I have been reviewing the SpaceX IPO and various analyses of their plan, and the findings are deeply unsettling. The SpaceX offering bears little resemblance to a normal company seeking funding to build meaningful, long-term revenue streams. It appears closer to a final extinction burst of post-industrial capitalist machismo, contorting into a reprehensible, inhumane form of techno-fascism with cosmological pretensions. Even The Economist finds a strain of paranoid eschatology embedded in the offering:

"Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk… will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra."

The SpaceX IPO is deeply weird, brutally manipulative, and ponderously speculative. I am not a professional business person so what follows is just my opinion, informed by other perspectives I have explored. One astonishing feature is that Musk has actually induced the NASDAQ exchange to rewrite its own rules to guarantee the SpaceX IPO extracts billions of dollars from millions of retirees and small-scale retail investors and gives it to elite financiers, particularly Musk’s super-wealthy cronies. This has been orchestrated in such a way that there is nothing small investors can do about it. The SpaceX IPO is grift on a Trumpian scale—perhaps even beyond.

As is widely understood, the SpaceX IPO will be the largest public offering in history, seeking up to $80 billion in fresh capital. The company—which partners closely with Musk’s other ventures, such as Tesla—is targeting a valuation of nearly two trillion dollars, despite running at a multi-billion-dollar loss across most divisions and offering highly fantastical projections of future revenue. Where standard IPOs are typically dry recitations of lease agreements and tax liabilities, the SpaceX prospectus reads less like a standard financial disclosure and more like speculative fiction entirely unmoored from material constraints, penned by Isaac Asimov on five hits of acid and a chug of nitrous. It opens with fourteen pages of photographs of rockets and satellites.