SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.
But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.
Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.
SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space tourism, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” An adviser to the deal told the Financial Times last month: “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream.”
What do you get when you combine SpaceX the business with the financial instrument and the meme? An unfathomable amount of money, it seems. Last week SpaceX opened trading at a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. The scale of Musk’s own net worth is now almost impossible to comprehend, such that, on Monday, SpaceX’s stock rallied, and Musk’s one-day gain was more than the net worth of Bill Gates, once the richest person in the world. In short order, SpaceX has become the sixth-most valuable public company despite the fact that it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.
On Tuesday, SpaceX announced it is using some of that value to purchase Cursor, the AI-coding start-up, for $60 billion, all in stock. In reaction to the news, Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager (and inveterate poster), wrote on X: “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” Ackman’s reasoning rings true in a financial sense: According to the deal, the price that SpaceX will pay for Cursor will be set by its own share price in the seven trading days before closing, which in effect will mean that the more valuable SpaceX is, the less Cursor will cost it. But Ackman’s koan is also correct in a more absurdist way. It highlights the irrationality of the modern stock market and reflects a lesson of the past decade: If a person or group of people is able to marshal enough genuine attention toward an idea—no matter how ridiculous it might seem—they can usually bend reality toward their preferred outcome.
Other than perhaps Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue anyone has been more successful at this than Musk. Musk excels not because he can’t stop winning, but because he understands that, in the financialized logic of our age, winning is less important than the perception that you will win. Speculation beats fundamentals. One way to look at Musk’s personal brand is as somebody who has borrowed obsessively against his own reputation, each loan used to invest in and service the debt of the last, until it becomes impossible to follow the money. One of the things that makes Elon Musk so valuable is how valuable he is.
With SpaceX’s IPO, you could argue that Musk has either won or broken capitalism. His wealth, in our current system, makes him a chaos agent with no real comparison. He is virtually impervious to fines. His money, should he wish to spend it, has the potential to drastically influence the outcome of elections. That leverage could be used to benefit Musk’s businesses, securing further contracts with the government and entrenching him deeper into the infrastructure of everyone’s lives. This power isn’t theoretical; Musk’s dominance in satellite connectivity has already made him geopolitically relevant in places including Ukraine and Iran.
SpaceX and Musk are, of course, not inevitable. Analysts are predicting volatility for the stock as lockup periods end and people sell shares. The AI bubble could pop. Musk could mismanage the company as he did with X, or he could become so radioactive that institutions stop associating with him. But you can also imagine the SpaceX flywheel spinning out of control, perpetuating itself as Musk and SpaceX become fully untethered from reality. On X, Will Manidis, a start-up founder and investor, argued recently that, given the dynamics of SpaceX’s stock, it could continue to purchase some of the internet’s foundational software companies at a cost of basically nothing. Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on SpaceX’s direction, and such tweets, at this moment, are little more than fan fiction. But they represent the absurdity of Musk’s current position in the modern economy. Musk has long fantasized about creating a massive, vertically integrated constellation of services—from banking to social networking—he once dubbed “the everything app.” So far, he’s failed in that quest (the phrase trust Elon Musk with your routing number would still strike fear in the hearts of most people). But it’s not difficult to see Musk using his cheap and abundant money to build toward the Everything Holding Company.
Is any of this possible? Would it even be legal? That’s unclear. But as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine once noted, it seems like “Elon Musk’s recent career is a long experiment to prove that, if you are successful enough, the regular laws do not apply to you.”
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman Sachs, he wrote, “positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble,” enabled by “a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules.” Revisiting that article in the age of Musk the trillionaire feels almost quaint. Musk and SpaceX have a true nose for money, including sniffing out government infusions and contracts. The aerospace company has figured out how to position itself firmly in the middle of the speculative hype of the AI cycle, and numerous financial organizations have amended rules designed to protect retail investors.
The vampiric Goldman Sachs that Taibbi describes is an institution, a system that became too big to fail, and thus ungovernable. Musk is a person, not a system or institution, but he owns more than 40 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 80 percent of its voting shares. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to SpaceX’s IPO Musk was dictating terms to Goldman Sachs and other banks.
If Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid, what does that make SpaceX and Musk? The natural world offers few good comparisons. What we’re seeing in terms of hype, valuation, and fortune is without precedent, even when stacked up against the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. SpaceX and Musk are better served by a mythological comparison, in part because the entire enterprise is built on a story told over and over until it transcends reality. SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system. It is the seven-headed Hydra at the end of finance, the teleological endpoint of money. It is a myth kept alive by blind faith, devotion, and even aggression, which makes it dangerous whether you believe in it or not.