It is hard to find a financial publication, a podcast, or even a casual investor conversation today that does not, at some point, drift toward SpaceX. The confidential S-1 filed on April 1, 2026, the rumored $1.75 trillion valuation, the unprecedented 30% retail allocation, the late-June Nasdaq target – all of it has created what is shaping up to be the most anticipated public market debut in history. And rightly so. SpaceX is a singular company, and its IPO will mark a genuine inflection point: the moment public market is forced to recognize space as a real, investable industry rather than a fringe curiosity.
But the question a long-term investor should be asking is the following: if the commercialization of space is going to be one of the defining secular trends of the next two decades, are there other ways to play it? Are there other ways that do not require paying 87x revenue at an IPO, do not require betting on a single founder's execution across an enormously ambitious set of projects, and do not require accepting the dual-class share structures and float-scarcity dynamics that are likely to define SpaceX's early public life? Is there, in other words, a less obvious vehicle that captures the same secular tailwind while being underwritten by an existing, profitable, mature business that pays you to wait?
I believe there is, and the answer is not a small-cap space niched pure-play. It is one of the most boring-sounding companies in the S&P 500, hiding in plain sight: Linde, the largest industrial gases company in the world. The company is, by an enormous margin, the most under-appreciated way to participate in the commercialization of space, precisely because almost no one thinks of it that way.
Company History:
When most investors look at an industrial gases company, they see a slow-growth chemicals business tied to GDP, with steel mills, refineries, and hospitals as its main customers. They see a $34 billion revenue company that grew sales 3% in 2025 and project that forward forever. What they miss is that Linde is not really a chemicals company at all. It is an infrastructure company – a network of physical pipelines, on-site plants, and long-term take-or-pay contracts that, once installed, become essentially impossible to displace. And that infrastructure, originally built to serve 20th-century heavy industry, now sits in exactly the right place to power the 21st-century space economy.
To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand how Linde was built. The story begins in 1879, when Carl von Linde, a German engineer at the Technical University of Munich, developed the first practical refrigeration machine. By 1895, he had invented the cryogenic process for liquefying air – the foundational technology that allowed oxygen, nitrogen, and argon to be separated from the atmosphere at industrial scale. This was not a chemical innovation; it was a thermodynamic one, and it created an entirely new industry. Every air separation unit (ASU) operating in the world today, whether built by Linde, or its other two main competitors – Air Liquide and Air Products – is a descendant of that 1895 patent.
Linde's first major strategic move was to globalize early, and the consequences of that decision still define the company today. In 1907, Linde AG established an American subsidiary called Linde Air Products Company, designed to bring its German cryogenic technology to the rapidly industrializing United States. During World War I, the U.S. government seized the subsidiary as enemy property, severing it from its German parent. The orphaned American business was eventually absorbed into Union Carbide in 1917, where it operated for the next 70 years as an industrial gases division, before being spun off as an independent public company in 1992 under a new name: Praxair. Meanwhile, the original Linde AG continued to operate in Germany and across Europe, rebuilding its international footprint and eventually acquiring AGA AB of Sweden in 2000 and The BOC Group of the United Kingdom in 2006 for €11.7 billion. The result of this hundred-year separation is the single most important fact in understanding Linde's modern dominance. The German parent (Linde AG) and its long-lost American descendant (Praxair) spent nearly a century evolving independently in different geographies, accumulating different customer bases, different pipeline networks, and different engineering specialties – Linde AG anchoring Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, while Praxair built the densest industrial gas network on the U.S. Gulf Coast and across South America. They were, in effect, two of the three or four global champions in the industry, each dominant in regions where the other was weak. In October 2018, after nearly a century apart, the two halves came back together in an $86 billion merger, creating a single entity with combined revenues of approximately $27 billion, operations in over 100 countries, and a market capitalization at the time of around $90 billion. The FTC required divestitures in nine specific industrial gas product markets to clear the deal – most notably in helium and certain bulk gases where the combined market share would have been excessive – and what was left after those divestitures was a global champion with complementary geographic footprints that no competitor can credibly challenge.
The reason this merger mattered so much is not merely scale. It is geographic complementarity. Praxair had built dominant pipeline networks across the U.S. Gulf Coast – the densest concentration of refineries, petrochemical plants, and (now) launch facilities in the world. Linde AG had built equivalent networks across Europe and Asia. Together, they assembled a global "density" of installed infrastructure that simply cannot be replicated by a new entrant, because the customers that anchor each pipeline have already signed twenty-year contracts with the incumbent and have no economic reason to switch.
This density is the foundation of everything else. To understand why, consider how the industrial gas business actually works. Atmospheric gases – oxygen, nitrogen, and argon – are extracted from air at air separation units (ASUs). These plants are capital-intensive, energy-intensive, and only economical at scale. Once a Linde ASU is built next to a large industrial customer – a steel mill, a refinery, a semiconductor fab, or, increasingly, a rocket launch site – it supplies that customer via pipeline under a take-or-pay contract typically lasting 15 to 20 years. The customer pays a fixed monthly fee regardless of consumption, plus a variable fee for actual volume. This contractual structure is the closest thing in the industrial economy to a software subscription: recurring, highly predictable, inflation-linked, and almost impossible for a competitor to dislodge, because dislodging it would require building a new ASU next door and convincing the customer to bear migration risk on a mission-critical input.
The history of Linde, in short, is the history of an industry that quietly transitioned from a commodity chemicals business into a long-duration infrastructure business with utility-like cash flows, and then consolidated until only three serious global players remained. Linde, Air Liquide, and Air Products together control the vast majority of the global market. Linde alone holds approximately 30 to 32% of global market share, ahead of both rivals, supported by 1,200+ production sites worldwide and an installed base that took 130 years to build.
Current Moats:
Today, Linde's economic moats are exceptionally wide and durable because they function as a self-reinforcing ecosystem in which each advantage protects and strengthens the others. The durability of this business model is rooted in the fact that Linde is not merely a gas supplier, but the physical operating system for industries that cannot function without uninterrupted, ultra-reliable gas supply – a position that has become even more entrenched as its end markets have moved into higher-purity, higher-value applications.
The foundation of Linde's dominance is its network density. The economics of an air separation unit are determined almost entirely by utilization. A plant running at 90% utilization generates exceptional returns; a plant at 50% utilization barely covers its cost of capital. Linde's enormous installed base – particularly along the U.S. Gulf Coast, the Rhine Valley, and parts of Asia – allows the company to add new customers along existing pipelines at near-zero marginal capital cost. A new entrant attempting to win a customer in Houston or Antwerp would have to build a new ASU and a new pipeline from scratch, while Linde can simply tap an existing line. This is not a marginal cost advantage; it is a structural barrier that grows over time, because every new customer added to the network reinforces the density and lowers the marginal cost of serving the next one. Air Liquide and Air Products have the same business model, but at smaller absolute scale, which is precisely why the industry has converged into a three-player oligopoly rather than five or ten.
Complementing this network density are the extraordinary switching costs embedded in Linde's customer relationships. Consider what is involved for, say, a semiconductor fab that uses Linde for its on-site nitrogen, helium, and specialty gases. The Linde infrastructure is physically integrated into the customer's facility – pipelines, control systems, purification equipment, and in many cases on-site Linde personnel. The gas is mission-critical: a one-hour supply disruption can scrap millions of dollars of wafers in process. The contracts are typically 15 to 20 years long. Switching providers would require not just signing a new contract, but tearing out installed infrastructure, validating a new supplier's purity specifications against the fab's process recipes, and bearing operational risk during the transition. The economic case for switching essentially never exists, which is why Linde's customer retention rates in its on-site business are functionally close to 100%.
This lock-in is further cemented by intangible assets, specifically engineering know-how and regulatory trust. Linde's engineering division does not just operate plants; it designs and builds them. The company holds proprietary technology for air separation, hydrogen production, carbon capture, and cryogenic storage that has been refined over more than a century. When a customer wants a custom on-site gas plant, Linde is one of a handful of firms in the world capable of designing, building, and operating it. This vertical integration – from engineering through production through distribution – means that Linde captures value across the entire stack and creates yet another layer of switching cost: a customer is not just buying gas, they are buying a Linde-engineered facility integrated into their own operations.
Finally, Linde enjoys a massive cost advantage driven by scale and energy management. Air separation is one of the most electricity-intensive industrial processes in the world; energy costs typically represent 50 to 70% of the cost of producing atmospheric gases. Because Linde operates more ASUs than any competitor and negotiates power supply at global scale, often locking in long-term power purchase agreements that smaller rivals cannot match, the company has a structural cost advantage in the input that matters most. Combined with its 26.6% adjusted operating margin in 2025 and 45.5% Pre-tax ROIC – best in class in the industry – this cost advantage allows Linde to outearn competitors through cycles while reinvesting heavily into new projects. The 2025 annual report shows the result: record adjusted EPS of $16.46, $10.4 billion in operating cash flow, $7.4 billion returned to shareholders, and a project backlog of $10 billion securing future revenue.
Expansion Opportunities:
So far, we have discussed only how Linde built an impenetrable defense around its core business, but it is arguably more important to understand how the company is playing offense and is positioned to ride three secular tailwinds simultaneously: clean hydrogen, semiconductor manufacturing, and the commercial space industry. It is this last tailwind that I believe the market is fundamentally underpricing, and it is the central reason I find Linde so attractive at current levels.
Clean Hydrogen and the Energy Transition
The first growth vector is the most discussed and the most consensus, but it is real. Linde sits at the center of the emerging hydrogen economy as the world's largest producer of hydrogen, with a project backlog that includes a $10 billion pipeline of committed projects, much of it in low-carbon hydrogen. The company is pursuing both green hydrogen (produced via electrolysis powered by renewables) and blue hydrogen (produced from natural gas with carbon capture), which gives it flexibility across geographies and policy regimes. Major projects include a 35-megawatt PEM electrolyzer in Niagara Falls that will double Linde's U.S. green hydrogen capacity, a 24-megawatt facility at the Leuna chemical complex in Germany, and partnerships with Yara in Norway to produce green hydrogen for ammonia. The critical point for investors is the contract structure: these are 15 to 20-year fixed-fee supply contracts with investment-grade off-takers, generating utility-like returns on capital deployed. Linde's 2025 capital expenditure budget of $5.0 to $5.5 billion is heavily weighted toward these high-quality, long-duration projects, which means today's capex becomes tomorrow's contracted, inflation-linked cash flow.
Electronics and Semiconductors
The second growth vector is the company's electronics franchise, which supplies ultra-high-purity specialty gases to semiconductor fabs – nitrogen for purging, argon for ion implantation, helium for cooling, and a long tail of specialty gases used in lithography, etching, and deposition. The semiconductor industry is in the early innings of a multi-year capacity build-out driven by AI compute demand, geographic re-shoring, and the transition to ever more advanced nodes that require more gas per wafer. In Linde's Q1 2026 results, electronics was the standout end market, growing 10% year over year. Every new fab announced in Arizona, Texas, Japan, Korea, or Germany is, by default, a new long-term customer for either Linde, Air Liquide, or Air Products – and given Linde's scale advantage and existing presence in semiconductor clusters, it captures a disproportionate share.
Commercial Space – The Hidden Optionality
The third growth vector is the one I find genuinely exciting, and the one that I believe is currently being given no value in the share price. This is Linde's position in the commercial space industry, and it is the single best reason to own this stock today.
The thesis is structural, not speculative. Approximately 90% of a rocket's mass at takeoff is propellant. The two propellants that dominate modern launch vehicles are liquid oxygen (used as the oxidizer in essentially every orbital rocket flying today) and either liquid hydrogen or liquid methane (used as fuel, depending on the engine architecture). SpaceX's Falcon 9 uses liquid oxygen and kerosene; Starship's Raptor engines use liquid oxygen and liquid methane; NASA's Space Launch System uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Beyond the launch itself, every rocket also requires massive quantities of liquid nitrogen for engine cooling, tank pressurization, and pad operations. And once satellites are deployed, many use rare gases – xenon, krypton, and increasingly argon – as electric propulsion propellants for orbital station-keeping.
All of these gases are Linde products. The company has been involved in the space industry for over a century, supplying liquid oxygen to NASA since the Apollo program, and in 2024 alone Linde gases powered more than 100 rocket launches. When NASA's Space Launch System took off on the Artemis I mission in November 2022, it consumed several hundred thousand gallons of Linde liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as propellants.
Linde is virtually the Exxon for space: just as Exxon does not care which car manufacturer wins, but profits from every mile driven on gasoline, Linde does not care which launch provider wins (e.g., SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc), but profits from every kilogram of mass sent to orbit on propellants.
The economics of this position are about to change dramatically, and this is where the SpaceX IPO becomes the catalyst. Consider the trajectory. In 2021, there were roughly 145 successful orbital launches globally. In 2024, there were 254. In 2025, there were 315 – a 24% year-over-year increase, with U.S. launches alone reaching 192. Vandenberg Space Force Base in California went from 6 launches in 2021 to 65 in 2025, a roughly tenfold increase in four years, the vast majority being Falcon 9 missions. It is projected that SpaceX alone will account for approximately 47% of total global launches by the end of the decade, with Starship orbital launches scaling from 13 today to more than 10,000 per year. Each Starship launch consumes vastly more propellant than a Falcon 9 – the vehicle is designed to lift over 100 metric tons to orbit and requires roughly 4,600 tons of cryogenic propellant per flight. The gas consumption per launch is not linear with payload; it scales with vehicle size, which is why the shift from Falcon 9 to Starship is, for Linde, a step-function increase in demand per mission.
And SpaceX is only the most visible piece. Behind it sits an entire ecosystem of new launch providers – Blue Origin's New Glenn, Rocket Lab's Neutron, Stoke Space, Relativity, ULA's Vulcan – plus the entire Chinese commercial launch sector, all of which use the same basic propellants. The launch industry is increasingly competitive, but the gas industry is not: every one of these providers, whether they win or lose, needs liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen, and in many cases liquid hydrogen or liquid methane. They will buy it from Linde, Air Liquide, or Air Products, because there is no fourth option, and Linde is the largest of the three with the most U.S. Gulf Coast infrastructure – which happens to be exactly where the launch industry is concentrated.
The company is already positioning aggressively. In June 2025, Linde broke ground on a $100 million air separation plant in Brownsville, Texas, specifically designed to supply liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen, and argon directly to SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica – roughly 9 miles away from the launch pad. The plant will dramatically reduce delivery times by eliminating the 500+ mile truck routes that previously supplied Starbase, and it locks Linde in as SpaceX's primary on-site gas supplier under what is presumably a multi-decade arrangement. Linde already has similar long-term agreements with major launch providers at Kennedy Space Center and Vandenberg. According to Linde management, when commercial space consistently accounts for at least 5% of overall revenue – up from a low single-digit percentage today – the company will break it out as a standalone end market in its reporting. That moment, in my view, will be the catalyst that forces sell-side analysts to reframe Linde from "mature industrial chemicals" to "the picks-and-shovels infrastructure of the space economy," with corresponding multiple expansion.
The beauty of this exposure, from a portfolio construction standpoint, is the asymmetry. If the space economy grows at half the rate that consensus forecasts suggest, Linde is still a high-quality industrial gases business with 29.8% adjusted operating margins, a $10 billion project backlog, mid-single-digit EPS growth, and a buyback program that has reduced share count by approximately 2% per year. The downside is bounded by the existing earnings power of the core business. If the space economy grows at the rate that SpaceX, Starlink, and the broader launch industry seem to be tracking, Linde inherits a structurally higher-growth end market with no meaningful additional capital deployment required, because the infrastructure to serve it is already being built and is largely funded by long-term customer contracts. This is the textbook definition of a free option – and it is currently embedded in a stock trading at roughly 28x to 30x forward earnings, a multiple consistent with its history as a defensive industrial compounder.
Market & Competition:
To fully appreciate the resilience of the Linde thesis, one must dissect the competitive dynamics across the specific sub-segments where the company operates. Critics often make the mistake of viewing the industrial gases industry as a commodity business, assuming that price competition in one segment equates to an existential threat to the whole. In reality, the gases value chain is segmented by application, geography, and contract structure, and Linde has strategically positioned itself to be a dominant force in the most attractive layers.
The core atmospheric gases business – oxygen, nitrogen, and argon – operates as a global three-player oligopoly between Linde (approximately 30 to 32% global share), Air Liquide (roughly 24 to 26%), and Air Products (roughly 17 to 19%), with smaller regional players including Messer Group, Taiyo Nippon Sanso, and Matheson making up most of the remainder. The barrier to entry for a new global player is essentially infinite. A challenger would need to spend decades building a pipeline network, signing long-duration take-or-pay contracts with industrial anchor tenants, and developing in-house engineering capability to design and operate air separation units at scale. The capital cost alone runs into the tens of billions of dollars, and the customer acquisition timeline runs in decades because contracts only come up for renewal every 15 to 20 years. This is why the industry has remained a three-player oligopoly for half a century and is likely to remain one for the foreseeable future.
Moving into the on-site and pipeline business specifically, Linde holds a particularly strong position along the U.S. Gulf Coast, which is both the largest concentration of petrochemical demand in the world and the heart of the U.S. launch industry. The Praxair heritage gives Linde a dense network of pipelines connecting Houston, Beaumont, Lake Charles, and the Mississippi Delta – infrastructure that took five decades to build and that no competitor will ever replicate. This same network now extends into Brownsville, where the new SpaceX-adjacent plant ties Linde directly into Starbase. A similar density exists in Europe along the Rhine and Antwerp-Rotterdam corridors, and Linde holds leading positions in key Asian electronics clusters in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore.
In the merchant and packaged gases business – smaller customers served by truck delivery and cylinders – the competitive landscape is more fragmented, with thousands of regional distributors. Linde competes here primarily on density and brand, leveraging its production network to serve regional markets efficiently. This segment generates lower margins than on-site, but it provides important customer diversification and serves as a feeder into larger on-site relationships as customers grow.
In the engineering business, Linde competes with a handful of specialized firms – Air Liquide's Engineering & Construction, Chart Industries, and a few Asian players – for the design and construction of air separation units, hydrogen plants, and LNG facilities. This is a relatively small revenue contributor but a strategically important one, because it gives Linde proprietary technology that it can deploy in its own gas business, ensuring that the company is always one step ahead on plant efficiency and operating cost.
In the high-growth specialty applications – electronics gases, medical gases, and rare gases for satellite propulsion – the competitive dynamic shifts in Linde's favor. These are markets where purity, reliability, and technical service matter far more than price, and where the customer relationship is sticky over decades because of the cost of qualifying a new supplier. Linde's specialty gases division is increasingly the highest-growth, highest-margin part of the portfolio, and it is precisely the segment most exposed to the space, semiconductor, and clean energy tailwinds discussed above.
Finally, in the helium market, Linde occupies a particularly strategic position. Helium is a rare and difficult-to-source gas, primarily extracted as a byproduct of natural gas production in a handful of geographies (the U.S., Qatar, Algeria, and Russia). At the time of the Linde-Praxair merger, the FTC found that the combined entity would control roughly two-fifths of the global helium supply, which is why divestitures were required. Even after divestitures, Linde remains one of the largest helium suppliers in the world, and helium is a critical input for semiconductor manufacturing, MRI machines, and –increasingly – certain satellite cooling applications. Periodic helium shortages have become a feature of the market, and during shortages Linde's contractual relationships and storage capacity give it pricing power that smaller players cannot match.
Ultimately, Linde's market positioning is that it does not need to win every single battle to win the war; it simply needs to remain the infrastructure backbone that connects the customers in every relevant industrial end market. By dominating the on-site pipeline business along the world's most important industrial corridors, holding a structural cost advantage in electricity-intensive production, and leveraging a century of engineering know-how into proprietary technology, Linde has constructed a business model that is structurally hedged against the cyclicality of any single end market. When steel is weak, electronics is strong. When chemicals is weak, hydrogen is funded. When traditional industry is weak, space is accelerating. The portfolio of end markets diversifies the business through the cycle, while the contract structure ensures that revenue is largely contracted regardless of where we are in the cycle.
Main Risks & Mitigants:
When investing in Linde for the long-term, several risks deserve careful monitoring, though I find each of them either well-mitigated by the business model or asymmetric in a way that favors the long-term holder.
The first risk is energy cost inflation. Because air separation and hydrogen production are both extraordinarily electricity-intensive, a sustained increase in power prices compresses Linde's gross margins. The mitigant is contractual: the vast majority of Linde's on-site contracts include pass-through clauses that allow the company to recoup energy cost increases from customers. The company has demonstrated this through multiple energy cycles, most recently during the 2022-2023 European energy crisis, when Linde maintained and even expanded its margins despite extreme power price volatility. The pass-through is not perfect at the margin and there can be timing mismatches, but structurally the business is insulated from energy as a long-term cost driver.
The second risk is the cyclicality of certain end markets – particularly steel, chemicals, and traditional manufacturing – which can pressure volumes during global recessions. The mitigant here is twofold. First, the take-or-pay contract structure ensures that even when a customer's volumes decline, Linde still collects the fixed monthly fee. Second, the end-market diversification means that no single industry represents an outsized share of revenue. In 2025, with U.S. manufacturing soft and European chemicals under pressure, Linde still grew adjusted EPS by 6%, demonstrating the resilience of the model. The downside cases I model assume essentially flat volumes for several years, and under those scenarios Linde still compounds EPS in the mid-single digits through pricing, productivity, and share repurchases.
The third risk – and the one most relevant to the offensive thesis – is execution on the project backlog. Linde has $10 billion of large projects under construction, with a significant portion in clean hydrogen. Hydrogen economics are still evolving, policy environments are shifting (particularly U.S. Inflation Reduction Act provisions and European green hydrogen mandates), and individual projects can be delayed or scaled back. The mitigant is that Linde's contracts are typically structured with take-or-pay protection from investment-grade off-takers; the company does not generally build speculative capacity. The risk is more about timing of revenue ramp than about the underlying economics of deployed capital.
The fourth risk, specific to the space angle, is that the commercial space industry takes longer to scale than current projections suggest. Launch cadence forecasts depend heavily on Starship reaching operational maturity, on Starlink continuing to consume launches, and on a broader ecosystem of payloads emerging to fill the lift capacity that is coming online. If Starship development stalls or if launch demand grows more slowly than expected, the upside case I described becomes attenuated. The mitigant – and this is the core elegance of the thesis – is that the downside in this scenario is not a loss; it is simply the existing business at its existing growth rate, which already justifies a reasonable return at current valuations. The space tailwind is a free option, not the base case.
The fifth risk is valuation. At roughly 28x to 30x forward earnings, Linde is not cheap on a multiple basis, and it has historically traded between 25x and 35x. A meaningful multiple compression is possible if growth disappoints, or if the broader defensive industrial complex de-rates. I view this as the most meaningful near-term risk to total returns, though I would note that Linde has consistently grown into its multiple over time through a combination of EPS growth and disciplined capital returns. The dividend yield is modest (around 1.2%), but the total shareholder yield – dividends plus buybacks – is more substantial, with Linde returning $7.4 billion to shareholders in 2025 against a market cap of approximately $230 billion.
Conclusion:
Linde represents, in my view, one of the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities in the public markets today, and one of the very few large-cap stocks that combines a fortress balance sheet, a defensive moat, and a credible secular growth option in the same package. The base case – mid-single-digit EPS growth, expanding margins, disciplined buybacks, and steady dividend growth – delivers a long-term IRR above the S&P 500 average with materially lower business risk. The upside case – in which the commercial space economy emerges as a meaningful new end market over the next decade, while clean hydrogen and semiconductor demand continue to scale – delivers returns that I believe are not currently reflected in the share price.
The asymmetry is what makes this position genuinely interesting. Most "space economy" investments today require investors to take on enormous execution risk, valuation risk, or both. SpaceX itself, at $1.75 trillion and 87x revenue, will be priced for flawless execution across launch, Starlink, defense, and increasingly speculative ventures like orbital data centers. The smaller pure-play space companies – Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, Iridium, AST SpaceMobile, and others – each face their own competitive and capital intensity challenges. Linde offers something genuinely different: a chance to participate in the same secular trend through a 130-year-old industrial monopoly, with cash flows underwritten by long-term contracts with the largest companies in the world, at a valuation that does not require the space thesis to work at all.
I believe Linde is the quiet monopoly behind the rocket – the company whose products will physically lift every gram of payload that humanity sends to orbit for the foreseeable future, and whose pricing power and scale ensure that it captures a disproportionate share of the value created as the space economy compounds. The upside risk – Linde emerging as the indispensable infrastructure layer of the commercial space industry while continuing to defend and extend its core network – is substantially more likely than the downside risk of moat erosion or failure to execute on its current backlog.
The history of great investing is, in many ways, the history of finding businesses that look like one thing on the surface and turn out to be something far more valuable underneath. I believe Linde looks like an industrial gases company and will turn out to be the operating system of the space economy. The market will figure this out eventually. The opportunity, as always, is to be early.