Linde makes industrial gases. SpaceX buys industrial gases. Rothschild & Co. Redburn connected these two facts and called it derivative play analysis.
This is the investment thesis. Rockets go up. Rockets need gas to go up. Company that sells gas makes money when rockets go up. Buy the gas company.
You could apply this logic to anything. SpaceX employees eat lunch. Subway makes sandwiches. Derivative play on Subway stock. SpaceX rockets land in the ocean. Water is wet. Long H2O futures.
The beauty here is calling it unusual. A gas supplier benefits when a customer buys more gas. Truly unprecedented market dynamics. Someone at Rothschild saw SpaceX buying liquid oxygen and thought "What if we told people about the company that sells liquid oxygen?" Then they published a note. Then financial media wrote it up. Then you read about it.
Linde has a market cap of $200 billion. SpaceX launches maybe fifty rockets a year. Each launch uses a few hundred tons of liquid oxygen and methane. Do the math on what percentage of Linde's revenue comes from filling up Elon's rockets. I'll wait.
It rounds to zero.
But sure. SpaceX goes public. Retail piles in. Stock goes up. Then retail remembers they missed SpaceX. They panic. They search for exposure. Some guy on Reddit says "Linde supplies SpaceX." Another guy says "Derivative play." Forty-seven people buy calls. Linde moves 0.3% on unrelated European industrial data. Everyone declares victory.
Rothschild charged someone six figures to learn that rocket manufacturers purchase industrial gases from industrial gas companies.
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