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Like Elon Musk, I used to amuse myself on warm South African evenings by reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. But whereas I thought the Infinite Improbability Drive was just a joke, he seems to have treated it as a challenge. As SpaceX, his rocket firm, prepares to list its shares, it is impossible not to be impressed by his ambition. He wants to build data centres in space, powered directly by the sun, untroubled by NIMBYs and ready to supercharge his quest to build the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence. How much of this will work, no one knows. But the SpaceX IPO could make him a trillionaire, as wealthy as all the households in the country of his birth combined.
Our
cover leader this week,
hastily pulled together after the SpaceX IPO prospectus was released just before we went to press, makes a number of arguments about Mr Musk. We praise him for the seemingly impossible engineering problems he has solved. We observe that, although his firms have sometimes made use of the state’s resources, they are also the fruits of capitalism on rocket fuel. His
latest venture
could bring extraordinary benefits to humanity.
Nonetheless, it is troubling to see so much power in the hands of one man, especially a man with such obnoxious political views. Investors should also be concerned at SpaceX’s insider-friendly ownership structure, which makes Mr Musk unsackable. Still, he is not the first galactically ambitious entrepreneur with odious opinions to transform modern life; think of Henry Ford, who brought cars to the masses and ran an antisemitic newspaper on the side. It is a marvel of capitalism that it can harness the talents of such people to (usually) benign ends. Mr Musk’s investors will shoulder the risk; the rest of us can clutch our towels and hitch a bumpy ride.
On
The Insider this week,
our editor-in-chief and colleagues discuss the “MAGA tax”. We estimate how much faster the American economy would be growing if it were not for President Donald Trump’s erratic policies.
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