The Ticking Time Bomb Elon Musk Has Hidden In SpaceX

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]SpaceX is preparing for what could become the largest IPO in human history.

[00:00:05]At a reported valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion, investors are essentially betting that Elon Musk's empire could become one of the most important infrastructure systems on Earth. Now, normally this kind of math would get laughed out of the room, but SpaceX is no longer being treated like a normal company because honestly, it isn't. It's really not just a rocket company. It's a bunch of companies stacked on top of each other pretending to be one thing, but it's actually like honestly a bunch of things. It's a telecom network, a satellite empire, an AI infrastructure company, a military contractor, and increasingly a giant interconnected system tied directly to Elon Musk. So now investors are effectively betting that this same empire could become critical infrastructure to the future itself. So how did a rocket company become the infrastructure of the future?

[00:00:57]and is it really the future we want?

[00:01:03]The Mars dream. So, this all started because one guy wanted to go to Mars. In 2002, Elon Musk was not yet the rocket guy or a sort of international embarrassment. He was a newly rich PayPal founder with hundreds of millions of dollars, a deep interest in science fiction, and just a general disregard for anything. His original idea was called Mars Oasis, a plan to send a small greenhouse to Mars, grow plants there, and hopefully reignite public excitement about space exploration. The problem was getting there. At the time, rockets were brutally expensive. So, the launch industry was dominated by governments or national space agencies and giant like legacy aerospace contractors. Even with that money, you can't just like buy a rocket and use it.

[00:01:50]It's a whole thing. So Musk initially tried to buy rockets from Russia, reportedly looking at refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles that could be repurposed for launch, but the Russian negotiations did not go well and they were like laughed out of the room.

[00:02:04]On the flight home, Musk reportedly decided the real problem was that the rockets were too expensive because the industry had become too slow, too bureaucratic, and completely inefficient. So he would just build cheaper rockets himself. The rocket business is not like launching an app.

[00:02:20]If your app fails, people leave a one-star review and someone in product has to say the word frictionless in a meeting. If your rocket fails, it becomes a very expensive fireball over the Pacific Ocean. And in the early 2000s, the idea of a private startup building rockets cheaply enough to change the economics of space sounded not much like a business plan. It sounded like a libertarian fever dream.

[00:02:43]But that was the founding idea of Space X. The company was created in 2002 with a stated mission to reduce the cost of space transportation and eventually enable human settlement on Mars. And as easy as it is to make fun of Elon Musk, and we absolutely will do that, the original critique of the space industry itself was not entirely stupid. The first rocket SpaceX built was Falcon 1, a small two-stage launch vehicle. It wasn't very glam. This was a small private rocket launching from an island in the Pacific run by a company that most of the aerospace establishment still did not take seriously. Falcon 1 launched for the first time in March of 2006 and failed. Then it launched again in 2007 and failed. Then it launched a third time in August 2008 and failed again. Three launches, three failures.

[00:03:35]But in September of 2008, on the fourth attempt, Falcon 1 reached orbit, making it the first privately deployed, fully liquidfueled rocket to successfully reach orbit around Earth. And that is the story that the company and investors and fans and even critics honestly keep coming back to. The impossible thing that almost failed and then suddenly worked. That same year, NASA awarded SpaceX a commercial resupply services contract worth $1.6 6 billion for 12 cargo missions to the International Space Station. That contract changed everything. From here, SpaceX will keep telling a story about human destiny and private innovation and escaping the limits of Earth. But the deeper the company embedded itself into communications and launches and satellites and governments, the more the whole thing started to feel slightly freaky. like humanity had accidentally begun building critical infrastructure around the ambitions of one billionaire.

[00:04:33]Whether we like it or not, SpaceX and Starink have huge scale global power. So much so that I'd heard Ukraine had actually regained territory after Russia lost Starlink access. I found out about this story on ground news. Their website and app that pulls in thousands of news stories from around the world every day, organizing them by story and showing you the political bias, factuality, and ownership of every source, so you can see every angle in one place. Using the bias comparison feature on ground news, I can see that out of the 26 sources covering the story, only one of them is right leaning. A left-leaning headline reads, "US intelligence says Ukraine regained territory after Russia lost Starling access." Meanwhile, a more right-leaning outlet says, "Ukraine regained territory after cutting Russia's black market stink terminals."

[00:05:24]It's a totally different vibe, right?

[00:05:26]Ground News also gives articles a factuality rating. The right leaning outlet source has a low factuality score, while 78% of the overall coverage of the story is high factuality. This means I can make sure I'm getting the facts, not just a spin. If you want to get a clearer picture of the news, you can go to ground.news/danger to subscribe and get 40% off unlimited access to the Vantage plan. The link is also in the description and pinned comment.

[00:05:56]Let's get back to the story. Three failures and a miracle. Even after Falcon 1 finally did reach orbit, for years, SpaceX looked like it might completely collapse anyway. People were not they weren't buying it. they went into it. The company moved fast and they ignored huge chunks of aerospace conventions and they were burning through money at a terrifying speed.

[00:06:14]Musk reportedly pushed teams relentlessly, often demanding impossible timelines. Engineers were sleeping on the floor and But that culture became central to the company's identity. SpaceX developed this philosophy of rapid iteration. Build fast, test, fail fast, and fix fast.

[00:06:31]Falcon 1 was proof of concept, but the real target was Falcon 9, a much larger rocket designed for serious payloads, government contracts, and of course, human space flight to go to Mars. Why? I don't want to go to Mars. If you've been watching the channel a long time, I don't know why anyone wants to go up there. Around the same time, SpaceX also began developing Dragon, a spacecraft capable of carrying cargo and later astronauts to the International Space Station. Now, this was a huge deal. In 2011, NASA retired the space shuttle program. The United States suddenly no longer had its own domestic capability to launch astronauts into orbit, which created an enormous opening for private companies. We're privatizing space now.

[00:07:15]NASA increasingly shifted towards a model where it would fund commercial partners to handle launch and transport services instead of building every vehicle entirely inhouse. So instead of competing against NASA directly, SP X became intertwined with NASA. And then the moment that changed everything, the Falcon 9 landing. In 2015, Spac X successfully landed the first stage of an orbital class Falcon 9 rocket back on Earth after launch. So it went up, came safely back down. Now suddenly that meant SpaceX could launch more frequently. It meant they could undercut any competitives that might pop up. They could dominate all the contracts and most importantly build things in orbit at scale. Once SpaceX controlled cheap access to orbit, the company's real transformation could begin. The rocket business itself was never the final destination. The rockets were just the transportation system. The real business, the thing that would eventually wrap itself around communication, government, wars, and give one man an obscene amount of power, was still to come. the orbital internet monopoly. The rockets are certainly the spectacle. They are the mythology, but the real product is Starlink. What SpaceX has actually built is one of the largest communications infrastructure systems on Earth or technically slightly above Earth. Starink began as an attempt to create a global satellite internet network using enormous numbers of low Earth orbit satellites. The concept sounds deceptively simple. SpaceX launches thousands of satellites into orbits. Users place small little receiver terminals outside their homes or their businesses. And the internet gets transmitted across the planet through a constantly moving orbital network. There are now more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, making it the largest satellite constellation in human history. Traditional satellite internet had historically been associated with terrible speeds um and the kind of user experiences that made people nostalgic for dialup. Starlink changed that by placing satellites much closer to Earth, dramatically improving performance and allowing internet access in remote regions where traditional infrastructure either didn't exist or was just far too expensive to build. If you're in New Zealand, that means waiting for fiber to get installed. And suddenly, SpaceX was competing with telecom companies. The rocket business and the telecom business effectively reinforced each other. The rockets that everybody associated with SpaceX were now functioning as a deployment mechanism for a global communications empire. In 2025, Starlink had more than 10 million subscribers across roughly 150 countries. Multiple reports now indicate Starink generates the majority of SpaceX revenue and acts as the primary financial engine supporting much of the rest of the company. And the more Starink was expanding, the more obvious it is that this network had implications far beyond consumer internet. Airlines began using Starlink. Governments started using Starlink. Militaries started paying very close attention to Starlink. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, communications infrastructure became an immediate problem. Traditional systems were damaged. They were disrupted or they were vulnerable to attack. Starlink terminals were rapidly deployed throughout Ukraine and quickly became deeply integrated in civilian and military communications. I mean, hospitals were using it. The government was using it. Journalists relied on it to get their story out. Frontline military coordination increasingly depended on it. At one point, global geopolitical analysts were discussing the implications of one private billionaire possessing direct influence over communications capability inside an active war zone. The deeper story here isn't really about rockets anymore. It's about privatized infrastructure. SpaceX increasingly occupies a very strange position somewhere between a telecom giant and a defense contractor as well as a launch monopoly and a geopolitical actor. So SpaceX, like I said, is really just like other companies stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat. And we haven't even got to the third company yet. The AI boom completely changed the trajectory of Silicon Valley almost overnight. Open AI's Chat GPT launch triggered a massive arms race around AI infrastructure. Now, Musk had helped found OpenAI years earlier, but had long broken publicly with the company and its leadership. I have a whole video on this, by the way. It's actually way more crazy and publicly than you think if you're not like tied into it. I do recommend checking it out. So, Elon launched XAI in 2023 as his own competing artificial intelligence company. Publicly, XAI framed itself around building truth seeking AI systems. Though exactly what that meant became slightly difficult to interpret once Grock company Chatbot began developing the personality of well Elon.

[00:12:06]But XAI became very serious very quickly. The company aggressively recruited engineers and researchers from OpenAI or Google DeepMind, Microsoft, as well as pretty much all the other elite AI labs while simultaneously entering the enormous infrastructure war consuming the broader AI industry. AI isn't just like a software business.

[00:12:26]It's increasingly an infrastructure business. Frontier AI systems require gigantic gigantic compute clusters, advanced semiconductors, like they use all the water and they need their big data centers and almost an incomprehensible amount of capital expenditure. Once XAI enters the picture, all of M's companies begin overlapping in ways that blur the line between separate businesses and one giant interconnected conglomerate system. X provides real-time global information streams and built-in user platforms. XAI provides AI systems and compute ambitions. Starlink provides communications infrastructure. Spac X controls launch capability and orbital systems. Massive data center projects provide the computational layer tying everything together. The companies increasingly reinforce each other strategically, financially, culturally, and politically. This is one of the reasons the SpaceX valuation became so controversial in financial circles because investors were no longer simply trying to value like a launch company or even a telecom company or even an AI company. They were increasingly trying to value a giant overlapping ecosystem tied together by the world's richest man, Elon Musk. And XAI eventually folded into the broader SpaceX structure through an all stock transaction that reportedly valued XAI at roughly $250 billion despite relatively limited revenue compared to competitors.

[00:13:50]Combined, the broader Musk ecosystem was increasingly being discussed at valuations exceeding a trillion dollars.

[00:13:57]Markets are no longer pricing current business fundamentals in any conventional sense. They are pricing a theory about the future. A theory where AI systems and orbital infrastructure all become deeply interconnected layers of the next industrial era and where Elon Musk companies sit at the center.

[00:14:17]Supporters view this as a visionary integration, the everything company for the future economy. Critics increasingly see it as something closer to a billionaire attempting to vertically integrate modern civilization itself while surrounding the whole structure with enough mythology and futurist rhetoric to justify almost any valuation investors are willing to imagine the 1.75 trillion question. So how exactly do you value something like this? By the time SpaceX began preparing for its IPO, the company was reportedly targeting a valuation of around $1.75 trillion. that would place it among the most valuable corporations on Earth despite the fact the company is reportedly losing billions of dollars annually. According to the Guardian, SpaceX generated roughly $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 while posting nearly 5 billion in losses. Now, this is largely due to Starship development costs and various expansions and honestly just the obscene spending requirements surrounding XAI and everything they need for that. Under normal circumstances, financial markets aren't supposed to behave like this.

[00:15:22]Most major companies are valued at maybe a few times more than the revenue they actually make in a year. Now, SpaceX was reportedly being valued at roughly 90 times its annual revenue. But with SpaceX, investors increasingly seemed willing to ignore conventional valuation logic entirely. SpaceX's current finances are almost irrelevant to understanding its valuation because the market was effectively trying to price an entire future economic system around this company. So once you look at it like that, well, it is still kind of fully insane. It at least becomes understandable. Investing.com compared the potential SpaceX IPO to Netscape in the '9s. Not because the companies are similar operationally or anything, but because Netscape symbolized the beginning of the internet era as a mainstream investment category. The implication there is that Space X might represent the same thing for the emerging like space telecommunications economy. To be fair, sometimes that belief turns out to be partially correct. Like railroads really did reshape economies. I mean the internet, right, reshape civilization. And AI may genuinely become one of the most important technologies in modern history, whether we like it or not. But speculative belief systems also create bubbles. I mean, where's Netscape today?

[00:16:35]The perspective of this IPO itself contained discussions about preserving the light of consciousness, making humanity multilanetary, and eventually building largecale off-world civilization infrastructure. Like, it's not normal It's all weird as hell.

[00:16:51]So, Space X is effectively pitching civilization expansion. And honestly, I think that might be the most important reason that this valuation became so disconnected from traditional markets.

[00:17:04]They're buying participation in a mythology, a narrative where Elon Musk's ecosystem becomes the backbone for the next stage of human technological development. Critics say this is financial delusion wrapped in bizarre futurism, but supporters say it's the beginning of a new industrial revolution. Markets, meanwhile, appear increasingly willing to suspend disbelief entirely. And usually that's the point in history where things either become transformational or catastrophically unstable. Layer by layer, more of the machinery underneath modern life is becoming privatized.

[00:17:38]Space X simply makes this process impossible for us to ignore because the scale is so absurdly visible. If you're interested in Elon stuff, I got a lot of videos for you. I just think it's crazy.

[00:17:48]I don't want to go to space. I got I don't want to I got nothing to do with anything up there. Mars looks Sorry. Bye.