What Has SpaceX Become? - The Atlantic

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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>With SpaceX’s IPO, you could...