Washington (United States) (AFP) – When SpaceX lists on Wall Street, expected on Friday, Elon Musk will serve simultaneously as chief executive, chief technology officer, and board chairman of the rocket and AI company. He will control more than 82 percent of its voting shares. There is no designated successor, no deputy, and no key-person life insurance written into its filings. The world’s most valuable IPO depends entirely on one man.
“He’s completely upending the conventional conduct of running a publicly traded corporation by declaring himself an irreplaceable dream weaver and master engineer of the whole undertaking,” Quinn Slobodian, co-author with Ben Tarnoff of “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” told AFP in an interview. For Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University who has spent years studying Musk’s empire, that brazen concentration of personal power is not a flaw in the SpaceX offering — it is its defining feature. SpaceX is targeting a valuation of approximately $1.8 trillion and aims to raise $75 billion when trading opens Friday under the ticker SPCX, in what will be the largest public offering in history.
To understand how Musk positioned himself as literally irreplaceable, Slobodian pointed to the “prophetic founder” model exemplified by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. “Jobs and Gates are kind of the template,” Slobodian said, adding that Musk’s decision to give Walter Isaacson — the biographer who immortalized Jobs — access for his own biography was itself a tell. What gave Musk’s version of that archetype genuine credibility, Slobodian argued, was a willingness to go against the grain of early 21st-century investment orthodoxy. At a time when “design in California, assemble in China” was the way — with the iPhone as the example — Musk poured his early fortune from PayPal into a rocket company and an electric vehicle manufacturer, both requiring him to solve brutally hard engineering problems.
His distance from his tech-billionaire peers is now measurable in purely financial terms. Musk’s fortune, expected to hit $1 trillion with the IPO, is approaching three times the size of that of the second richest person on the planet, currently Google co-founder Larry Page. “He’s operating at a different scale, and with a scope of ambition that just makes him singular,” Slobodian said.
Musk is often framed as a libertarian entrepreneur who built his empire outside the reach of government. Slobodian argues that Musk has always depended on government as primary client or subsidy giver, from his earliest startup Zip2’s reliance on publicly funded GPS data to the billions SpaceX draws in federal contracts today. He pointed in particular to what he described as SpaceX’s Golden Dome contracts, worth $4 billion, to supply satellite infrastructure for the Trump administration’s proposed national missile defense shield. In his view, SpaceX is structurally too critical to national security interests for any administration to let it fail. “If Trump gave a second thought to bailing out Spirit Airlines,” Slobodian said of the bankrupt low-cost carrier, “what about SpaceX?”
Slobodian situated Musk’s alignment with far-right movements in the United States and sovereigntist parties in Europe as serving commercial ends, not merely personal ones. He argued that Musk sees compliant political partners both abroad and at home as essential to obtaining the regulatory approvals SpaceX needs: spectrum allocations, satellite launch rights, and permission to operate Starlink in key markets. That worldview, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend in their book, has roots in Musk’s upbringing in the suburbs of Pretoria under apartheid-era South Africa — a regime they argue deployed IBM mainframes and advanced technology to control the population through data collection and surveillance.
As for whether the Musk model outlasts the dream weaver himself, Slobodian pointed to Palantir — which, like SpaceX, first broke into government work by suing the US military for contracts — as one potential carrier of the torch. But a true successor, he suggested, may be hard to find, “just as there was no Henry Ford after Henry Ford,” only imitations.
© 2024 AFP
