The SpaceX trillionaire bubble

So Wall Street just dropped another season of the longest running reality show in America, and if you’ve been watching long enough, you’ve caught this show before. The show is called Market Bubbles, and it’s basically been on the air forever, just with different casts every few years.

Early seasons back in late 1990s to 2000, was the dot com bubble. Companies with no profits, no real plan, and sometimes barely a working website got valued like they’d invented warp drives. Everyone said this time technology changes everything, and then it all came crashing down while everyone acted shocked. It was like nobody saw a websites burning cash and no sustainable business models as a problem.

Then the show rotated seasons to real estate. The 2008 financial crisis season, where banks bundled up risky mortgages, repackaged them with fancy names, and convinced everyone they were AAA safe. Spoiler alert, they were not safe. The whole thing collapsed, millions of people lost their homes, and a handful of executives walked away just fine. Great season for drama, terrible season for basically everyone watching.

And now we’ve got this week’s premiere, SpaceX Goes Public, and the production values are off the charts. The retail investor events for this thing was reportedly built more like a tech keynote than an investment pitch, with Star Wars music, rockets on elevators, and merchandise on sale, including a bell shaped like one of the company’s rocket engines, because nothing says sound investment like a gift shop. Elon Musk also skipped the normal IPO process where the price gets negotiated based on demand and some semblance of reality. Instead they just said the price is 135 dollars, take it or leave it, even though major research firms valued the company at less than half that. And about 78 percent of the money being raised was already promised to insiders before the public even got a look. Wall Street was lining up to collection their $100 million fees. None of that stopped the stock from opening at $150, popping as high as $176, and closing around $161 with the company now valued over 2 trillion dollars. The IPO also made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, with his net worth jumping to roughly 1.1 trillion dollars in a single day. Three times the next closest person. Everyone clapped. Champagne flowed.

But here’s what’s been nagging at me, and it’s not really about the rockets. It’s about the guy whose face is plastered all over this thing, and the fact that a lot of regular people are now quietly attached to his fortunes whether they know it or not.

See, here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Because of how big this IPO is and rewriting of the rules, index funds, the kind that sit inside millions of ordinary 401k and retirement accounts, may end up being required to buy billions of dollars worth of this stock automatically, regardless of whether it’s a good idea. Pension funds representing workers in New York and California already raised concerns about the company’s structure before the IPO even happened. And on top of that, SpaceX’s business is deeply wired into government contracts, NASA, the Department of Defense, the whole thing, meaning taxpayer money keeps flowing toward a company controlled almost entirely by one guy. So even if you’ve never bought a single share on purpose, there’s a decent chance your retirement account or your tax dollars are quietly part of this insane story anyway. Congratulations, you just go volunteered to burn money.

And the guy at the center of it has built a career on saying things that aren’t true and just kind of vibing through the consequences. Full self driving cars, coming next year, for like ten years running. A Mars colony, also coming next year, also for like ten years running. At some point “next year” stopped being a timeline and became his catchphrase, like a magician’s “abracadabra” except instead of a rabbit out of hate, nothing happens and everyone just moves on anyway. People normalized the scam.

Then there’s the X situation. He bought it, fired a huge chunk of the staff seemingly overnight, and turned it into his personal megaphone for posting wild stuff that gets blasted out to hundreds of millions of people with basically zero guardrails, because he owns the guardrails now. When advertisers started pulling out, he told them on stage, in front of cameras, to go f*** yourselves, which is one way to keep your remaining advertisers feeling valued. Then there was the time he showed up on stage waving an actual chainsaw around as a symbol of cutting government spending. He’s also known for blowing up working relationships fast, picking very public fights with coworkers, business partners, and former allies. On top of all that, reports came out that Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a longtime friend, was so concerned about Musk’s drug use that he reportedly invited him out to Hawaii to dry out. That’s when you know he’s clearly an addict.

And then there’s the family situation, basically its own subplot. This is a middle aged guy with at least 14 kids and a rotating cast of baby mamas and a history of being a deadbeat dad. There have also been multiple reports of him offering his sperm to coworkers like he’s handing out business cards at the office. On top of all that, he spends a good chunk of his time online pushing conspiracy theories to an audience of hundreds of millions.

So just picture your average middle aged guy down the street doing all of that. Baby mamas he barely shows up for, blowing up at coworkers, offering people his sperm at the workplace, wild conspiracy posts at all hours. How do you think the neighborhood would treat that guy?

Now picture that same guy is also worth over a trillion dollars, and a chunk of the neighborhood’s retirement money is now riding on his rocket company that explode rocket debris over your house whether they signed up for it or not. One of his king social media fluffers recently floated that Musk is on track to hit 10 trillion dollars in net worth, about a third of the entire US economy. His followers just nod along like that’s a totally normal goal and not a sign that everyone involved needs to step away from their phones for a bit and spend some time in reality.

None of the behavior changed, only his paper bank account did, and somehow that’s enough to flip “yikes” into “visionary.” We’ve quietly rewired what counts as admirable in this country. Net worth success gets treated as proof of goodness, like the math just works backwards. Got a trillion dollar valuation? Must be doing something right, ignore literally everything else.

That’s how the SpaceX premier went. Roll the highlight reel, cue the applause, enjoy the ride while it lasts. But every season of this show ends the same way. The bubble pops, the music stops, and everyone acts shocked all over again, like history wasn’t basically begging them to see it coming. The only real question left is when it ends, not if. See you then.