SpaceX’s Loudest Cheerleader Wants You to Buy. Wonder Why.
Welcome to issue #30 of The Davem Dish. Every week I share what actually works in investing based on my 20 years of wins, losses and expensive lessons. You’ll also get my thoughts on solopreneurship and life in general because the same principles apply — keep it simple, stay consistent and focus on what matters.
This is the first issue of Receipts & Reality, a recurring series where I take a finance-world claim and put it next to the reality. If you want to build an investing process that doesn't depend on anyone else's agenda, keep reading.
Last Monday, Ron Baron went on CNBC’s Squawk Box and told viewers that SpaceX will be worth $20 to $40 trillion within the next decade. “I think we’re going to make hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said, sitting across from the anchors like a man delivering a weather forecast rather than predicting something that would make SpaceX larger than every publicly traded company on Earth today. He said what SpaceX has accomplished “isn’t possible for anyone else” and that Elon Musk is at least ten years ahead of everyone in satellites, rockets, and networks.
You might think he was SpaceX’s chief marketing officer, or chief cheerleader, which he kind of is.
While he said all of this, the banner on the side of the screen reminded you why you should listen: Founded Baron Capital in 1982. $55 billion in assets under management. Over four decades of outperformance.
That banner isn’t lying. Ron Baron’s track record is verifiably excellent. Baron Partners Fund has returned 17.7% annualized since its inception in 2003, against 13.1% for its benchmark, and those numbers are net of fees. Fifteen of his funds have beaten their benchmarks since inception. He has earned roughly $57 billion in cumulative profits for his investors, as of late 2025, across four decades. If I’m going to put someone’s claims next to the actual numbers — and that’s the entire point of this series — I have to start by acknowledging that the numbers here are real.
Which is exactly what makes this one worth writing about.
The Receipts
Ron Baron started Baron Capital in 1982 with $10 million. He grew up working as a cabana boy and lifeguard in Asbury Park, New Jersey, turning a $1,000 investment into $4,000 as a teenager. Chemistry degree from Bucknell, law school at George Washington, a stint as a patent examiner, and then twelve years at various brokerage firms where he learned how to evaluate small companies from the ground up. The origin story is impressive. A self-made investor who built something real through decades of patient, research-driven work.
The fund’s strategy has always been concentrated and high-conviction. Baron holds positions for years, sometimes more than a decade, and looks for companies with what he considers durable competitive advantages and exceptional management. Portfolio turnover runs around 5%, compared to a category average north of 50%. He doesn’t chase quarterly earnings or hop in and out of momentum trades.
So far, so good.
Now let’s look at what that strategy has evolved into.
Baron Capital’s SpaceX position, as of the IPO on June 12th, is worth approximately $25 billion. That single holding represents 33% of Baron Partners Fund and 25.5% of Baron Asset Fund. Add in Tesla, and roughly half the assets in some of Baron’s portfolios are tied to companies led by one person: Elon Musk. His personal portfolio is even more concentrated. Around 65% allocated to Musk-led companies, split roughly 40% Tesla and 25% SpaceX.
One thing worth understanding about how Baron operates: most mutual funds are classified as “diversified” under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which means they’re required to limit the size of any single position relative to total assets. Baron Partners Fund is classified as non-diversified, which gives it much wider latitude to concentrate in fewer names. That’s a deliberate structural choice, and it means the portfolio can look radically different from what most people picture when they hear “mutual fund.” Even with that flexibility, the fund still faces constraints that hedge funds don’t, including leverage caps and daily liquidity requirements. The concentration here is legal and transparent, but it’s unusual enough that Morningstar concluded the portfolio has become so “unorthodox and extreme” that it “isn’t a recommended choice for most investors.”
The fund is also leveraged. It can borrow up to one-third of its total assets to invest. That leverage, combined with the concentration, produced a standard deviation of 26%, well above the benchmark’s 16%. In 2022, the fund dropped 43% and landed in the bottom decile of its category. It recovered nicely in 2023 and 2024, but the volatility profile tells you something important about the kind of ride investors are actually on, even when the long-term return numbers look exceptional.
And this isn’t new behavior from Baron. His admiration for Musk has been building publicly for years. In a November 2025 CNBC interview, he compared Musk to Da Vinci and said his impact dwarfs “Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Ford — the great industrialists.” He said in that same interview that he never expects to sell a single share of Tesla or SpaceX in his lifetime, and that he would be “the last person out of the stock.” He named his newest ETF the “Baron First Principles ETF,” borrowing Musk’s personal branding catchphrase, and in his Q1 2026 shareholder letter, he quoted Grok to explain Musk’s philosophy to his fund’s investors.
The Reality
Here’s where I think this matters for anyone who watched that interview and felt a pull to invest.
When Ron Baron goes on national television and tells you SpaceX will be worth more than every publicly traded company on Earth today, he’s doing so while sitting on a $25 billion position. He bought another $1 billion worth of shares during the IPO itself. Every word that comes out of his mouth on that segment, every projection of $30 trillion or $40 trillion in future value, lands differently when you understand that he’s talking his own book with one of the largest concentrated bets in the history of mutual fund investing.
That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He might turn out to be exactly right, and SpaceX might become the greatest investment of this century. But you and I are not being asked to evaluate a disinterested analysis. We’re watching a man with a quarter of his firm’s assets in a single stock tell us that stock is going to multiply by ten or twenty.
And the thing nobody on that CNBC set asked him about — the one risk that SpaceX itself considers significant enough to disclose in its own prospectus across 38 pages of risk factors — is key-man dependence.
SpaceX’s S-1 filing says it plainly – the loss of Elon Musk, whether through death, disability, or anything else, “could significantly disrupt our management structure, adversely affect our ability to execute our strategic plans, and negatively impact our reputation and relationships with customers, partners, and other stakeholders.” Analysts reviewing the filing noted that SpaceX lacks a formal succession plan. Musk holds 85% of the voting power needed to remove him from leadership, which means the company is structurally designed so that no one can replace him, and also that no one has been prepared to try.
Ron Baron has half his fund’s assets and 65% of his personal wealth riding on the continued health, focus, and judgment of a 54-year-old who runs six companies simultaneously. And as far as any public filing, interview, or disclosure reveals, there is no hedge — no puts, no structural downside protection. This is the same fund that let Tesla climb to 54% of net assets at its peak without trimming, and that bought another billion dollars of SpaceX on IPO day instead of taking profits after a roughly 1,300% gain. Neither position appears to have a contingency plan for the one scenario the company itself warns about in its own paperwork.
Why This Matters for You
This is the first installment of a series I’m calling Receipts & Reality. The premise is simple: I take something a well-known finance figure says publicly and put it next to the actual numbers — their positions, incentives, track record, the fine print they’d rather you not read. The goal isn’t gotchas or bad-mouthing successful people. It’s building the habit of asking yourself one question every time someone credentialed and confident tells you what to do with your money: what’s in it for them, and how does this apply to me?
Ron Baron is a fitting place to start, and more nuanced than an easier target would have been.
Baron’s track record isn’t manufactured. His conviction in Tesla and SpaceX has generated extraordinary wealth for his investors over the past decade, and if you’d invested in Baron Partners Fund at its inception and held through every drawdown, you’d have beaten the market by a wide margin. He earned that credibility and I’m pretending otherwise.
But credibility earned over decades can become the most effective sales tool in finance. When someone with Baron’s track record goes on television and says SpaceX will be worth $30 trillion, the credential does the heavy lifting. You stop scrutinizing the concentration risk, the leverage, the non-diversified structure, the fact that the company’s own filing says there’s no plan for what happens if the one person the entire thesis depends on is no longer there. You hear “44 years of outperformance” and “billions in profits” and you absorb the prediction as informed analysis rather than what it actually is — a promotional appearance by someone with a massive financial interest in the outcome.
This is where even a great investor becomes dangerous to follow. The gap between Baron’s entry price and your entry price is enormous. He started buying SpaceX at a $20 billion valuation. You’re being invited in at $2 trillion — a hundredfold difference in starting price. The leveraged, non-diversified, unhedged structure that worked for him across a decade of compounding would destroy a retail investor who buys at these levels on the strength of someone else’s enthusiasm.
And that’s the real lesson, the one that connects everything I write about in this newsletter. The answer to Ron Baron on CNBC isn’t to decide he’s a fraud, because he doesn’t appear to be one. The answer is to recognize that even genuinely talented investors operate inside incentive structures that make their public pronouncements unreliable as investment advice for you. Baron’s interests, his entry point, his risk tolerance, and his time horizon are not yours and can’t be. No amount of admiration for someone’s track record should change the way you make your own decisions.
You need a process that doesn’t depend on someone else’s conviction — entry and exit criteria, position-sizing rules, and a loss cap that protects you regardless of who’s on television saying what. The person on television, even the brilliant one with the real track record, is always making the case for their own position.
Cheers,
Andrew
Have someone you think deserves the Receipts & Reality treatment? Drop a name in the comments.
Thanks for reading The Davem Dish! If you enjoyed this issue, feel free to subscribe and share it with other awesome people like you.
The content provided are personal opinions and presented for educational purposes only, as of the date published or indicated. Davem Advisors LLC is not a bank, licensed securities dealer, broker or investment advisor. Displayed returns are unaudited. Nothing stated constitutes a recommendation or advice as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. You alone are solely responsible for determining whether any investment, strategy or service is appropriate for your objectives. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the risk of loss.