The Service
Marc Lichtenfeld’s Oxford Income Letter is a dividend newsletter that has built its name on reliable, growing income. The current pitch, though, is dressed in far more exotic clothing: a “SpaceX Royalty” portfolio promising to collect “up to $11,400 per year from critical suppliers.” We opened the box and checked what is inside. Here is our honest review. Our Oxford Income Letter explainer covers this in detail. There is more on this in our Monument Traders Alliance article.
The Pitch, Decoded
The framing is clever. SpaceX has never gone public, so ordinary investors cannot buy its shares, and the pitch leans on that gap. You cannot own SpaceX, the story goes, but you can collect “royalty payouts” from the ecosystem around it. The reveal is two data center REITs, Equinix (EQIX) and Digital Realty Trust (DLR), and our full teardown explains how the logic chains together.
The reasoning runs like this: Starlink traffic has to pass through physical data centers, those data centers are owned by REITs, and REITs are required by law to distribute at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders. So, the pitch concludes, you are effectively collecting a “SpaceX royalty” without owning a share of SpaceX.
The Fine Print on the Numbers
The math is where the pitch gets quiet. Both stocks are blue-chip data center landlords, and their dividend yields are unremarkable, roughly 2% to 3%. To collect $11,400 a year at a 2.5% yield, you need about $450,000 invested. That is the quiet part: “up to $11,400 per year” is what happens when someone already sitting on a six-figure position collects their dividends. Lichtenfeld essentially concedes the point in the fine print, “you get out what you put in.”
The REIT mechanics are real, but they are not a loophole. The 90% distribution rule is standard, decades-old tax law that applies to every REIT, from strip malls to cell towers. And the SpaceX connection adds no analytic value: what moves these stocks is funds from operations, lease rates, and data center demand, not whether Starlink traffic happens to route through a particular facility. For a fuller picture of the category, our pieces on the best data center REITs and data center REITs map the field.
What the Oxford Income Letter Does Well
The underlying picks are quality. Equinix is the largest data center REIT in the world, and Digital Realty is a global landlord for the same sector. Both have real assets, real customers, and long dividend records. The data center demand story is legitimate: cloud, AI, and connectivity all require physical facilities, and these two are among the largest landlords for exactly that. And the $99 price with a 365-day refund remains one of the more consumer-friendly offers in the industry.
What to Consider
The “royalty” framing is income marketing. Calling a dividend a “royalty” is a category error, and there is no legal loophole, just ordinary REIT structure. SpaceX is not a disclosed tenant of either company in any direct sense. The connection is that internet traffic, some of which is Starlink traffic, moves through third-party facilities, which is a long way from “SpaceX writes you a royalty check.”
For readers weighing the broader data center theme, our explainers on data center power demand and data center stocks cover the growth story the pitch is really about.
The Verdict
These are two genuinely good companies, and if you want exposure to the multi-year data center buildout with a dependable dividend, Equinix and Digital Realty are reasonable places to look. But buy them for the data center demand story, not the “SpaceX royalty” gloss. The honest version of this pitch is simple: two blue-chip REITs, a fair yield, and a headline income number that depends entirely on how much capital you bring.
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