# The "50x Seat" Nobody Else Was Sitting In

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/yesterday-i-went-to-mars-7106663/the-50x-seat-nobody-else-was-sitting-in
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/yesterday-i-went-to-mars-7106663/the-50x-seat-nobody-else-was-sitting-in.md
Podcast: [*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”*](https://stenobird.com/podcast/yesterday-i-went-to-mars-7106663)
Published: 2026-06-09T15:16:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/makotowillolympusmons/episodes/The-50x-Seat-Nobody-Else-Was-Sitting-In-e3ki4k2
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/fcce555c/podcast/play/121229378/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-5-9%2F39998fd2-097a-bee9-4462-dd556d3c5fbe.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/yesterday-i-went-to-mars-7106663/episodes/the-50x-seat-nobody-else-was-sitting-in
Duration seconds: 395

## Resource

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.

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## Transcript

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