The eye-popping scale of SpaceX’s stock-market debut is remarkable enough on its own, with numbers so large they almost defy belief.
Consider this: in a single day, the company turned 4,400 staff members into dollar millionaires — everyone from aerospace engineers to cleaners and canteen workers.
Its founder, the driving force behind the business, has on paper become the world’s first trillionaire. The listing stands as the largest market flotation ever seen, while the banks involved have collected hundreds of millions for steering the deal to investors.
Yet for a moment, set aside the dizzying financial records. Tune out the applause from Wall Street and look past the clouds of high-octane, space-age hype swirling around the launch.
What makes the prospectus so striking — and so compelling — is that at its core lies an unknown. This extraordinary flood of capital is being committed to a leap of faith. It is a wager, an enormous one, placed on the imagination of a single person and on his ability to transform ambition into something real.
And “ambition” may be the better word, because even “dream” suggests a more clearly defined destination than the one we have. In truth, there is not yet a fully spelled-out vision of exactly what he intends to accomplish.
Elon himself has told us that his venture has a ‘Total Addressable Market’ worth $28trillion. That means by my maths that SpaceX is hoping to sell, on average, a total of $3,500 worth of goods or services to every man, woman and child on the planet; and though I am willing to believe it, the truly amazing thing is we don’t yet know what those goods and services might one day be.
SpaceX’s visionary founder Elon Musk has become the world’s first paper trillionaire
Space X president Gwynne Shotwell (centre) celebrates with colleagues during a bell-ringinf ceremony to mark the opening of trading of the firm’s shares at Nasdaq, New York, today
The SpaceX vehicle is off, streaking towards the heavens – and we don’t really know where it is going, or on what mission. According to Elon himself, the objective of the company is ‘to extend the light of consciousness to the stars’. That sounds like a noble and exciting ambition, but we are left vague about what happens when he succeeds. How does that butter our parsnips here on Earth? The truth is that we don’t know – and that’s precisely why the whole thing is so utterly magnificent.
We don’t know whether we will really be able to make a go of Life on Mars, and in truth it all sounds a bit forbidding, what with the temperatures at -60C and no air to breathe. We haven’t the faintest idea how to get to the stars, or what we would do once we got there.
As for the parts of space nearer our planet, they seem barely more hospitable to human beings. It’s either extremely hot or extremely cold, your muscles atrophy through lack of gravity, and you are in constant danger of being taken out by some tiny coin-sized fragment of another satellite that was left to disintegrate, decades ago, by the Chinese.
We don’t yet know how to get rid of all this space debris, or how to make these data centres in space, or even how to transmit solar energy from the heavens to Earth. We aren’t even entirely sure how to make space weapons, of the kind seen in James Bond, because it turns out that the clouds block the lasers (I asked the MoD).
We know so little about the possibilities of space that this SpaceX flotation is a colossal act of speculation, perhaps the biggest ever; and yet I support it and believe in it passionately – because it is exactly this kind of risk-taking, driven almost always by the energy of one man, that is the engine of capitalism and progress.
Think of Amazon. Jeff Bezos didn’t set out to become a vast global retailer; he wanted to be a bookseller. Facebook started out as a wheeze to keep university chums in touch. I don’t know exactly what SpaceX is going to deliver, and nor does anyone else, including Musk. But think what the company has already done – cutting the cost of sending stuff into orbit by a factor of ten. The objective, as I understand it, is to keep cutting that cost – with more and bigger and ever more efficient rockets – and then suddenly all kinds of things might become possible.
The SpaceX vehicle is off, streaking towards the heavens – and we don’t really know where it is going, or on what mission, writes Boris Johnson
Elon Musk himself has told us that his venture has a ‘Total Addressable Market’ worth $28trillion. That means by my maths that SpaceX is hoping to sell, on average, a total of $3,500 worth of goods or services to every man, woman and child on the planet, writes Boris
If I had to guess, I think we will indeed crack the problem of harvesting the rays of the sun, and then sending unlimited quantities of clean, green energy down to Earth, possibly via microwaves. Imagine the benefits for humanity. No more Miliband madness. No more turbines marching over our moors and killing our birds. No more Net Zero panic – and all because we were willing to take a punt on space.
As evidence for my hunch I would remind readers of the process by which this article is transmitted to the Daily Mail. When I was in government we put a huge amount of money, time and effort into rolling out gigabit coverage across the nation. We hired new engineers, at a time when engineers were in short supply, and by superhuman effort – involving ministers such as Nadine Dorries and Oliver Dowden – we increased coverage from about 7 per cent of premises to 70 per cent of premises.
I think it was a pretty stunning effort by the UK Government. Alas, we had some parts of the country still uncovered at the time I left office, and here in this part of Oxfordshire things are very much the same as they were three or four years ago.
There was one UK provider of whom I had high hopes. This company had taken quite a lot of taxpayers’ money to get people connected. I was therefore very cheesed off to get a pathetic letter, saying that they were being forced to give up, owing to some overwhelming technical difficulty – the cost of getting the council to approve the digging, tree roots, bats, whatever. So I had no choice. I need fast and reliable broadband, and there was only one other solution – and that was to put a satellite aerial on the roof, and link up to Elon’s low Earth orbit array.
In a few minutes I will finish this piece, and it will be sent up the throbbing nose-cone of some celestial Musk gizmo, and then whanged down again to the Earth. This piece is going to travel vast gulfs of space, when it should be pumped through British gigabit broadband the relatively short distance to London. It is crazy that I am relying on an American trillionaire to perform this everyday task, but there is a huge lesson here for this country.
It is very often only the private sector that is capable of taking the risks, and developing the technology, that will change our lives. That is because private companies are driven by the individual effort of their owners or founders or leaders – their desire to succeed, or achieve, or leave their mark. Elon Musk is currently the supreme example of this phenomenon, though there are thousands of others. It is thanks to that competitive, individualistic, ego-driven lust to excel that SpaceX could yet be a technological boon for the whole human race.
