The Pick
Ian King’s “Musk Master Key” is Solaris Energy Infrastructure, ticker SEI. The stock closed around $51.81 on August 26, 2026, with a market cap near $3.4 billion. King’s argument is that this is the company sitting at the chokepoint of the AI buildout: a business that can deliver electricity to a data center in weeks, not years.
Solaris did not start in data centers. It began life as Solaris Oilfield Infrastructure, providing mobile power to remote drilling sites for roughly a decade. That work taught the company how to drop turbines and generators in places the grid does not reach, and that same skill is what now powers xAI’s Colossus facility in Memphis.
The Stateline Power Joint Venture
The Musk link is a joint venture called Stateline Power. Solaris owns 50.1 percent of it, and SpaceX holds the other 49.9 percent. That joint venture is what supplies power to Colossus, the data center Musk built in 122 days and then doubled in size in 92 days.
King’s headline reads “Elon Musk Just Bet $86 Million on a Tiny Company,” but the $86 million is not a personal bet on Solaris shares. It is the capital Musk committed to the Colossus power joint venture. None of it has shown up in Solaris earnings yet, and it never will as a share purchase. It is project capital.
That distinction matters. Investors who buy SEI because they think Musk personally loaded up on the stock are buying a story the numbers do not support. The real case for Solaris has to stand on its own contracts.
The Business Model
Solaris provides on-site, behind-the-meter gas turbine power. The data center customer absorbs the variability in natural gas and electricity prices, and Solaris gets paid a fixed rate under equipment-rental style contracts. That is the part worth understanding.
This is a genuinely different risk profile from a merchant power producer. Solaris is not gambling on power prices. It is collecting a fixed payment for a machine the customer needs running around the clock. If that model works at scale, the cash flows are predictable in a way most energy businesses are not.
Beyond Colossus, Solaris has signed long-term, gigawatt-scale power deals with two other hyperscalers. King’s bull case: the fleet more than triples by 2029, more than 2 gigawatts sit under 10-to-15-year contracts, and once fully running the company clears over $1 billion in annual cash earnings. Our explainer on data center power demand walks through why those contracts exist in the first place.
The Numbers
The valuation is where investors need to slow down. Analysts expect about $1.00 in adjusted earnings per share for 2026 and $1.86 for 2027. At $51.81, that is a forward multiple near 70 times this year’s number, but roughly 25 to 28 times full-year 2027 estimates.
The stock already had its first big narrative run. It peaked near $80 in June and has de-rated since. That is the honest context: the easy money from the Musk association may already be reflected in the price.
There are real costs on the way to that 2027 number. Turbines install in waves, and the joint venture does not reach full power until 2027. There is a two-to-three-quarter window where debt and capital spending ramp before the power agreements throw off meaningful cash flow. The company carries over $2 billion in long-term debt, its share count has doubled in two years, and it expects around $1 billion of its own capital spending in 2027.
What to Watch
Solaris pays a $0.48 annual dividend, about a 1 percent yield, unchanged since 2023. That tells you management is prioritizing the buildout over the payout for now.
The fixed-rate model is the thing to verify over the next few quarters. If cash flow arrives on schedule as turbines come online, the 2027 multiple looks reasonable. If the ramp slips, the debt and dilution become the story instead. For a deeper look at the contract economics, see our Solaris Energy Infrastructure stock breakdown and our piece on the Elon Musk power plant.
Where the Pitch Overreaches
Every financial promotion leans on a greed lever, and this one uses “10x, 40x, 80x” language. That framing deserves the same skepticism you would give any headline. Solaris has real revenue and a real contract structure, but both names in this pitch have already had their first narrative run, and SEI specifically peaked near $80 in June before settling back into the low $50s.
There is also a subtle overreach in how the $86 million is presented. King frames it as Musk betting on a company nobody has heard of. In practice it is capital committed to a specific power project, and it does not directly accrue to Solaris shareholders. The distinction is not academic: it changes what kind of investment this is.
The fixed-rate model is genuinely attractive, but it also means Solaris competes for every new hyperscaler contract against other on-site power providers. Winning Colossus is proof the model works. It is not proof Solaris wins every deal that follows. The real test is whether the contracted gigawatts convert into cash flow on the schedule the bull case assumes, and that gets answered over the next several quarters, not in the next news cycle.
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