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Elon Musk is about to get richer and more powerful than ever
The SpaceX IPO is built on hype, but it will make him a trillionaire.
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In the finale of Amazon Prime series “The Boys,” a new character is briefly introduced: Günter Van Ellis, the richest man in the world, amateur astronaut, and father of 17 children.
After suggesting the acquisition of slaves to work in his factories, Van Ellis says to the evil superhero Homelander, “I’d love to bend your ear about white fertility rates.” Even Homelander is repelled; he grabs Van Ellis, flies him up to space, and leaves him there.
Elon Musk was not amused at the barely-concealed mockery, tweeting repeatedly about how much he hated the episode (without acknowledging the Van Ellis vignette). He seemed particularly bent out of shape that in the end Homelander loses his powers and is killed, which Musk, deploying all the analytic insight of a nine-year-old, pronounced “fake and gay.”
This is the man who in a matter of weeks will become the world’s first trillionaire, carried to impossible heights by his own hype machine and the hopes of huge numbers of investors. His company SpaceX will soon have its initial public offering — the first, and probably the biggest, of a series of tech company IPOs in the coming months.
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If the artificial intelligence industry was built on a bubble before, it’s about to get even more so — and your retirement account could depend on whether that bubble pops.
This is big
Earlier this year, clearly looking toward this IPO, Musk combined SpaceX (which launches rockets and runs the Starlink satellite internet service) with his artificial intelligence company xAI (creator of the anti-woke chatbot Grok), which had already absorbed X (formerly known as Twitter). The IPO is expected to raise $80 billion for the company, making it by far the largest in history; the current record-holder is Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, which raised $25.6 billion when it went public in 2019.
This has Wall Street in a tizzy, with everyone excited about getting in on the action. Even the banks managing the offering will scoop up over a billion dollars in fees and commissions; “Goldman Hits the Jackpot After Banks’ ‘Dogfight’ to Lead SpaceX’s I.P.O.”, read the story in the New York Times. OpenAI will follow with its own IPO soon, and Anthropic (which, amazingly enough, is actually profitable) could be next.
With the stock market one of the only parts of the economy where the news is good, this will be the year our economic dependence on AI kicked into overdrive. What could go wrong?