Today, Elon Musk took his privately owned SpaceX public. The result was the first $2 trillion market valuation on any company, ever. What’s more, unlike other most huge companies that have made people rich, like Google and Facebook, it’s a company that deals in atoms, not bits. (Amazon is sort of in-between, really). If Facebook and Google are fairy dust, SpaceX is heavy metal. It builds big things that sometimes blow up. They’re things that a lot of “experts” (*cough* Neil de Grasse Tyson *cough*) thought he couldn’t build, and certainly couldn’t operate at a profit. But he has. Now he’s promising, right in the prospectus, to go much farther.
There are two kinds of reactions to this: Celebration, and jealousy. They are diagnostic.
There’s no question that Musk has relied on government funding whether EV subsidies or direct investment still it has been his efforts that turned these ventures into viable firms.
