SpaceX just announced it wants to be worth $1.75 trillion. To put that in perspective, that is more than the GDP of most countries, roughly equivalent to the entire stock market value of Japan, and enough money to buy every house in America twice over with enough left to launch rockets at them.

The company, which literally sends things to space, is now being valued as though space itself is a financial asset class. Investors have apparently decided that the traditional measures of value—earnings, revenue, profit margins—are too terrestrial. Why bother with quarterly reports when you can just point at the sky and say “that’s worth money now”?

Here is what makes this genuinely funny: SpaceX is not even profitable yet. It is a company that burns through billions annually to launch rockets, land them on drone ships in the ocean, and occasionally explode them for science. The business model is still essentially “we will figure out how to make money from space later.” Yet somehow, between one funding round and the next, investors have collectively decided this is worth more than Berkshire Hathaway.

The company is preparing for what it calls the “largest stock market debut.” That phrasing alone deserves a standing ovation. Not “an IPO”—“the largest stock market debut.” It is as if SpaceX’s PR team looked at normal corporate language and thought: we send rockets to space, so our words should also escape Earth’s gravity.

What is actually happening here is worth understanding, because it tells you something real about how modern finance works. SpaceX has real technology, real contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense, and real revenue from Starlink and launch services. Those are actual facts. The valuation, though, is pure extrapolation. Investors are looking at the current revenue, imagining a future where Starlink has a billion users, where Mars colonization is a going concern, where space-based manufacturing is real, and working backward to calculate what that would be worth today.

That calculation is not insane. The problem is that it requires almost everything to go right. Starlink has to achieve global dominance in satellite internet. Regulatory hurdles have to evaporate. Competition from Amazon’s Project Kuiper and others has to not matter. The moon has to stay valuable. Mars has to become commercially viable. And Elon Musk has to continue being Elon Musk, which is either a massive asset or a massive liability depending on which week you ask.

Investors have basically decided to price in a future where SpaceX becomes something between a utility company, a real estate developer, and a space colonization firm all at once. They are not buying the company as it exists. They are buying a ticket to a version of Earth where space is as mundane as aviation and just as profitable.

The satire writes itself: we have reached the point where the literal cosmos is now a financial asset that gets adjusted for inflation. When someone asks you why stocks are up, you can now genuinely answer “because space is worth more than it used to be.” The economy has not just gone to the moon—it has priced the moon as a commercial real estate opportunity and calculated the NPV.

For regular investors, this is the useful signal: when a private company’s valuation becomes larger than most public companies without proportional revenue, you are looking at a bet on the future, not a valuation of the present. That bet might pay off spectacularly. SpaceX might actually be worth that much in 2035. Or it might turn out that “we will figure out profitability later” works better as a startup motto than as a long-term business plan. Either way, if you ever get a chance to buy in at this valuation, you are not investing—you are speculating. And that is fine, as long as you know the difference.