Forget all of Elon Musk’s talk of heading to the moon and Mars, or “extending the light of consciousness to the stars.” The real reason for his forthcoming initial public offering — very likely to be the largest ever, opening up a small piece of SpaceX to the stock market — is far more mercenary.
The first clue to Mr. Musk’s game plan came in February, when he wrote that merging SpaceX with his artificial intelligence start-up xAI would result in “the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” Note the term “vertically integrated.” That’s code for controlling every stage of an extraction business from source to market.
For all of Mr. Musk’s talk of colonizing Mars, there is a tantalizing extraction opportunity much closer to home, just 100 to 200 miles above Earth, at what is called low-Earth orbit, LEO.
Think of LEO as a kind of cosmic mother lode, a vast open territory capable of providing limitless energy drawn directly from the sun. Controlling LEO, from launchpad to electricity generation, could indeed be transformative. In the global scramble for new energy resources, SpaceX vows to meet the rapacious energy demands of A.I. data centers by moving them into space.
And while some of its predictions of that market seem wildly hyperbolic, SpaceX already has a near monopoly on LEO. More than 80 percent of satellites launched into space last year were SpaceX’s. Mr. Musk’s only serious competitor is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, but the immolation of his New Glenn rocket on a Florida launchpad last week was a serious setback.
In the aerospace industry, SpaceX has become what Boeing once was in aviation: the benchmark that others struggle to match. By 2018, it pioneered the spectacular choreography of booster rockets that, once separated from the upper stages, return to Earth for reuse rather than ending as junk in the ocean.
Its Falcon rockets deliver those satellites into LEO with flawless regularity. The Dragon capsules that sit atop the rockets convey crews and supplies to the International Space Station with dependable precision. And SpaceX’s network of around 10,000 Starlink satellites supplying broadband access across the world delivered $4.4 billion in operating income in 2025.
This degree of technical mastery has meant that SpaceX has rightly earned the status of a national asset (stepping off Air Force One in Beijing alongside President Trump, Mr. Musk had the aura of someone being presented as one of America’s top minds). As a result, many billions of government dollars flow into the company. (Whether this success justifies SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion valuation is a different question.)
How fast Mr. Musk can build his empire in space depends on more than the success of this ambitious initial public offering. It also depends on Starship, his newest and largest rocket. With its shark-fin nose and thundering power, Starship resembles the spaceships of early science fiction. It was originally touted as the prototype for eventual exploration of Mars, but the I.P.O. documents revealed its real purpose: performing as a kind of Mack truck that will disgorge huge clusters of satellites that form the basis of orbital data centers. Before that can happen, Starship will need to reach the same level of reliability as the smaller Falcon 9 rocket, and it is nowhere near that stage in its development.
Of course, demand for artificial intelligence may not be vast enough to justify SpaceX’s valuation; it also may not even be possible to sustain and maintain complex data centers in space. But the I.P.O. makes it imperative to confront the question: Should one person have the power to control so much, and should it be a person with the deeply flawed character of Elon Musk?
There is one similarly complex and titanic figure in American history — someone who came to capture and dominate a new energy market despite his deeply flawed personality: John D. Rockefeller.
Out of the chaotic, wildcat birth of the American oil industry in the 1860s and ’70s, Rockefeller built Standard Oil, becoming the nation’s first billionaire and the world’s richest living person. Like Mr. Musk, Rockefeller was an innovative genius, originating the cold-eyed structure and culture of the typical American mega-corporation. Forty-one businesses were run from one New York office. By the 1890s, Standard Oil sold 84 percent of all petroleum products in America. In this case “vertical integration” meant, with brutal effect, controlling the whole process from drilling, refining and transporting to final sales, driving out smaller producers and rigging the markets through a cartel.
In 1904, the investigative journalist Ida Tarbell published a two-volume exposé detailing how Rockefeller crushed his rivals with ruthless and unjust tactics. The penultimate chapter had a surprising title, “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.” Tarbell carefully distinguished between what happened in the light and what happened in the dark: “This huge bulk, blackened by commercial sin, has always been strong in all great business qualities — in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness. It has always been rich in youth as well as greed, in brains as well as unscrupulousness.”
Ten years after the book was published, Rockefeller rose to infamy for the “Ludlow Massacre,” where company-sponsored attacks on striking Colorado miners resulted in the deaths of at least 20 people, including 11 children.
Mr. Musk’s own brand of careless inhumanity may eclipse that episode. Researchers at Boston University designed a model to track the impact of his desecration of the U.S. Agency for International Development as Mr. Trump’s cost-slashing proxy. By this past February, they estimated that more than 800,000 people, including half a million children, had already died worldwide as a result. And, as now disclosed, he mindlessly destroyed the carefully layered defenses against Ebola in Africa as part of his decimation of government services.
Rockefeller and his heirs gave millions of dollars to charity. Mr. Musk has shown no such interest in philanthropy — or contrition for his actions. What they both exhibit is the pairing of great wealth with moral destitution. Until now, this has always been a uniquely American problem to wrestle with. This time, though, it transcends in impact terrestrial geography and becomes, literally, stratospheric.
