🚀 Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Why that's good news for all of us

'If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable, everyone gains.'

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

Of note, via The Wall Street Journal: “Elon Musk is Officially World’s First Trillionaire.”

Anyone who believes in the American Way of Wealth must be disgusted today by Elon Musk’s achieving trillionaire status today thanks to the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation going public. It’s one thing to reward success—up to a point, of course. (All billionaires are a policy error, obvi. Trillionaires must be a magnitude worse error! Successful bodega owners are tolerated.) But what has Musk ever done? Yes, the company he founded in 2002 is now worth nearly $2 trillion and his stake accounts for maybe two-thirds of his wealth.

Good, good for him.

But again, what did Musk do other than take advantage of Washington’s decision to effectively privatize spaceflight in the 2000s after the American public had spent billions funding NASA and the rocket technology it developed? Only for Musk—and now also Jeff Bezos—to extract and exploit this extraordinary public investment for personal gain (Big Pharma doesn’t hold a candle here), contributing little more than some incremental technical improvement and a whole lot of marketing chutzpah with all his Mars talk. It’s like something out of post-Soviet Russia, where the privatization of state industry created a legion of superrich oligarchs whose only skill was knowing the right people in Moscow.

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Sure, I’m being a bit cheeky here as the table-setter before making a few basic points, with the final one the most important.

First, SpaceX’s ability to lower launch costs by roughly 90 percent—through reusable first-stage boosters, but also a vertically integrated manufacturing process and a high-cadence flight rate —is mega innovation equal to any of the past quarter century. That massive cost decline, with another 90 percent or more potentially on the way through full reusability, has fundamentally altered the economics of space and finally made possible the dreams of the original Space Age: orbital cities, deep-space habitats, space-based solar, asteroid mining. The whole retro-futurist shebang.

Second, Musk’s role in making SpaceX super valuable went far beyond introducing concept videos of a possible Mars colony at industry conferences. He made a series of company-defining bets that put SpaceX where it is today. Let’s look at a few of them, resume style:

• Kept SpaceX alive long enough for the fourth Falcon 1 launch to reach orbit, then pushed reusability after the Space Shuttle had left much of the aerospace industry deeply cynical.

• Built a vertically integrated company that could design, test, break, and improve hardware faster than the old contractor model. (Some in the media are still confused on the business model.)

• Made SpaceX its own best customer through Starlink, turning cheap launch capacity into a fast-growing broadband business rather than merely selling rides to orbit.

The 407-foot-tall Starship—stainless steel body, methane engines, full reusability—is the biggest bet of all. (More on below.)

Third, it’s definitely a good thing for Americans when someone becomes superrich starting a company that provides goods and services deemed desirable and valuable by society through its purchase decisions. It’s a sure sign American techo-capitalism is working.¹ Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the Google founders all started companies that sell an economically valuable product. Apple gave us the one device. Amazon built the everything store. Google became the internet’s front door.

And as wealthy as those businesses made their founders, we assuredly made out even better. We always do when an entrepreneur builds a business around an innovative technology or a cheaper way to make something people want. Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus actually ran the math, finding that innovators captured barely 2 percent of the value their inventions threw off across half a century, leaving the other 98 percent to the rest of us.²

The same will be the case for Musk and SpaceX if the vision outlined in its IPO prospectus—cheap and fully reusable rockets, a planet-scale Starlink business, orbital AI infrastructure, and ultimately cities on Mars—pans out. Massive benefits for humanity, not just SpaceX shareholders.³

And if that vision falters? If, for instance, SpaceX can’t quite get the ginormous Starship to do what the company needs it to do? This from the Financial Times:

At the heart of Elon Musk’s ambitions to send humans to Mars — and propel SpaceX to the largest initial public offering in history — is a gargantuan 407-foot-tall rocket known as Starship. SpaceX hopes Starship will become the world’s first fully reusable launch system. Recycling both stages of the rocket, while dramatically increasing payload capacity, would allow the company to launch more equipment into orbit, carry larger satellites and eventually undertake missions to the Moon and Mars at far lower cost. Yet Starship remains far from operational. US regulators grounded the rocket after the company lost control of its booster during a test flight in May. Turning it into a reliable transport system will require technical breakthroughs, including the ability to refuel the spacecraft while in orbit.

By the way, no Starship means no guarantee on that trillionaire status. The sustainability of the vast bulk of Musk’s wealth depends on his ability to create value through SpaceX that civilizationally benefits us more than it ever will him. Fixating on the size of any Musk’s or any individual fortune misses what is surely the bigger story: If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable (or simply because someone started a company that’s really good at selling stuff we really want) everyone gains.

That’s the real dividend of techno-market capitalism.

1. The US has 1,135 billionaires worth $5.7 trillion, up from 927 in 2020, and roughly 70 percent are self-made—large fortunes here are predominantly built, not inherited.

2. Fewer than half of Western Europe’s billionaires are self-made, with fortunes more often tied to inheritance and luxury brands. A high self-made share is a signal of economic dynamism, and Europe’s more hostile climate for risk-taking has coincided with relative stagnation.

3. The dystopian sci-fi assumption—The Blade Runner Fallacy— that advanced technology mainly entrenches elites runs against the historical record of technology raising wealth, health, and problem-solving capacity broadly. Cars, air travel, computers, and smartphones all began as expensive elite goods before becoming widely available — undercutting the fear that AI, robotics, or space tech will stay toys for the rich.

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On sale everywhere by James Pethokoukis The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised