SpaceX is finally going public, which means Elon Musk has officially run out of Earth-based schemes to distract us from the fact that he owns half the internet’s infrastructure while the other half argues about whether he should. A stock debut for a rocket company is the logical next move when you have already bought Twitter, promised to colonize Mars, and somehow convinced people that cryptocurrency is a personality trait.
Here is what actually matters: SpaceX going public will dump roughly seventeen billion dollars into Musk’s accounts at a moment when the broader economy is doing that thing where inflation keeps pretending it is dead but nobody believes it. The timing is exquisite. While regular people are still figuring out whether their mortgage will explode next quarter, a billionaire gets to turn his space venture into a publicly traded asset—complete with retail investors who will buy shares because they saw a rocket go up on the news.
The real comedy is that SpaceX is a genuinely functional company with real revenue and actual customers. It is not a meme stock. It is worse: it is a legitimate business that will now be valued by people who do not understand the difference between a satellite launch contract and a cryptocurrency. Musk gets a war chest. Shareholders get exposure to the space economy. And everyone else gets to watch a billionaire perform financial acrobatics while inflation eats their savings at a steady 3.2% annually.
The absurdity is not that SpaceX is going public. It is that this is how we have decided to fund space exploration: through the same mechanism that lets day traders bet their rent on meme stocks. At least the rockets actually work.