Who will invest in Elon Musk’s SpaceX vision?
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Do you believe that Elon Musk can establish a colony on Mars of a million people or launch data centres into space? If you do, you might be thinking of investing in SpaceX, which will go public this month. And if you don't, you might just gamble on Musk anyway, for fear of missing out. Today, Quinn Slobodian, co-author of Muskism, Guide for the Perplexed, on Musk's $1.8 trillion offering. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Quinn, you have written a book about Muskism, which apparently is the new Fordism. So he's the new Henry Ford, is he?
Well, we use that term because social scientists and others have found it helpful to say Fordism rather than just focus on Ford, because it makes you think about all the parts of the social world that are necessary for, you know, Ford's factories to work. So when you say Fordism, you don't just think about cars, but you think about the nuclear family, the male breadwinner, the welfare state, mass consumption plus mass production. It becomes this whole ensemble of relationships. And our book tries to recreate that for Musk. Muskism is the promise of sovereignty through technology that's offered to nations and individuals. but it cashes out as greater dependence on often individual heads of enormous tech companies like Elon Musk himself.
Okay, so interesting. All right, so Quinn, given you really are a Musk expert, you're perfect to run us through Elon's next venture, that is to make his company SpaceX public. Now, he's filed the paperwork needed to undergo the initial public offering, so that is the investor prospectus, if you like, and its target value is absolutely massive, isn't it?
Yeah, so far it's projected to go public at $1.8 trillion is the most commonly cited figure, which will be the biggest IPO in history and will immediately make SpaceX the sixth or seventh largest company ever. in the world by market cap. It would raise $75 to $80 billion right out of the gate for Musk himself to dispose of. So it's really a massive generational, really, moment for the corporate world and for the stock markets to see if it can sustain this, whether there will be kind of a halo effect that ripples out from it, or if it will trigger the kind of the beginning of the bust, actually, of this latest AI boom.
All right, so let's delve more in a moment into these figures that have been released in these documents. But this document, Quinn, it's part financial and it's like part science fiction, isn't it? Because throughout these pages, SpaceX reiterates that its ultimate goal is to establish colonies on the moon and Mars and have data centres in space. It's pretty wild.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, there's even some wilder rhetoric than that. I think the official mission statement of SpaceX is to establish a multi-planet civilization and to extend the light cone of consciousness outwards throughout the universe. It's something along those lines. It's also replete with... These sort of embellished, sometimes AI-generated images of enormous football field-sized AI data centers orbiting the Earth and rockets taking off for other planets, etc. So it really is a piece of science fiction in and of itself. In fact, the phrase, we believe, I can't it, is used 254 times everywhere. in the course of the documents. So it's very interesting to think of it as a piece of sort of speculative fiction in and of itself.
Yeah, and it mentions the light of consciousness almost a dozen times.
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