We’re All on Starship Elon Now

We’re All on Starship Elon Now SpaceX is coming to a mutual fund or 401(k) near you. Elon Musk is, famously, kind of a lot. He’s a thrice-divorced man with at least 14 children by four different women who’s spent a significant part of the past few years flirting with White nationalism and promoting a sex chatbot. He is also fabulously successful, having helped transform PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX from startups into household names — not to mention his roles in the buyout of Twitter (since rebranded as the anti-woke social network X and swallowed up by SpaceX) and the 2024 election of Donald Trump. Now he is also a trillionaire. On June 12, SpaceX went public, closing with a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion, which sent Musk, who has a roughly 40% stake in the company, to a level of wealth that, as a percentage of US gross domestic product, puts him roughly on par with the richest Gilded Age monopolists. In the minds of Musk and those who bought into the largest initial public offering in history, SpaceX still has plenty of room to grow. The company’s registration statement with US financial regulators outlines three lines of business — rocket launches, satellite internet, and hardware and software for artificial intelligence — and claims that its total addressable market is $28.5 trillion, which is almost as big as America’s entire GDP. That calculation includes $370 billion for rocket launches, $1.6 trillion in satellite-related revenue and a staggering $26.5 trillion coming from the data centers Musk plans to launch into space.