With the SpaceX IPO landing that Friday, episode 239 of Man and Machine — part of The Pulse on the Tradier Hub — turns into a wide-ranging market conversation, and it’s one of the more idea-driven episodes Dillon and Ben have done in a while.
The stock in real life is technically Tesla, but the hosts are quick to say the interesting part isn’t the cars. It’s the man and his other company. They run through Tesla’s history — public since June 2010 at $17 a share, roughly $1.27 split-adjusted, now trading near $391 after a rough Friday that knocked $30 off it — but the real focus is SpaceX. It’s set to price around $135 a share at an eye-watering expected market cap near $1.8 trillion, raising about $75 billion, with retail investors reportedly getting up to 30% access through a brokerage waitlist.
Ben’s thesis is the heart of the segment, and it’s a classic long-game, see-it-before-the-crowd read. He leans on the gold-rush analogy: the people who got rich weren’t the ones panning for gold, they were the ones selling the picks and shovels. In his view, Musk is holding the picks and shovels for the AI boom — SpaceX has reportedly signed major AI-infrastructure deals, including roughly $920 million a month from Google and a similar arrangement with Anthropic. Since the real bottleneck for AI is physical execution and energy, the companies that own that infrastructure are the ones positioned to win. He’s bullish enough that if he can’t get SpaceX shares, he’ll put a little into Tesla on the expected halo effect.
The other standout is a genuinely thoughtful debate on the new PDT (pattern day trader) rules, framed as an overrated-or-underrated lightning round. The hosts land on both sides. Overrated, because looser rules tempt undisciplined traders to trade more and lose faster. Underrated, because retail traders can finally exit a bad position the same day without landing in “PDT jail” and being forced to hold overnight risk. Their conclusion is honest: the change amplifies both outcomes — winners keep winning, losers keep losing, just faster.
There’s also a fun behind-the-scenes moment where Ben admits he asked an AI assistant to brainstorm recurring Monday-morning segments, and the two rank the ideas live — a “bull or bear” 30-second debate, a “buy/sell/hold the week” macro call, and a confessional segment about the trades you’d never admit to (Ben owns up to a bearish oil ETF trade that went the wrong way).
On the bots, it was a tough Friday. King AI lost nearly $900 and King AI Turbo took another hit — the “royal family went 0 for 3” — as the S&P fell more than 2.5% and broke below its 20-day moving average for the first time since early April. The hosts keep it grounded: these are 1DTE iron condors on SPX, losses are part of the game, and strategies that have been live from seven months to two years still show consistent results. They close with the week’s calendar — CPI on Wednesday, the SpaceX IPO on Friday — Dillon leaning bearish into the inflation print, Ben betting on a bounce.
