Loathe him if you must. But study him. Why Musk still matters

You can hate him but you cannot ignore him. You can despise him but you cannot erase him. You can detest him but you cannot stop studying him. On Wednesday afternoon, Elon Musk filed the long-awaited prospectus for SpaceX's Nasdaq listing. The company has not yet indicated the size or price of the offering, but according to several observers, Musk is preparing to raise something in the order of 75 billion dollars by selling a stake in the company to investors.

The fundraise, the Financial Times reports, would be based on an overall valuation of approximately 1,750 billion dollars — meaning the market would attribute to SpaceX as a whole, not just the stake being sold, a value approaching 1.75 trillion. If the figures are confirmed, it would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX's market listing matters for the numbers, but it matters for another reason too — one that concerns a characteristic of Musk that even those who, for perfectly good political reasons, detest him ought to learn to study. The SpaceX IPO promises to be record-breaking not only because Musk's business is still doing rather well (Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, has become the group's main engine of profit and growth: its connectivity segment, driven by Starlink, generated 11.4 billion dollars in revenue in 2025, up nearly 50 percent year on year, and 4.4 billion dollars in operating profit, up 120 percent). Musk's IPO presents itself as a record-breaking operation because Musk continues to embody, even in the eyes of those who detest him, a singular quality. Not, as is often said, a monopoly over a market, but, more prosaically, a commanding monopoly over our collective imagination. With SpaceX, Musk is not just selling rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence. Musk is selling an idea of the future so powerful and so compelling that it leads investors to forgive him things they would forgive almost no one else. And the near-unique quality of Musk's imaginative hold is his ability to bring into a single system — a single galaxy — planets that in other galaxies drift in disorder, without a unifying vision.

Space, satellites, rockets, cars, social networks, artificial intelligence. Alongside this element there is another great unspoken factor behind investors' bet on Musk, despite his evident eccentricity, his avowed populism, his proclaimed extremism. Musk, unlike state entities such as China that invest heavily in technology to allow authoritarian regimes to multiply their power in the future — however authoritarian his own impulses may be — is a product of the open society, a product of the West, a product of the market. And however far his profile falls from the ideal for anyone who holds the non-negotiable values of an open society dear, his being a visionary has turned him into an infrastructure that is simply indispensable for those unwilling to surrender the monopoly on the future to authoritarian regimes. In the prospectus filed on Wednesday, SpaceX imagines the future — and sells it — through orbital data centers, artificial intelligence chips, missions to the Moon and Mars, a new and lucrative lunar economy. It imagines a future full of opportunities and full of unknowns, not least the bet on artificial intelligence: because Musk says frankly that investments in AI are and will be enormous, but no one yet knows how to make those investments profitable. Musk acknowledges that today he loses far more on AI than he brings in: against 818 million in revenue, the AI division lost 2.47 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026; in 2025 the AI division posted 6.4 billion dollars in operating losses, and capital expenditures allocated to AI totalled 12.7 billion. Yet at the same time Musk is asking for money, because what he is explaining to investors is that what counts today is not only making profits from AI, but securing a position — being at the front of the line, having greater computing capacity — in anticipation of a bet on a future market that does not yet exist but may one day.

The observers most attentive to the relationship between technology, open society and democracy — who will have noted that the elusive Musk has in recent months played a crucial role through his Starlink in two conflicts, in Ukraine and in Iran: in the first case by supporting the Ukrainian military with his technology, withheld from Russia, and in the second by helping Iranian civilians remain connected to the world despite the ayatollahs' attempt to cut the network — are right to say that Musk is simultaneously a symptom of Western strength and of its weakness. Strength, because no other system produces entrepreneurs capable of putting rockets, satellites and free networks into orbit. Weakness, because democracies that outsource to a single individual functions that ought to belong to states are naturally taking a risk. But in the face of the monstrous incoming IPO, those who do not love Musk should not worry only about the risks of monopoly, of conflicts of interest, of digital oligarchy. In the face of the monstrous incoming IPO, those who love the open society should above all take comfort in the fact that a rough customer like Musk must answer for his actions not to an authoritarian regime but to its exact opposite — the market. And entrusting the market with technology means more obligations of transparency, more oversight, more democratization of profits. And besides, those who do not love Musk should ask themselves not how to reduce his weight in the world, how to contain him, how to limit him — but how to do everything possible to ensure that alternatives exist to his potential monopoly over the imagination of the future.

The Draghi report, to give just one example, notes that Europe has world-class space infrastructure, such as Galileo and Copernicus, but also that Europe is losing ground in commercial launches, in mega-constellations, in propulsion, in receivers. In Europe, for instance, public spending on space in 2023 stood at 15 billion dollars, against 73 billion in the United States. And if a Musk were to emerge in Europe, before even thinking about how to turn his imagination into capital, he would probably have to worry about how to prevent his creation from being deemed too large to avoid being caught in the deadly web of European bureaucracy. You can hate him, detest him, despise him. You can observe him with terror, concern, suspicion. But the monstrous incoming IPO of SpaceX deserves to be studied not only to understand what is missing from the Musk model to make it fully reassuring, but also to understand what is missing from the rest of the world in order to offer a non-regime alternative to the Musk model.

(Translation produced with AI assistance)