Rocket Lab CEO Interview on Neutron Rocket

A test of the Archimedes rocket engine intended to power Rocket Lab’s next-generation Neutron craft (Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab CEO: Neutron still on track for 2025 launch

But Peter Beck warns, “There’s no fat in the schedule, so everything has to go according to plan.”

8/13/25 1:01PM

Rocket Lab is on track to launch its next-generation Neutron rocket later this year, CEO Peter Beck told Sherwood News in an interview Tuesday, but stressed that the timeline to launch remains incredibly tight.

“It’s a green light schedule and it’s a rocket program,” Beck said, using the engineering shorthand for a project that is currently on schedule. “We are pushing hard and, you know, we’ll do everything we can to get that vehicle away.”

A successful launch of Neutron — which has a larger payload that can deliver the constellations of low-orbit satellites increasingly used for commercial and government space applications — is the linchpin of Rocket Lab’s corporate strategy.

A successful Neutron launch would allow Rocket Lab to compete directly with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which currently dominates the launch business.

The market seems to be betting that there’s a large, untapped demand for alternatives to Musk, whose erratic personal behavior, forays into global right-wing politics, and highly publicly rupture with President Trump might have put SpaceX’s lucrative space launch franchise at considerable risk.

Rocket Lab’s stock surged following the Musk-Trump breakup, adding to gains that have made the space company one of the stock market’s big winners over the last year.

Its rise of roughly 700% put it in the top 0.25% of all gainers in the Russell 3000 over that time period, though the shares have slipped a bit recently, after the company reported mixed earnings results last week.

We asked Beck whether there had been an uptick in interest from the US government since the Musk-Trump rupture.

“Both government and commercial partners and providers and customers are looking for launch diversity,” Beck said, adding, “I think there’s a general uneasiness that there’s really nobody that is competing with that class of launch vehicle, irrespective of whatever macro or minor political things are going on.”

But before Neutron can compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it has to get off the ground, a process that continues to burn cash and keep Rocket Lab in the red. (The company has never posted a quarterly profit.)

Rocket Lab is betting that once Neutron is up and running, that flow of red ink will quickly slow as R&D expenditures decline and the prices it can charge for Neutron launches with larger payloads will rise.

Beck said he was confident that the company has the financial resources to bridge the gap until that happens.

“Of all the things I worry about at night, customer demand and the financial health of the business are not the two things I’m worried about,” he said. “When we started off this program with Neutron, we said we’re going to spend somewhere between $300 million and $350 million, and we are bang on budget.”

Tasha Matsumoto

11/14/25

Despite a modest rebound in tech, the S&P 500 closes slightly lower

The S&P 500 managed to erase most of its early morning losses through the session.

Matt Phillips11/14/25

Speculative stocks rebound from early sell-off

As we head toward the last hour of a wild week of trading, the buckle-up vibes the market started out with Friday have mellowed into a modestly positive day, with the Invesco QQQ Trust and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF both in the green.

But the volatility was pretty wild for some of the high-beta momentum stocks that have taken some of the worst beatings in recent days.

Shares like Applied Digital and Bloom Energy saw cumulative swings on the day along the lines of 20 percentage points. Even those that haven’t quite managed to stay positive, like IREN and Oklo, have nonetheless erased sizable losses.

Why? Frankly, it’s impossible to say. The same uncertainties that the market was facing yesterday — doubts about further rate hikes, confusion about the state of the economy, jitters about the potential for the AI boom to turn into a bust — are still hovering out there somewhere. Perhaps it will take more than a 2-percentage point drop from record highs for the major indexes — about the extent of the recent sell-off — to dull the retail reflex to buy the dip.

Luke Kawa11/14/25

Micron spikes on report that Samsung hiked memory chip prices by as much as 60%

Memory chip specialist Micron is soaring after Reuters reported that Samsung has raised prices of select memory chips by as much as 60% since September, citing two people with knowledge of the price changes.

Memory chips play a key supporting role in the AI boom by feeding high-powered GPUs with data to process.

Micron, the biggest US memory chip seller, has been on an absolute tear, more than doubling in price since the end of August. Shares recently traded more than 15% above the average analyst price target, a record based on data going back to 2007.

These days, you need a pretty good memory to keep up with all the bullish news flow surrounding memory chip stocks, whether it’s been reports of imminent price hikes for these chips, South Korean memory giant SK Hynix already being sold out of all its 2026 production, or Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang nodding at shortages of these valuable components.

Max Knoblauch11/14/25

Warner Bros. Discovery rises as potential sale boils down to bidding war between Paramount, Comcast, and Netflix

The potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery appears to have boiled down to three contenders: Paramount Skydance, Comcast, and Netflix.

All three entertainment giants are prepping bids for WBD, with a deadline of next Thursday for first-round offers, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. Warner Bros. shares climbed more than 2% in premarket trading on Friday.

Per the WSJ, Comcast and Netflix are mostly interested in WBD’s streaming assets, while Paramount — which is said to have had three offers rejected already — wants to buy the whole company.

According to people familiar with the companies’ plans, Paramount believes it has the clearest path toward regulatory approval, as it thinks Netflix’s cofounder, Reed Hastings, having supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election could be a significant hurdle in getting a deal approved, per the WSJ.

Exclusive | Paramount, Comcast, Netflix Prepare Bids for Warner as Deadline Approaches

Per the WSJ, Comcast and Netflix are mostly interested in WBD’s streaming assets, while Paramount — which is said to have had three offers rejected already — wants to buy the whole company.

Luke Kawa11/14/25

Beyond Meat’s refinancing efforts that spurred meme stock rally now have shares down 67%

Well, with a bit of time and a lot of volatility, the dust is settling on how Beyond Meat’s refinancing efforts have gone.

This morning, management announced that its new 2030 notes could be converted at a price of about $1.7459, or around 85% above where shares are trading in the premarket in the midst of another big retreat.

The twists and turns that brought us here:

On September 29, the company announced its intention to replace $1.15 billion in convertible notes due in 2027 (with an interest rate of 0%) with a mix of stock and up to $202.5 million in new second lien convertible notes due in 2030 (with an interest rate of 7%). Prior to that, its stock closed at $2.85.

Shortly after management reached a deal with 97% of its 2027 noteholders in mid-October, Beyond Meat became a meme stock. Despite massive dilution that raised the company’s share count by more than 300% and made prior noteholders the new corporate owners, retail traders positioned for a potential short squeeze in the shares, thinking the refinancing would give the company a new lease on life.

Shares rose from a closing low of $0.52 on October 16 to an intermediate closing peak of $3.62 on October 21 — a near 600% rally in just three sessions. That propelled shares to well above where they were trading before these refinancing plans were announced. But the true frenzied zenith for Beyond Meat came the next session, when the stock more than doubled intraday on what were then record volumes of above 2 billion, only to ultimately close slightly lower. The air came out of the balloon almost immediately thereafter.

(A fun aside: in calculating the conversion rate for the 2030 convertible notes, management deems that day to have been a “market disruption event,” which removes it from the calculations and makes the conversion price lower than it otherwise would have been.)

Shares tanked on October 23 on heavy volumes, and then interest and trading activity in Beyond continued to wane — along with its share price. Delaying the release of Q3 results as management tried to figure out how big of a write-down to take and then issuing those numbers along with a weak Q4 sales outlook did nothing to change the narrative.

There’s no reason to think those 2030 notes will be converted any time soon, based on where the stock is trading. Because these 2030 notes provide the opportunity for “payment in kind” and Beyond is in a relatively stressed financial position, interest on these notes can be paid not just with cash but also (more likely) through the issuance of more stock or the accumulation of more debt.

In sum: Beyond Meat eliminated about $800 million in debt and all it got in exchange was a 67% decline in its stock price, a longer runway to make processed peas into faux meat, and an entertaining (and for those who bought into the meme rally without exiting at the right time, painful) story.