Musk Says SpaceX Could Be Worth More Than the Entire World
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Megalomania as a business model: Elon Musk thinks SpaceX could one day be worth many times the entire global economy. “This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy,” Mr. Musk wrote on X last Thursday. A day later, he added that seeing a path was not a statement of extreme confidence. He merely believes the probability is “not zero.”
$12 Quadrillion as a Floor
Yahoo Finance did the math. The International Monetary Fund estimates global economic output for 2026 at about $126 trillion (about €112 trillion). Just two orders of magnitude more would mean a value of more than $12 quadrillion (about €10.7 quadrillion). That would be roughly 5,500 times SpaceX’s current market value, which stood at about $2.2 trillion (about €2 trillion) at Thursday’s close. A $1,000 investment would turn into $5.5 million.
SpaceX is still far from that. In the second quarter, the company posted revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92 percent, but a loss of $541 million. Internally, SpaceX expects $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, according to Mr. Musk. Since its I.P.O. in June, the stock has recovered after a slump, recently lifted by Starship’s first orbital flight and the planned push into the U.S. wireless business.
The Sun as a Business Model
The idea is not new. In July, Mr. Musk said SpaceX would be worth more than the rest of Earth if it achieved its goals. His argument rests on the Kardashev scale, which ranks civilizations by how much energy they can harness. In space, he argues, it is possible to tap many times the energy available on Earth, for example for orbital data centers, while humanity so far uses only a tiny fraction of the Sun’s output.
‘Classic Musk Hype’
Analysts reacted with mockery and skepticism. Neil Wilson of Saxo UK called Mr. Musk “a believer and a stargazer” and the post “a bit of classic Musk hype and theatre,” though he conceded that even a small fraction of that value would make SpaceX very valuable. Russ Mould of AJ Bell pointed to the enormous costs and risks: A discounted cash flow valuation would require an extremely high discount rate, so the theoretical value may be lower than many assume. And Ipek Ozkardeskaya of Swissquote Bank said the most obvious question remains unanswered, namely how much it will cost to get there in the first place. Critics also point out that Mr. Musk has been promising fully autonomous driving at Tesla for more than a decade.
For Mr. Musk himself, the SpaceX rally is already paying off: This year he briefly became the first trillionaire in history and is by far the biggest winner among tech billionaires.
