The Most Manipulative IPO in History
by Daniel Pinchbeck
I have been reviewing the SpaceX IPO and various analyses of their plan, and the findings are deeply unsettling. The SpaceX offering bears little resemblance to a normal company seeking funding to build meaningful, long-term revenue streams. It appears closer to a final extinction burst of post-industrial capitalist machismo, contorting into a reprehensible, inhumane form of techno-fascism with cosmological pretensions. Even The Economist finds a strain of paranoid eschatology embedded in the offering:
"Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk… will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra."
The SpaceX IPO is deeply weird, brutally manipulative, and ponderously speculative. I am not a professional business person so what follows is just my opinion, informed by other perspectives I have explored.
One astonishing feature is that Musk has actually induced the NASDAQ exchange to rewrite its own rules to guarantee the SpaceX IPO extracts billions of dollars from millions of retirees and small-scale retail investors and gives it to elite financiers, particularly Musk’s super-wealthy cronies. This has been orchestrated in such a way that there is nothing small investors can do about it. The SpaceX IPO is grift on a Trumpian scale—perhaps even beyond.
As is widely understood, the SpaceX IPO will be the largest public offering in history, seeking up to $80 billion in fresh capital. The company—which partners closely with Musk’s other ventures, such as Tesla—is targeting a valuation of nearly two trillion dollars, despite running at a multi-billion-dollar loss across most divisions and offering highly fantastical projections of future revenue. Where standard IPOs are typically dry recitations of lease agreements and tax liabilities, the SpaceX prospectus reads less like a standard financial disclosure and more like speculative fiction entirely unmoored from material constraints, penned by Isaac Asimov on five hits of acid and a chug of nitrous. It opens with fourteen pages of photographs of rockets and satellites.
SpaceX’s true purpose, according to the filing, has nothing to do with short-term revenue or making Musk the first trillionaire. Instead, the company’s objective is now of galactic generosity:
"Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence [Grok, which distorts data according to Musk’s racist and authoritarian biases] that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets."
One thing I have been learning, as I watch the United States’ pathetic collapse and self-willed immolation, is that fascism is more like an art project or a dramatic spectacle than any sensible or functional form of government. Elon Musk, of course, was one of the main architects of our country’s rapid race to the bottom, showing off his Roman/Nazi salute soon after Trump’s victory. The tech oligarchs still want us (the suckers) to believe they are embarked on a great mission for humanity that is somehow in the public good.
The opacity and scale of Musk's initiative have inevitably fostered an atmosphere of paranoia, sometimes emanating from within his own orbit. For example, Ashley St. Clair—the mother of one of his children—recently circulated the claim that Musk may have utilized his satellite infrastructure to interfere with the 2024 voting systems. While this remains an unverified theory, its resonance is telling (amplified by Musk’s own ominous pre-election posts asserting that "anything can be hacked"). The fact that such claims can gain traction underscores the lack of accountability surrounding his aerospace and communications empire. Yet we do not need to rely on satellite conspiracy theories to recognize his interference. His documented efforts to secure Trump's re-election were blatant and unprecedented, encompassing hundreds of millions in PAC spending, algorithmic manipulation of X, and legally dubious cash giveaways to swing-state voters. The threat he poses to democratic structures is not merely hypothetical; during an interview, he laughed nervously while admitting he would likely end up in prison if Trump lost.
One concept that has gained traction recently is “hyperstition,” a framework particularly useful for understanding neo-fascist movements. Hyperstition proposes that mimetics and mythic narratives can be used to manifest a desired future simply by acting as if it is inevitable. The SpaceX IPO functions as a massive, albeit blatantly unconvincing, exercise in hyperstition. As financial analyst Patrick Boyle observed upon reviewing the filing, “What we’re looking at is quite possibly the most extraordinary document in the history of American securities regulation.”
To justify its staggering valuation, the SpaceX prospectus does not focus on existing businesses, but rather projects enterprises that might eventually emerge. SpaceX claims a potential total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, a figure larger than the entire annual economic output of the United States. To defend this valuation, the company provides a long list of highly speculative business opportunities. One proposal is long-haul point-to-point travel, which involves catapulting passengers across the Earth in rockets instead of airplanes. Eight years ago, the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, stood on a TED stage and promised that within a decade, people would take thirty-minute rocket trips from New York to Shanghai, withstanding three times the force of gravity at takeoff in the process.
Today, no commercial commuter rocket exists. Yet the product continues to be pitched to investors as a realistic revenue stream. The SpaceX prospectus also envisions a luminous future of in-orbit manufacturing, building factories in zero gravity—a feat never attempted at scale. It describes passenger and cargo transport to the Moon and Mars, manufacturing and energy production on the Martian surface, and asteroid mining. None of these technologies exists in a commercially viable form, and no market exists to price them.
Every one of these hyperstitious constructs depends on a single machine: the Starship rocket. The rocket forms the basis of Musk’s entire argument. It is expected to launch the next generation of Starlink satellites, carry the cargo for a future Mars colony, and reach a launch frequency the company itself accurately terms “insane.” So far, the Starship rocket remains prone to “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the aerospace industry’s euphemism for exploding. The two-trillion-dollar valuation assumes this vehicle will work exactly as advertised, on schedule, with zero setbacks.
Remarkably, according to the IPO, SpaceX does not conceive of itself primarily as a rocket or satellite internet company. In terms of future revenue, it presents itself as an artificial intelligence company. The filing attributes 93 percent of its total addressable market to AI, and roughly 60 percent of the company’s spending now goes toward AI infrastructure. This includes massive data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi powered by temporary gas turbines that unleash huge pollution, alongside the ceaseless noise of a fleet of jumbo jets.
Musk’s AI product is Grok, which currently holds a marginal 3.4 percent of the AI market. The filing concedes that the enterprise AI space is dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. As Boyle notes, the main documented uses of Grok have been fact-checking posts on X and generating non-consensual nude images. Furthermore, Grok’s explicit rejection of ethical safeguards has drawn regulatory investigations in Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. Alarmingly, Grok is also being integrated into the Pentagon—currently overseen by Pete Hegseth—which struggles to manage escalating conflicts in Iran while blowing up fishing boats.
SpaceX’s own engineers have been slow to adopt Grok because it underperforms rival tools. Musk himself recently admitted the code needs to be rebuilt from scratch, a statement made shortly after he sold xAI to SpaceX for $250 billion in an all-stock transaction. His proposed fix was to spend $60 billion attempting to buy Cursor, the coding tool his engineers actually prefer, with a $10 billion penalty if the deal collapsed. There is a palpable sense that SpaceX is functioning as a vehicle to patch up Musk’s past failures—Solar City, the Tesla Cybertruck, the chaotic acquisition of Twitter—by bundling them into one monumental initiative that the public must buy into to avoid planetary extinction (the “fate of the dinosaurs”)...
However, SpaceX’s near-term AI revenue does not stem from selling Grok as a business-to-business or consumer product. It comes from renting AI computing power to one of its main competitors. SpaceX has a deal to rent compute capacity to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month through 2029, equating to roughly $15 billion a year. Bloomberg reports this amounts to approximately 40 percent of the company's near-term projected revenue. As Boyle points out: if Volkswagen rented out all of its car factories to another manufacturer, would anyone still consider Volkswagen a car company?
If 93 percent of a $28.5 trillion market is AI, then by SpaceX’s own logic, the companies actually winning that market must be worth far more than SpaceX. Anthropic’s quarterly revenue is already roughly double the revenue of SpaceX’s entire AI segment, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing public offerings at around a trillion dollars each. SpaceX is asking the public for nearly two trillion dollars based on the strength of a market already dominated by its direct competitors.
Only one business inside SpaceX currently makes money. In the first quarter of 2026, the space division—the part that builds and launches rockets—lost $662 million. The AI division lost $2.5 billion in the same three months. The connectivity division, Starlink, earned $1.1 billion.
Founded in 2019, Starlink has launched approximately 6,800 satellites into space for personal, commercial, and military use. While Starlink produced $4.4 billion in operating profit across 2025, the overarching enterprise still lost $4.94 billion overall. That means the rest of the company consumed more than nine billion dollars in a single year. Even Starlink’s success reveals underlying vulnerabilities: its average revenue per user has fallen about 18 percent since 2023, largely because the company has relied on steep discounts to artificially inflate subscriber numbers ahead of the public offering.
Starlink also carries a profound ecological risk regarding the Kessler Effect, a threat the IPO filing carefully skirts. The prospectus treats orbital debris merely as a hazard to SpaceX’s own hardware, noting that space is “inherently hostile” and that satellites may fail. It does not reckon with the deeper, systemic flaw in its plan to eventually launch up to a million satellites into low orbit.
The Kessler Effect, named by astrophysicist and former NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler, outlines the atmospheric threshold where the density of objects in orbit becomes so high that a single collision spews debris, triggering a cascading chain reaction of further collisions. This uncontrollable cascade would render whole orbital bands—and potentially our entire stratosphere—unusable for satellites, knocking out global communication infrastructures within months or years. According to Kessler, once this chain reaction reaches a critical tipping point, it is irreversible based on current technology, and the resulting debris field could persist for decades, centuries, or even a millennium.
The SpaceX IPO also inadvertently reveals who has been purchasing the Tesla Cybertruck: SpaceX itself. According to the filing, SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks from Tesla at full retail price, amounting to roughly 1,500 vehicles... (read the rest on Substack)
I stopped the article here because, to read the rest of it, you have to agree to a 7-day free trial, but have to input credit card data to start the free trial. I refuse to be jerked around like that. I considered deleting the entire article, but I feel that many of the points Pinchbeck makes are valid, and I cannot stand Elon Musk, so I want to read the rest of this, but will not sign up as requested. You can subscribe to the free version on Substack, but the free trial is the only way to read the res of this post. I frankly resent this type of coercion and it makes me suspicious of Pinchbeck. Reading some of this guy's bio makes me even more suspicious. Still, I am going to be selfish and leave this here. We'll see what becomes of the rest of this. If you want to read the rest, you can go to Daniel Pinchbeck at Substack.
