How do you make a billion dollars? If you ask Michael O’Leary, he’ll tell you it’s by investing 10 billion dollars in an airline. And if you ask Elon Musk, he’ll tell you it’s even easier: start with $22 billion of American taxpayers’ money, lose $5 billion a year, and then sell the lot to the public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion.

That is, roughly, the proposition behind Friday’s flotation of SpaceX on the Nasdaq, the largest initial public offering in stock market history which saw the company’s value soar to close to $2 trillion. While it has been fiercely debated whether the company is drastically over- or underpriced, the question itself feels somewhat irrelevant. This is because whatever the ticker did once it started trading, what should have been decided long before the opening bell was another deceptively simple question: what is SpaceX, exactly?

Is it a rocket company? A satellite communications provider? A social media platform, or an AI frontier lab? A data centre provider? The answer, actually, is yes. Its Falcon 9 flies more often than the rockets of any nation on Earth combined, while Starlink serves more than 10 million customers across 160 countries. Its Starshield division operates the Pentagon’s satellite constellation. This is while X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now uses its own LLM model called Grok, which will soon need so much computer power that it will attempt to create vast data centres in space.

While we may not know which industry SpaceX is actually in, what is certain is that it is an Elon Musk index fund – a single security whose value is a bet on the priorities, attention span and political fortunes of one egomaniacal man.

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