"For 50 years they’ve sold us a shrunken future: less energy, fewer children, less ambition, managing the decline cleanly. And then, all of a sudden, the world’s biggest financial asset is a bet on abundance, expansion, and adventure."
Translated from French
SpaceX closed its first day of trading at $2.1 trillion, +19%. Everyone’s looking at the number. No one’s looking at what it’s actually pricing.
Let me tell you what the market just bought, and why I think this company will be worth 30 to 50 trillion in 5 years.
First, the symbolism. This IPO is a referendum. On one side, 20 years of talk about degrowth, sobriety, redistribution, the end of history managed by committees. On the other, a man who said “I’m going to make humanity multiplanetary,” whom everyone treated like a clown, and who just created the largest publicly traded company in history starting from a warehouse in El Segundo. The market voted. Wokism had HR departments, SpaceX had rockets. The rockets won.
Next, the economic mechanics, because that’s where everyone’s getting it wrong. Analysts value SpaceX as a launch company plus Starlink. It’s like valuing the internet in 1995 based on the fax market. Starship doesn’t reduce the cost per kilo in orbit by 20%, it divides it by 100. And every time in history that an infrastructure cost has been divided by 100, it’s not the existing market that grows, it’s entire industries that are born. The cost of computation divided by 100 gave us the internet, the smartphone, AI. The cost of orbit divided by 100 will give us a complete space economy.
Let’s list what becomes profitable when the kilo in orbit costs the price of an airplane ticket. Orbital data centers, with continuous solar power and free cooling, right at the exact moment when AI is exploding terrestrial energy demand. Microgravity manufacturing of semiconductors, optical fibers, printed organs impossible to produce under gravity. Mass orbital tourism, then lunar hotels, which will go from fantasy to business plan exactly like luxury cruises in the 20th century. Point-to-point terrestrial transport, Paris to Tokyo in 40 minutes. The asteroid mining industry, where a single M-class body contains more metals than all humanity has extracted since the Neolithic. And Mars in sight, not as a tourist destination, but as the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken, with all that implies in demand for energy, materials, robotics, AI.
SpaceX won’t participate in these markets. SpaceX owns the entry toll to all these markets. It’s AWS, but for civilization. Apple is worth $3.5 trillion selling glass rectangles on a single planet. The first monopoly of access to an infinite frontier at 30 or 50 trillion in 5 years isn’t exuberance, it’s just simple arithmetic on the expansion of the addressable market.
And now, the part I like best. This future doesn’t need bureaucrats. There’s no advisory committee in orbit. No Théodule commission on Mars. Every dollar of this new economy will be created by engineers, technicians, welders, pilots, entrepreneurs. The norm-management graduates will have to learn a useful trade, and frankly, that’s excellent news for them too: building is infinitely more fun than controlling.
Because that’s the real signal today. For 50 years they’ve sold us a shrunken future: less energy, fewer children, less ambition, managing the decline cleanly. And then, all of a sudden, the world’s biggest financial asset is a bet on abundance, expansion, and adventure. Pessimism just went short on itself.
The future will be mega fun. There’ll be hotels with views of Earth, honeymoons in orbit, kids who’ll say “Dad, what was it like before reusable rockets” the way we say “what was it like before the internet.” And somewhere in the 2030s, a human will walk on Mars in a livestream in front of 5 billion people, and on that day no one will remember the name of a single one of its detractors.
Buy optimism. It’s still undervalued.
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