What The Oxford Club Won't Tell You About The 'SpaceX Royalty' Portfolio: Collect Up to $11,400 Per Year From Critical Suppliers

The Hook

Marc Lichtenfeld’s Oxford Income Letter is a dividend newsletter that normally does exactly what its name suggests: it hunts for reliable income. The current pitch, though, is dressed up as something far more exotic. For $99 a year, with a 365-day refund window to its credit, Lichtenfeld is selling what he calls a “SpaceX Royalty” income portfolio, headlined by a promise to collect “up to $11,400 per year from critical suppliers.” That angle gets the deep-dive treatment in our “Equinix Stock: What Investors Need to Know” piece.

The setup is engineered to make you think you are getting a backdoor into one of the most famous private companies on Earth. SpaceX has never gone public, so ordinary investors cannot buy its shares directly. Lichtenfeld’s pitch leans hard on that gap. You cannot own SpaceX, the story goes, but you can still collect “royalty payouts” from the ecosystem that surrounds it. It is a clever frame, and it works beautifully, right up until you open the box and see what is actually inside.

The Big Claim

The central promise sits in the promo’s own words: “What few people realize is that billions of dollars each year gets paid out through what I call SpaceX royalty shares… a legal loophole that allows regular folks to collect royalty payouts every single year without having to own a single share of SpaceX stock.”

There are two ideas packed into that sentence, and both are doing heavy rhetorical lifting. The first is the word “royalty.” Royalties are what songwriters, authors, and mineral-rights owners collect: a stream of payments for something you own but do not operate. The word implies you can clip a coupon while someone else does the work. The second idea is “legal loophole,” which suggests a clever trick only insiders know about. Neither word survives contact with the actual securities being recommended.

The Mechanism

The reasoning, as Lichtenfeld tells it, runs like this. SpaceX builds rockets and satellites, but it does not build data centers. As the promo puts it: “SpaceX does not own the infrastructure that connects its satellites to the internet… every time a Starlink satellite beams data down from orbit, that signal has to pass through a physical data center before it reaches your phone.” From there, the pitch narrows to “this SpaceX supplier company [that] operates over 250 facilities all over the world in Brazil, Australia, India, Singapore, and Canada.”

That “supplier company” turns out to be a real estate investment trust, a REIT. And this is where the “loophole” enters. REITs are required by law to distribute at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders each year. So the argument stacks up like this: data-center landlords collect rent, the tax code forces them to pass most of it out as dividends, and some fraction of that rent is paid by the networks that carry Starlink traffic. Therefore, the pitch concludes, you are effectively collecting a “SpaceX royalty” without owning a single share of SpaceX.

The reveal: the two companies are Equinix (EQIX) and Digital Realty Trust (DLR). The promo’s teaser clues about an “executive earning $28,759” and a “board chair earning $34,500” resolve to REIT insiders holding thousands of shares and receiving quarterly dividend checks of those amounts. Those payouts are real, but they belong to people who already own a great deal of stock.

The Real Pick

Both stocks have already crept higher since the tease prices were set, which is common once a promo starts circulating. Neither move is dramatic, but it is a reminder that the easy edge, if there ever was one, gets priced in fast.

Does the Math Check Out?

The headline number deserves a hard look. The promo floats “up to $11,400 per year.” Let us translate that into an actual investment amount. These are data-center REITs, and their dividend yields are unremarkable by income standards, roughly 2% to 3% depending on which one you hold and when you bought. Take the midpoint, around 2.5%. To collect $11,400 a year at a 2.5% yield, you need about $456,000 invested. Round it down and call it roughly $450,000.

That is the quiet part of the pitch. “Up to $11,400 per year” is not a passive-income promise for a modest stake; it is what happens when someone already sitting on a six-figure position collects their dividends. Lichtenfeld essentially concedes the point himself in the fine print: “you get out what you put in.” A $10,000 position at a 2.5% yield produces about $250 a year. Nothing about that is a royalty.

The REIT mechanics, to be fair, are real. The 90% taxable-income distribution rule is actual tax law, and it is precisely why REITs reliably pay dividends. But that rule applies to every REIT, from strip malls to cell towers. It is not a SpaceX-specific loophole, and it does not transform rent into royalties. It is simply how REITs are structured, and it has been for decades.

More importantly, the SpaceX connection adds no analytic value to these stocks. Whether Starlink traffic happens to route through an Equinix or Digital Realty facility does not change how you value either company. What actually moves these stocks is the same set of fundamentals that moves every data-center REIT: funds from operations (FFO), the payout ratio measured against FFO, lease rates, and the long-term demand for computing and connectivity. If Starlink disappeared tomorrow, Equinix and Digital Realty would still be collecting rent from cloud providers, banks, and enterprises. If Starlink tripled its satellite count, the incremental traffic would be a rounding error in the demand picture for facilities that already host thousands of customers.

So the math of the mechanism does not rescue the math of the headline. The mechanism is real but generic; the headline is large but requires a stake most readers do not have.

The Verdict

These are two genuinely good companies. Equinix is the largest data-center REIT in the world, and Digital Realty is a global landlord for the same sector. If you want exposure to the multi-year buildout of data centers, cloud, and AI infrastructure, either one is a reasonable place to look, and both pay a growing, dependable dividend.

But you should buy them for the data-center demand story, not the “SpaceX royalty” gloss. The royalty framing is income-marketing: it takes two ordinary REITs and drapes them in the charisma of the most famous private company on the planet. SpaceX does not write rent checks to Equinix or Digital Realty in any direct, disclosed way. The “royalty” you would actually collect is a plain dividend, and the “up to $11,400 per year” is a function of how much money you put in, not of any legal loophole. Our “Digital Realty Stock: What Investors Need to Know” article covers the details.

What They Got Right

• The underlying picks are quality. Equinix and Digital Realty are the two blue-chip names in data-center REITs, with real assets, real customers, and long dividend records. This is not a penny-stock lottery ticket.
• The data-center demand story is legitimate. Cloud, AI, and connectivity all require physical facilities, and these two companies are among the largest landlords for exactly that. The thesis that data-center demand is growing is sound and well supported.
• The REIT distribution rule is cited correctly. Lichtenfeld accurately invokes the 90% taxable-income distribution requirement, which is real and does mean REITs tend to pass income through to shareholders.
• The pricing and refund are fair. $99 a year with a 365-day refund window is reasonable by newsletter standards and meaningfully reduces the risk of trying the service.

What They Got Wrong

• The “SpaceX royalty” framing overstates the relationship. SpaceX is not a disclosed tenant of Equinix or Digital Realty in any direct sense. The actual connection is that internet traffic, some of which is Starlink traffic, moves through third-party facilities. That is a long way from “SpaceX writes you a royalty check.”
• The headline income figure hides the required stake. “Up to $11,400 per year” needs roughly $450,000 invested at a 2.5% yield. That is a six-figure-stake fantasy, not a passive-income promise, and it is a meaningful omission in a pitch aimed squarely at income investors.
• Calling dividends “royalties” is a category error. REIT distributions are ordinary dividend income with ordinary tax treatment, not the royalty economics of a music catalog or an oil well. The word is chosen for emotional appeal, not accuracy.
• The “legal loophole” framing is wrong. There is no loophole. The 90% rule is standard, decades-old REIT law that applies to every REIT equally. There is nothing secret or clever about it.
• The insider-income clues are cherry-picked. The “$28,759” and “$34,500” quarterly figures come from insiders who own thousands of shares. Those payouts are exceptional, and Lichtenfeld’s own admission that “you get out what you put in” quietly undercuts the entire “royalty” premise.

Compliance Disclaimer

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned.

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