Science and Technology

Elon Musk touches everyone’s lives. And increasingly, each of his ventures build on his others, creating a vertically integrated behemoth that is too big to fail. Consider how Musk’s social media site X, formerly Twitter, is automated by Grok, an artificial intelligence assistant created by xAI, which is a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, which just had a spectacular initial public offering and controls Starlink, a satellite internet service used around the world. Together, these companies span not only discourse, big data, and the airwaves, but also the future of truth itself. (Grok is also building Grokipedia, an AI-composed encyclopedia.)

The growing SpaceX empire, with a market value of more than $2 trillion, is no abstract matter for ordinary citizens. Millions of people are now automatically invested in the company through index funds and pension plans following its recent blockbuster listing on Nasdaq. So, what does its immense size and dominance of space mean for geopolitics? If one company—and one man—can determine whether countries or warring parties can have internet access in sensitive areas served only by Starlink, what does that mean for the world?

Elon Musk touches everyone’s lives. And increasingly, each of his ventures build on his others, creating a vertically integrated behemoth that is too big to fail. Consider how Musk’s social media site X, formerly Twitter, is automated by Grok, an artificial intelligence assistant created by xAI, which is a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, which just had a spectacular initial public offering and controls Starlink, a satellite internet service used around the world. Together, these companies span not only discourse, big data, and the airwaves, but also the future of truth itself. (Grok is also building Grokipedia, an AI-composed encyclopedia.)

The growing SpaceX empire, with a market value of more than $2 trillion, is no abstract matter for ordinary citizens. Millions of people are now automatically invested in the company through index funds and pension plans following its recent blockbuster listing on Nasdaq. So, what does its immense size and dominance of space mean for geopolitics? If one company—and one man—can determine whether countries or warring parties can have internet access in sensitive areas served only by Starlink, what does that mean for the world?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University and the author of several books on capitalism and neoliberalism. He is the co-author, most recently, of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The transcript that follows focuses on our discussion about SpaceX. For the full interview, including an explanation of what Muskism refers to and why it matters, try the video box atop this page—for subscribers only—or the free FP Live podcast, wherever you get your audio.

Ravi Agrawal: Let’s talk about SpaceX. What does it do exactly? Why is it so important?

Quinn Slobodian: The SpaceX IPO prospectus lays it out quite clearly. The way they describe it, it has basically three segments. There is a rocket segment, the Falcon 9 rockets, which have been doing a very good job at running many, many missions, often with the partially reusable rocketry that they pioneered about 10 years ago. Then there is the connectivity segment, which is Starlink. There are now around 10,000 of these low-Earth orbit satellites orbiting the Earth. In [early] 2019, there were zero, so that’s a fairly rapid upgrade. It accounts for about 70 percent of the satellites in orbit. Those provide relatively low latency broadband internet, and they’re moving into direct-to-device mobile, too. (That’s actually the only part of the company that currently makes money. The rockets more or less break even.)

Then there’s the AI segment, xAI, the most recent part of SpaceX. xAI is, at the moment, lagging quite far behind the front-runners Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Google Gemini. But what people are buying, if you look at the prospectus and how Musk describes SpaceX, is the AI segment. Most of the future growth, most of the future profit—85 percent, actually—is supposed to come from AI.

The question arises, then: How do they propose leapfrogging the competitors who are currently far ahead of them? The answer is that they’ll break the energy bottleneck that currently plagues the problem of compute for other AI companies by putting data centers in space.

RA: And part of the reason why SpaceX’s stock is down this week is that there have been worries about whether the AI market is overheated and whether we do, in fact, need that many more data centers.

I want to ask you about how reliant we all are on SpaceX. Obviously, this is now a company many of us are invested in. It’s also a company that has been backed by a lot of U.S. government funding, historically. How American is SpaceX? Does this give the United States a geopolitical advantage over China or India or anyone else?

QS: It’s a very important question because in many ways, one of the successes of Musk in the 2000s and 2010s was to denationalize himself, or to not overly mark himself as, let’s say, synonymous with the U.S. state. What that allowed him to do was to sell his production model of the Tesla Gigafactory to multiple clients throughout the world and convincingly sell them the vision that they were defending their own sovereignty and their........

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