Amazon Looks to Space

In this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss:

• Amazon’s reported interest in Globalstar.
• RH and housing trends.
• Best investing books for beginners.

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This podcast was recorded on April 2, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: The space industry is moving at light speed. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. Got a pretty full schedule here. We're going to talk about RH, what used to be Restoration Hardware, and its struggles, following up from yesterday's discussion about Nike. We're going to get some listener questions, but we want to get started first with space and space investing in particular. It has been one heck of a week when we talk about space in general. Just yesterday, the Artemis II launch, which look it happened. I don't care how many times we see rocket launches. Those things are wicked cool to watch.

Jon Quast: Yeah, and not to brag, but as a Floridian, I got to see the Artemis launch from my front yard yesterday. Me and my 9-year-old ran outside right after we watched the countdown on YouTube. Man, I'm pumped about space right now.

Tyler Crowe: Talk about seeing smoke. There is a lot of smoke happening in the industry of space as well. I mean, we've talked about the SpaceX IPO. We've mentioned it before in our IPO show, and this week, that chatter is getting louder and louder by the day. It seems like the SpaceX IPO's coming pretty soon. Also, in Space News today, satellite company Globalstar is up about 8% as we tape on rumors that Amazon is looking to acquire it. Now, one of the deals that we saw in recently, and I want to say in the past year or so, or maybe even further back, was SpaceX acquiring spectrum from EchoStar. It's basically the ability to use broadband spectrum for communications. In doing so, it established the ability for SpaceX to use cellular data transmission via satellite. Now, I'm not saying this is precisely why SpaceX made that happen, and I'm not saying that's precisely why Amazon is making this acquisition of Globalstar. But Globalstar does have a very large spectrum license for the next 15 years. Matt, I have to imagine that was part of the deal.

Matt Frankel: Simply put, Amazon needs to scale its satellite, build out faster. They have grand plans. I think the latest number I saw was 3,200 satellites of its own. It wants to get into orbit to rival StarLink, but it's not there yet. StarLink, just to put it in perspective, has over 10,000 active satellites. Amazon has about 200. Acquiring Globalstar and its spectrum licenses would speed up the time frame, because that's something no matter how much money you have, you just can't speed that up. Jon is going to dive into Globalstar's business a little more in a bit, but it does own valuable spectrum licenses that Tyler said, and it's almost certainly a big reason that Amazon's interested here. Like I mentioned, these are highly regulated. They require years of navigating regulation not only in the US, but all over the world. Globalstar holds licenses for valuable spectrum in more than 120 countries around the world. It does help accelerate the timeline of what Amazon is trying to do.

Tyler Crowe: Certainly seems like there's some trail here as to spectrum and making this a much more prominent part of the business. Now, look, the deal isn't finished yet. Like I said, this was a lot of rumors, and the stock is up on rumors, and we don't have a price tag on it. But at the same time, Globalstar is about an $8 billion company, and it's not like for a company the size of Amazon, that there are huge valuation concerns here for acquiring this. It's certainly not going to break Amazon's bank to make an $8 billion acquisition. With that in mind, like, what opportunity do you see here for Amazon, the stock? Is this something that's a real needle mover, or is it more like, Hey, this is nice to have, but I'm not building my investment thesis around it. Like when I think of Amazon, I think of, like, Prime Video. You can agree or disagree anyone you like, but I don't think anyone's building an investment thesis on Amazon based on it has Prime Video. Something like Globalstar feels like on that level.

Jon Quast: I think that's fair, Tyler. You're not building an investment thesis around this necessarily, but Amazon does have space aspirations. I think what this does that has value for Amazon is that it gets it a revenue stream from space that's reliable while it tries to build out that space business. Breaking down Globalstar business is actually pretty fascinating here. A single customer accounted for 63% of revenue in 2025. We don't know for sure, but that customer is likely Apple. Apple owns 20% of the business. It owns 85% of Globalstar's capacity, or at the very least, 85% of the capacity is dedicated to one customer. That customer is likely Apple. What is interesting here is when we think about the monetization of space, everybody wants to do space, but the monetization aspect gets tricky on the edges. This is something that Globalstar does provide Apple with the SOS emergency signal. That is actually a pretty important thing. It's a valuable business. We have one of the most important, valuable companies in the world, and Apple locked in as this Globalstar customer and locked in for the long term. If you're Amazon, I get this space business, a reliable income stream from space, as I continue to push forward with my own aspirations. I think that's the valuable thing here for Amazon.

Matt Frankel: First, to Tyler's point, Prime Video should be a part of the thesis, more so than a lot of people think. It's a big part of Amazon's advertising platform, which is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable parts of the business. We'll leave that for another conversation. But to me, Amazon's space investments are a nice-to-have. I'm an Amazon shareholder, and 100% of my thesis is built around the e-commerce platform in AWS. Now, there's a solid argument to be made that Amazon building out its satellite Count would be a big competitive advantage for AWS. Microsoft and Alphabet, which are the two closest competitors. They don't have that. These satellite capabilities, they can remove geographical constraints at the edge right now; their reach is limited to the Internet goes, and it'll let Amazon's customers move data without using the public Internet at all, something its competitors can't offer. It can be a competitive advantage that helps AWS keep or even grow its already leading market share. It could be a very nice thesis driver, but for now, it's a nice-to-have.

Tyler Crowe: I would say at the most generous, I think this acquisition and Amazon's butting space business is extremely early. I wouldn't even say early innings. It's like watching the pitcher warm up before the game even starts in terms of early innings here. It could be a fascinating thing to watch because clearly Amazon or Jeff Bezos, as the chairman, has had very ambitious plans for space with Blue Origin, which isn't necessarily tied to Amazon, but it's clearly something that Jeff Bezos has wanted to do, and I have to imagine that somewhere that is embedded in the DNA of Amazon. Coming up next, we're going to talk about another struggling retailer in the form of Restoration Hardware.

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Tyler Crowe: Shares of RH, which used to be called Restoration Hardware. I think I like the older name better. Shares plunged about 19% yesterday after the company reported earnings and offered guidance. Jon, was it the guidance or the earnings that really had the market saying no thank you to whatever management had to say?

Jon Quast: Well, the earnings were not fantastic, but definitely the guidance is a big part of what's going on with RH, and investors' adverse reaction to the report. Basically, here, if you look ahead to the first quarter, it just reported fourth quarter results, but if you look ahead to the first quarter, it's looking at a sales decline, and this is after already a couple of years of just mediocre, lackluster results. But then guidance for the year is modestly positive. If you take that in combination, what management is saying is, Hey, our business trends are actually about to get worse, but don't worry, they'll be better before the end of the year.

I think, just as an outsider perspective, I think management has cried wolf one too many times here in recent years. What I mean by that is it seems like that is routinely now the guidance. Things are about to be bad, but don't worry, it'll pick up in a couple of quarters, and investors just aren't buying it right now. Everything that drives RH is business, housing prices, interest rates, even the stock market; all of these things are trending in the wrong direction, and that's the point here. It's doing okay under the circumstances, but it's not great being under the circumstances, and investors don't know when the circumstances will get better. I don't think that it was buying what management was selling, and that's why the stock is down after the report.

Tyler Crowe: Well, you can certainly say that the report is a continuing trend that we've seen with RH because this is not anything new. Over the past five years, shares of RH are down 81%. I don't care how you slice it. That is not good. Now, there's clearly some internal problems, as you said, Jon, and there's some broader macro problems as well. Because this is furniture, mostly, and home goods and things like that, people buy furniture when they buy a new home or move. That tends to be the most frequent time that these purchases happen. The challenges existing homes in the United States from 2022 to today are at about the same rate that we saw 2008-2012, when we had that thing called The Great Recession going on, and housing was not in a great place.

Now, at the same time, retail’s struggling and businesses struggling with their turnarounds is not a new story. I mean, yesterday, Travis, Lou, and Rachel were talking about Nike and their seemingly multiyear turnaround strategy that hasn't quite gained traction yet; it seems to be like where RH is in a similar position. Look, we know it's some combination, and if I were to just ask, which one is it, we would all say it's a combination of both. I'm going to make you guys be a little more specific here. I want you to put percentages to when you look at this situation, how much of a percentage is, it's the company and its problems versus it's just a really bad market. How would you break that share into to blame for RH's woes?

Matt Frankel: Before I give my percentages. As you mentioned, the housing market is pretty terrible right now, and that's weighing on the business, for sure. It isn't just that people aren't moving into new homes and buying furniture for their new home, but people are largely not tapping into their home equity to complete big home purchases. That's generally talked about with projects like building a new deck and renovating a kitchen. But it also is a very common source of funding if people want to replace a few rooms' worth of furniture. Because of interest rates, that's generally not happening right now. Plus, with the inflationary pressures over the past few years, economic concerns, consumers are generally feeling squeezed, especially when it comes to making nice-to-have purchases, like updating furniture. Although the company missed estimates, there's an argument to be made that 4% year over year revenue growth in this environment isn't that terrible. But there are some things not to like about the company. I mean, its debt levels are high. I feel like management should be a little more conservative right now when it comes to investing for growth and really trying to innovate in this type of environment. In all, I would say 70:30 market versus company.

Jon Quast: Maybe I'm being a little bit too harsh here, but I put it closer to 50: 50, but I agree with everything that Matt just said. It is true. The housing market is a huge reason that RH's business isn't booming like investors hoped. There's only so much that the company can do in that environment, and management does point out, as Matt alluded to, that it is growing or producing results that are better than many of its peers. I guess, give it a little bit of credit there. It's a hard market to be in. But what is interesting is the numbers do look particularly weak right now because of what Matt just said, management isn't very conservative when it's building out to the long-term vision of the company, and it's continuing to invest like business is booming.

Look, we are long-term investors. We do like it when our companies take a long-term view, but I think that does contribute to the numbers perhaps looking worse than they need to be right now, because it is investing still so much in what it wants to do. Now, what does it want to do? RH aims for 5.8 billion in revenue in 2030. That would be up 70% in five years from what it just turned in in 2025. In the past, it's had operating margins of around 20. That's what it's aiming for. Definitely not there now. But look, if things go swimmingly according to management's plan, there's a scenario where RH could be generating 1 billion in operating income within five years. It only has a market cap of 2 billion right now. But the thing is, as Matt pointed out,