SpaceX is set to IPO on Thursday to the tune of a $1.77 trillion target valuation, setting Elon Musk up to become the world’s first trillionaire and marking the largest stock market debut in history.
But, like many things Elon Musk does, the public offering has come with its share of criticism. For one, some experts think SpaceX’s price tag is overblown. Morningstar analysts say the company is "significantly overvalued" and put its worth at $780 billion — a little less than half its valuation. Others worry that investors could be exposed to more risk because recent rule changes allow newly public companies to be added to major stock indexes much sooner, giving investors less time to see how those stocks perform before funds start buying them automatically.
What is clear is that the world’s richest man is about to get even richer — and even if he no longer has an official role within the Trump administration, Musk will be an influential figure for years to come. “Everyone who has any kind of financial investments at all in the United States is wound up in the fates of Musk’s investments and companies,” Quinn Slobodian, co-author of the new book Muskism, tells Katie Couric Media. We know — that sounds a little scary, so we sat down with the historian and his co-author, tech writer Ben Tarnoff, to get a better understanding of the SpaceX founder — how he thinks, what drives him, and the biggest misconceptions people have about him.
Katie Couric Media: Why do you think it's important for people to understand Elon Musk’s guiding principles?
Quinn Slobodian: Well, he's the wealthiest man who's ever existed. Tesla is a big part of the tech-driven stock market that we all, in one way or another, are influenced by. Over half of the American population holds stocks either directly as retail investors, or indirectly as people with pension funds or college savings accounts that track the biggest companies in the major indices. That definitely includes Tesla, and by the end of this month, it will include SpaceX as well.
Were Musk to publicly melt down, for either pharmacological or political reasons, and destroy his own companies, the effect would cascade across the whole market. He has become, in a way, too big to fail because of his financial power.
Beyond his financial role, the products and services Musk is selling are designed to make him infrastructurally indispensable. For example, the military capacity of the United States and the Ukrainian army are totally dependent on Musk's SpaceX and XAI. The United States government can't put mass into orbit without Musk's rockets, and the over $7 billion of contracts he signed just in the last couple of months to help build the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield in the United States will also make him a pillar of national security.
His entrenchment is a little scary, don’t you think?
QS: Absolutely. We were both driven to write Muskism out of a sense of terror. Were Musk to get everything he wants, I think many of the things we take for granted regarding individual freedoms would be bent to his mission. The integration with machines — especially technologies that many of us have concerns about because of their intrusion into human creativity, mental well-being, and political discourse — would be supercharged.
Ben Tarnoff: Musk is an extremely powerful individual, and the way he sees the world has immense consequences for everybody else. But Musk can be understood as an avatar of a broader political and economic system that’s coming into view. He embodies certain trends, one of them being the tighter integration of the tech industry with the state. He offers a window into the kind of world that’s being created and how it may differ from the capitalism that's existed in previous periods.
The SpaceX IPO would make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. What would that mean?
BT: On the one hand, Musk has made his name as someone who, unlike figures like Mark Zuckerberg, actually makes tangible things. That’s why his reputation has remained surprisingly intact — despite his erratic behavior and turn to far-right ideology. He wasn't building apps and websites; he wasn't just trying to get teenagers addicted to feeling worse about themselves. That really counts for something for a lot of people.
But his extreme wealth is relatively recent. It dates from the pandemic, when he became the richest man on Earth and Tesla became the most valuable car company in the world. What's interesting and a bit paradoxical is that, despite his reputation as a builder, much of his wealth has come from his capacity to inflate the valuation of his firms through social media performance.
As for what that might mean for the future, it's hard to predict. Going public exposes you to a whole new set of risks. The valuation of his company will be determined by millions of investors around the world, and whether SpaceX will be able to actually meet or maintain its expected $1.77 trillion valuation is an open question. There are loud voices in the financial press that doubt that such a valuation could be maintained.
QS: It's really peculiar when you take a closer look at the way that SpaceX is set up. There's the space segment [SpaceX, which builds rockets], the connectivity segment [satellite internet provider Starlink], and the AI segment [xAI]. The rocket side is very expensive, but also lucrative. It sort of breaks even. The Starlink satellites are quite profitable. However, xAI is a complete money pit; it burned $6 billion last year. Yet SpaceX claims that the vast majority of its future revenue will come from the AI segment.
But there's basically no reason to believe that claim any more than there was reason to believe that Musk would increase Twitter's revenue 5 times in a couple of years, which is what he claimed when he bought Twitter — and it didn't happen.
There’s a danger that retail investors will be left holding the bag.
Why is this huge valuation risky?
QS: On paper, the level of over-promising seems disqualifying, yet that does seem to be simply how business is done in this sector. But with the guardrails removed from SpaceX's entry to Nasdaq, the downside of that speculation becomes a bit more extreme. Without the [waiting period for inclusion into indexes], the [domino effect] on average investors becomes much greater. There’s a danger that retail investors will be left holding the bag.
So why do you think SpaceX is filing for IPO now?
BT: The simplest answer is that he needs money for AI development. Musk’s company, xAI, is a laggard in the AI race: xAI’s chatbot Grok is tied for fourth place behind Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. The only way he can improve his standing and increase consumer and enterprise adoption of Grok is by throwing quite a bit more money at it. He needs to access capital markets.
What do you make of Musk’s political shift to the right?
QS: If you look at politics as being downstream of his economic accumulation model, Musk’s decision to line up behind Trump came along with a pretty deep economic hit. He must have known that the zero-emission vehicle credits in California — which were, like, 40 percent of Tesla's revenue in 2024 — would not be long for this world if Trump were elected. But he was, in his mind, being threatened by Biden's economic policy so extremely that he was willing to swallow that bitter pill. The Biden administration was rolling out antitrust legislation, taxing capital gains, and trying to regulate AI — all of which were perceived as existential threats.
[On top of that, Musk and others associated the Democratic Party with certain social movements.] They believed that the Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and MeToo movements had unleashed a tidal wave of insubordination that was a very serious threat. The move to the right was expressed as a need to set up a bulwark against the twin threats of ungovernable, organic, disruptive social movements and the Democratic Party, which, according to them, was operating at the bidding of the woke masses.
What is the biggest misconception about Musk?
BT: One traditional misconception is that Musk is a libertarian. We strenuously argue in the book that he has never been a libertarian. He has always sought to fuse with the state, to instrumentalize it as a source of power and profit.
The other thing that's important to keep in mind about Musk, particularly now that so much of the emphasis is on SpaceX, is how nimble he has been over the years. It's very easy for me to imagine Musk reinventing himself once again in a new political environment, perhaps with a president Gavin Newsom and a Democratic Congress. It's not impossible to imagine Musk returning to form as a green capitalist. That's a role that he's distanced himself from in recent years, as Tesla has been repositioned as an AI and robotics company. But if SpaceX disappoints, if the politics of Washington shift, it’s quite easy to picture Musk inhabiting a different role.
QS: He's not a libertarian, but he is a shapeshifter.
