De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Make what you will of Elon Musk, his rocketry firm is a marvel of free markets.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
To channel of Elon Musk’s favourite science-fiction authors, SpaceX is a product of infinite improbability. When Mr Musk began, few would have predicted that a startup could design a liquid-fuelled rocket and put it in orbit. Nor that an engineer would be able to get a rocket’s booster to return to Earth, land upright on its own tail and be re-used. And no one has yet recovered a rocket’s second stage, which must withstand 1,500°C or so during atmospheric re-entry.
Having pulled off the first unlikely feat in 2008, six short years after its founding, and the second in 2015, SpaceX will try to use a launch due on May 21st to show that it can carry off the third, too. If the test fails by the time you read this, SpaceX will try again—and again, until it succeeds or runs out of money.
Success will be vital if Mr Musk is to realise his vision of dominating artificial intelligence, apparently by using space-based computers launched by SpaceX to satisfy AI’s ravenous hunger for data-processing. To pay for his dream, on May 20ththe company filed the prospectus that has started the countdown clock for an initial public offering next month worth about $75bn. This will be the biggest listing in history.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
In two ways, the IPO is infinitely improbable, too. It is inspiring in that Mr Musk aims to carry off yet more seemingly impossible feats of engineering. And it is worrying in that he is asking investors to trust their savings to a lossmaking outfit with hardly credible financial plans over which he will have total control.
SpaceX’s colossal listing will shake stockmarkets as much as its giant Starship rocket’s Raptor engines now rattle the coastal plain beneath the launch site in Texas. SpaceX may instantly land among the world’s ten most valuable companies, with a market value of as much as $2trn. A fortnight later it is to be ushered into the NASDAQ index, ending up in countless tracker funds, pension pots and other stock portfolios. By then Mr Musk may have become Earth’s first trillionaire, worth as much as all households in his native South Africa combined.
In a populist age, many people will see the concentration of power in trillion-dollar companies—not to mention trillion-dollar men—as a failure of capitalism. Yet as a story of risk-taking, competition, the ability to mobilise resources and thereby turn the improbable into reality, SpaceX is in fact capitalism at its most remarkable.
Sometimes Mr Musk has harnessed the state’s resources, sometimes he has gone it alone. Government policy played a crucial role in getting SpaceX off the ground. But his drive has repeatedly solved problems that the state could not. He has already opened up space, and if he succeeds in his dream of cutting launch costs to $185 a kilogram, 1% of their historical average, he will have utterly transformed it.
Getting there will be hard. SpaceX’s business plan, as outlined in its regulatory filing on May 20th, has „risky” written all over it. The company is losing more than $1bn a month, much of it on its AI business, xAI, which spent $8bn in the first quarter and is still far behind the industry’s stars.
The plan says that over 90% of SpaceX’s potential sales, which it values at $28.5trn—almost the entire GDP of America today—will come from AI. It is unclear whether that will be from making a success of his own AI business using data centres in space powered directly by the sun (and untroubled by terrestrial NIMBYs), or from selling data-centre services to others. Throw in some stardust about interplanetary missions and asteroid mining and you can begin to grasp the scale of Mr Musk’s ambition.
Yet even if he doesn’t get all the way there, his fleet will open up new possibilities that he and other capitalists can exploit. The government encouraged William Boeing to do this after the first world war, using idle warplanes to ferry air mail. Jeff Bezos sold spare cloud-computing capacity when Amazon had built more of it than it needed for its e-emporium. Mr Musk himself has done it, too: Starlink was initially a way to fill up SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, when external custom could not keep up with its billowing launch capacity.
He is also spurring competition. Blue Origin, founded by Mr Bezos two years before SpaceX, is working on its own re-usable rocket. Both it and Amazon have plans for their own satellite constellations to rival Starlink. In December a private Chinese challenger, LandSpace, test-launched a re-usable rocket; another Chinese company, called Space Pioneer, tried in April.
If anyone has earned the right to aspire to seemingly unattainable engineering goals it is Mr Musk. The financial risks—and the control he demands—are another matter. No other firm has tried to use public markets to raise as much as SpaceX will. NTT in Japan and Saudi Aramco were partial privatisations of state-owned assets. The nearest private-sector competitor, Alibaba in 2014, raised a third of what SpaceX wants.
SpaceX could, like any capitalist enterprise, crash and burn. Its valuation—as much as 100 times annual revenue—compares with 16 for Tesla. Mr Musk has a record of creating lots of shareholder value but little cash. SpaceX is on the hook for the lossmaking xAI, and his social network, X, with which it merged earlier this year.
And by giving him and other insiders special shares to elect directors, SpaceX’s structure makes Mr Musk unsackable. Investors are therefore saddled with his future business decisions as well as his obnoxious politics. He may face a backlash under the next Democratic administration for his racism and the ravages of DOGE under Donald Trump.
The thing is that Mr Musk comes as a package. He has needed a galactic ego and a cosmic appetite for risk to succeed—as did Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan before him. SpaceX is an imperfect company and Mr Musk an imperfect man. The marvel of capitalism is that it can harness their talents to create something extraordinary. While his investors take the risk, the rest of humanity can strap in for the ride.
© 2026 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.