startup, Galvany, theorized the problem wasn’t the heat pumps themselves, but rather the unnecessary complexity of the surrounding ecosystem. Now it’s raised roughly $11.5 million to help streamline the process of getting heat pumps into consumers’ homes and apartments.
“In Germany, heat pumps do not fail because of the technology, but because of the gap between subsidy bureaucracy, installation capacity, and economic viability for the end customer,” the company’s CEO, Raik Belka, said in a press release. This is exactly the gap we are closing.” The approach is already paying off — Galvany has installed more than 2,500 heat pumps to date and became profitable last year after increasing its revenue sevenfold.
The startup produces its heat pump in partnership with Panasonic, but its real innovation lies in the way it streamlines sales, procurement, installation, and ongoing heat pump operations into a single platform. Potential customers enter their building data online and, after a feasibility check, get a quick quote that factors in subsidies. They can then purchase a standardized kit that’s simple for installers to assemble. Once operational, the heat pump’s energy management system, which launches this summer, will automatically adjust heating loads based on the cost of electricity, saving customers money without them having to actively manage the system.
