🤚 The Open-Palm Illumination
Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk has looked at his portfolio — a $1.77 trillion rocket company about to IPO on June 12, a $1.65 trillion electric car empire valued at 420 times earnings (yes, that number), and whatever xAI is doing this week — and asked the only reasonable follow-up question: Could this become a $100 trillion company?
His answer, delivered with the casual gravity of a man who names his children after encryption protocols: “Insane amount of work between here and there, but it is possible.”
Peter Diamandis explored this exact question in his latest MOONSHOTS segment, and we at The Slap of Wisdom would like to offer our own premium analysis — free of charge, because wisdom, unlike Starlink bandwidth, should not be metered.
The numbers, for those who enjoy vertigo:
- SpaceX IPO: 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece. Valuation: $1.77 trillion. This would make it the seventh-largest company in the United States on day one — above Tesla itself.
- Tesla: $1.65 trillion market cap, currently running on regulatory credit sales and investor optimism in roughly equal measure.
- Combined entity (if merged): $3.4 trillion. That’s larger than the GDP of the United Kingdom, and the UK has been at this for considerably longer.
- Musk’s personal stake: $866.5 billion in SpaceX alone, plus $355 billion in Tesla, plus options worth another $100 billion. His net worth is about to sail past $1 trillion, making him humanity’s first trillionaire.
👐 The Two-Handed Reality Check
Now, before we all start converting our retirement accounts into Starship futures, let us examine the fine print — and there is so much fine print.
Morningstar has politely suggested that SpaceX is worth less than half of its $1.77 trillion IPO target. This is the financial equivalent of your real estate agent telling you that your kitchen renovation did not, in fact, add $200,000 in value. The market will decide, of course, but the market also decided that WeWork was worth $47 billion, so perhaps the market should sit this one out.
Fortune ran the merger math and concluded that a combined SpaceX-Tesla would lose money from day one. Tesla’s profits are currently propped up by the sale of regulatory credits — essentially, other automakers paying Tesla for the privilege of continuing to pollute. This revenue stream is, to use a technical term, ephemeral. When it evaporates, Tesla’s valuation of 420 times earnings will need to find new earnings to be 420 times of.
And yet, buried in SpaceX’s IPO prospectus like a treasure map drawn by a madman, is a compensation structure that ties Musk’s rewards to two milestones: achieving a $7.5 trillion market cap and colonizing Mars with at least one million inhabitants. One of these is ambitious. The other requires an entirely new civilization. The board approved both.
🌿 The Gentle Awakening
The merger speculation is where things get philosophically interesting. Some investors believe Musk’s endgame is to combine Tesla and SpaceX into a single entity — consolidating artificial intelligence resources, streamlining capital raises, and creating a vertically integrated empire that manufactures the cars, launches the satellites, trains the AI, and eventually colonizes the planet where it will sell more cars.
This is either the most brilliant corporate strategy since Standard Oil, or the most elaborate justification for why one man needs to own both the road and the sky. We suspect it is both.
The $100 trillion figure itself deserves a moment of quiet reflection. The entire global GDP is approximately $110 trillion. Musk is essentially proposing that a single company could be worth roughly the economic output of every human being on Earth. This is not a business plan. This is a cosmological event with a ticker symbol.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that Diamandis’s segment captures beautifully: the traditional valuation models were not designed for companies that operate across multiple planetary bodies. How do you price a company that manufactures autonomous vehicles, provides global internet from orbit, plans to build a city on Mars, and has a side project in artificial intelligence? You don’t. You just pick a number with enough zeros to make the analysts stop asking questions.
👑 The Crown Verdict
Will Elon Musk build the first $100 trillion company? The honest answer is that the question itself has already done its job. It has reframed the conversation from “is SpaceX overvalued at $1.77 trillion?” to “is $1.77 trillion merely the opening bid?”
This is Musk’s true superpower — not engineering, not capital allocation, but narrative arbitrage. He sells the future at a premium and delivers it just often enough that the discount rate never catches up. Rockets that land themselves. Electric cars that drive themselves (mostly). A Mars colony that exists entirely in PowerPoint but somehow adds $500 billion in market cap.
The path from $3.4 trillion to $100 trillion requires: a functioning Martian economy, autonomous robotaxis generating recurring revenue on two planets, Starlink becoming the backbone of interplanetary internet, and humanity deciding that one man’s compensation package should include a demographic milestone on another world.
Is it possible? As Musk himself said: “Insane amount of work between here and there.”
We would add: an insane amount of everything between here and there. But if anyone has proven that insanity scales, it is the man who just priced his rocket company above Toyota, Disney, and the GDP of Argentina — combined.
Inspired by Could Elon Musk Build the First $100 Trillion Company? | MOONSHOTS by Peter Diamandis.
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