NEW YORK — Elon Musk has never been shy about big predictions. His latest may be his biggest yet.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO said this week that he sees a way for his rocket and satellite company to one day be worth vastly more than the combined output of every economy on the planet, a claim that drew both admiration and skepticism from market analysts.

"This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy," Musk wrote Thursday in a post on X.

A day later, he offered a clarification.

"'Seeing a path' is not a statement of extreme confidence that we will achieve that outcome," Musk wrote Friday. "Just means that I believe there is such a path and the probability of achieving it is not zero."

Putting the numbers in perspective

The scale of Musk's vision is difficult to grasp.

The International Monetary Fund projected in April that global economic output, measured at market exchange rates, would reach about $126 trillion this year. SpaceX ended Thursday's trading with a market value of about $2.2 trillion, meaning the world economy is currently roughly 57 times larger than the company.

"Orders of magnitude" implies at least a hundredfold difference. For SpaceX to be worth 100 times today's global output, its market value would need to exceed roughly $12 quadrillion.

Holding other factors constant, that would require SpaceX's share price to rise about 5,500-fold from current levels. At that rate, a $1,000 investment made........

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