Today, Elon Musk took his privately owned SpaceX public. The result was the first $2 trillion market valuation on any company, ever. What’s more, unlike other most huge companies that have made people rich, like Google and Facebook, it’s a company that deals in atoms, not bits. (Amazon is sort of in-between, really). If Facebook and Google are fairy dust, SpaceX is heavy metal. It builds big things that sometimes blow up. They’re things that a lot of “experts” (*cough* Neil de Grasse Tyson *cough*) thought he couldn’t build, and certainly couldn’t operate at a profit. But he has. Now he’s promising, right in the prospectus, to go much farther.
There are two kinds of reactions to this: Celebration, and jealousy. They are diagnostic.
There’s lots of room for celebration. James Pethokoukis is one of the celebrants. He writes that it’s good that Elon Musk is a trillionaire now, because of what he’s accomplished: “If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable, everyone gains.”
Yes, SpaceX is worth a lot of money — and with it Elon’s shares — because it’s already doing amazing things and people expect it to do a lot more of them in the future. He writes:
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