SpaceX IPO Makes Elon World’s First Trillionaire, and It May Mark the Top of the AI Hysteria

SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) is today, as the company debuted at a price of $150 per share after listing last night at $135, and the stock instantly traded higher to $168.75 per share. This puts its valuation at close to $2 trillion, making Elon Musk’s 42% stake in the company worth about $765 billion, which combined with his $280 billion in Tesla stock value, officially makes him the world’s first ever trillionaire (as of this writing, SpaceX’s market cap has risen to $2.2 trillion). Grotesque doesn’t even begin to describe all this. Capitalism does, though. 

Part of why SpaceX’s valuation is so high is due to accounting chicanery Musk did by packaging xAI with it. Combining two multi-billion-dollar companies is a good way to make them worth more, albeit at the cost of diluting the investors in the company that actually has a compelling product (Starlink), not the ones who bought into the Nazi CSAM app. Unfortunately, this IPO was a very savvy move by Musk, for reasons I’ll get to in the second half of this blog about everyone’s fears that this is the end of the AI rally.

But before getting to why Musk is truly an expert capitalist, I want to stress that if you believe that capitalism is a fair and just system that produces the most efficient outcome, then you must believe that apartheid South Africa’s preeminent ketamine enthusiast deserves to be the world’s first trillionaire. Sure, Musk gamed the system and flooded it with bullshit, but the entire point of capitalism is that capital can game it. Those of us working wage labor are suckers, and we will never meet the heights that asset holders can reach under a system that rewards disproportionate power to a handful of people. Complaining about Musk breaking the supposed rules is just a choice to become the Democrats in the famed “the last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going ‘but a dog can’t play basketball!’ while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over” post, but for capitalism. 

Paul Krugman called Musk himself a Ponzi scheme, and he is correct, but Musk is simply playing in the sandbox provided to him by this economic system that concentrates wealth by design. He can gin up insane asset values by lying and turning his equity value into meme stocks, then use that paper net worth and his endless supply of options at vast discounts to build immense unrealized gains to help him develop very real-world influence, and he doesn’t even have to make money while doing it so long as he pinky promises to do so in the future. SpaceX only had $18.7 billion in revenues in an unprofitable 2025. This company doesn’t exist without federal contracts, and it may not exist in the not-too-distant future depending on who the next president is and how enthusiastic they are about nationalizing assets that have proven crucial to national security.

While Starlink is a genuinely revelatory product, and Musk’s exploding rockets are integral to our stripped down space program, SpaceX is nowhere near financially viable enough to justify this unhinged valuation that created the world’s first trillionaire. It’s not a stretch at all to call SpaceX the most over-valued company in public market history. Its IPO is priced this high in large part because Tesla’s price is so dislocated from its fundamental valuation, which in a weird way is wholly logical. Who gives a shit about fundamentals like revenue when you can just perpetually promise a future that never arrives and get people to quite literally buy into it? 

Many adherents of this flawed economic system specifically designed to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands will argue that Musk is an anomaly and that with the proper safeguards, capitalism can work for all of us as a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is yet another example of the classic mistake that capitalist adherents make, believing that markets and the equilibrium price of supply and demand are synonymous with a system specifically designed around ownership of shares and private property. Unless you own stock in the company you work for, you’re not a capitalist, you’re labor, and capitalists have spent the last century doing everything they can to dismantle the New Deal we got the last time capitalism’s unchecked greed crashed the global economy. This is a flawed system that utilizes money in inefficient ways, like parking it in Elon Musk’s assets appreciating value, or accumulating interest in a money market fund, instead of being circulated throughout the physical economy like middle class dollars typically get spent.

Elon Musk is capitalism. He won capitalism. He has the high score, and he did it through under-handed ways that the market has clearly stated it could give less than two shits about so long as his lies keep making number go up. Capitalism isn’t an immoral system; it’s an amoral one. It explicitly does not even consider morality in its worldview, just perpetual profits and up only asset values. If Steve Jobs is the (invented) friendly face of capitalism that makes products people want at prices they’re willing to pay, Musk is the brutal truth about an exploitative system in an age filled with them. This is how you beat the game that has no rules for those who truly know how to play it. Everyone else pretending there are any laws that truly restrict capitalists’ power under capitalism is a naïve fool, and Elon Musk, planet earth’s first trillionaire, is proof. 

a little on the nose for capitalism that the world’s first trillionaire is a nazi conman

— Micah (@rincewind.run) June 12, 2026 at 8:43 AM

Elon Musk, Walking AI Top Signal 

One reason Musk going first is genuinely savvy, proving yet again that he knows the cynical underbelly of capitalism better than anyone, is that $2 trillion is a lot of fucking money. There are other AI companies who also want to sell their shares on the public market for a lot of fucking money, and there is only so much fucking money to go around, so first mover advantage here is even bigger than it already is. One might think that the apes and moon boys and other assorted fish in the market who have propped up Elon’s net worth are excited about a new way to gamble on his lies, but the crypto bros who deep down know it is very over for them are all looking at SpaceX in fear.

Crypto fell hard last week, and it is basically flat today, demonstrating how money has been sucked out of the market and SpaceX is ensuring that some of it isn’t going back in. There are no doubt former NFT holders who lost their shirt last week on shitcoins who now are jumping into the SpaceX IPO instead of venturing back into the land of the dead. There are also surely serious fund managers who at this time last year were buying IBIT for their clients to finally get them Bitcoin exposure, or were buying every semiconductor company they could find, but now are buying into the Elon hype. Or they’re being forced to purchase SpaceX through ETFs like the Nasdaq 100 bypassing the typical one-year grace period for IPOs to “mature,” and yet again demonstrating how capitalism’s rules are as firm as Calvinball’s.

Extrapolate these dynamics across trillions of dollars around the world and you see the simple math problem here: there’s only so much money to go around, and the market is already incredibly over-valued, so why should more go into clearly tiring equities in year three of a crazy bull run instead of the shiny new thing? Nvidia, the only stock that matters that has become the largest company in the world building chips for this AI bonanza, has clearly reached a stage of diminishing returns in this rally. Prices can only go up for so long, and ultimately, people will take profits from an over-valued market. Wanting to buy into the largest IPO ever is one reason that could spark a lot of people to smash the sell button on their expensive equities.

And SpaceX is going to be a huge liquidity drain on the market in the coming weeks as serious people and degenerates alike trade the volatility in a new asset price trying to find its footing. Elon Musk’s unprofitable company is now the center of the stock market for the foreseeable future, and it is giving a lot of people the heebie jeebies that the good times may be over. Stocks worldwide sold off last week ahead of the SpaceX IPO, and UBS’s Paul Donovan said that “There seems to be no single cause, rather a general sense of increasing risk.”

One reason why the market has not crashed yet is that one of the most classic top signal indicators was not checked until today: major IPOs. In addition to being an emotional marker of how unhinged the animal spirits have become, there’s a very simple mathematical reason why IPOs can mark the end of major bull runs like they did in 2000. They take money away from the rest of the market, and SpaceX is just the start of this gigantic wave of AI equity supply. Anthropic filed an IPO prospectus with the SEC this month after announcing that its revenue run rate jumped to $47 billion and it closed a recent funding round at a $965 billion valuation, which surpassed OpenAI’s recent round that valued it at $852 billion in late March.

There’s a non-zero chance that Musk going first may have screwed over Anthropic and OpenAI whose IPOs will arrive later to an even more exhausted market. Just between three companies, that’s roughly four trillion in opening value on the public markets. That’s about a trillion dollars larger than Microsoft, the fourth largest company in the world. These AI IPOs are akin to dropping a blue whale out of a helicopter just off a beach area. Everyone lounging on the sand knows they’re about to get soaked, they just don’t know exactly when or how badly.

And the fear isn’t really in people buying SpaceX, but selling it and unleashing a wave of volatility on the rest of the market. Once the lockup period for early investors ends is where the Cool Zone begins for market bears, because that’s the actual wave of liquidity people fear. When the free floats rise from about 5% of SpaceX stock right now to an estimated 25% sometime this summer, that’s $750 billion in equity supply hitting the market. Early investors are going to realize some kind of return after not being able to sell for so long, and $750 billion in volume is a lot.  

“Strong price action, retail mania, slumping vol … so bubbly,” wrote Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett last month. “Add mega IPOs to AI big boys and market concentration easily surpasses (~48%) bubbles of roaring ’20s, Nifty 50 ’70s, Japan ’80s, TMT ’90s.”

Translation: you are now living in historic bubble territory.

Today is a triumphant day for Elon Musk, and it should be a sobering one for anyone who still believes in the fairy tale called capitalism. He won, and you cannot endorse this system without acknowledging the bleak realities its high scorer presents. Today is also a stark one for a lot of smart money on the street, as history tells us this is likely the starting gun for the beginning of the end. How long the end stages of this bull run takes is anyone’s guess, and the market can always stay irrational longer than shorters can stay solvent, but it would surprise exactly no one who understands this stuff if the SpaceX IPO winds up being the top of the AI bubble. Donald Trump killed the crypto bull market with a single post back in October, so if Elon Musk’s IPO does the same to the AI mania, perhaps we can say we don’t live in hell after all, just a simulation with a really sick and twisted sense of humor.