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The world’s richest man is making some of history’s wildest promises. Ahead of the forthcoming flotation of his SpaceX satellite, rocket and AI company — at a mooted valuation of a record-breaking $1.75tn — Elon Musk has been promising to deliver an AI-energised future of sustainable abundance, orbital data centres and a colony of 1mn people on Mars. We may need to invent a new adjective to describe the superlatives that pour from Musk’s mouth. Muskavite, perhaps?
On Wednesday, SpaceX filed its prospectus, one of the most extraordinary documents in corporate history. The company plans to accelerate the “emergence of new trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars, and beyond” and ensure humanity’s future flourishing. “We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the prospectus states, in a sentence unlikely to have appeared before in any US Securities and Exchange Commission document.
In September, Tesla (Musk’s $1.3tn corporate side hustle), unveiled Master Plan IV, promising to help build the future “we’ve always dreamed of” by “redefining the fundamental building blocks of labour, mobility and energy”.
As one FT reader has noted, Musk’s rhetoric has strange echoes of the promises made by a very different man in a very different context: the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961.
Earlier that year, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had completed the first manned space flight. Soviet technological prowess seemed unmatchable. The Communist Party’s bombastic general secretary Nikita Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union was well on the way to building a “life of plenty”. “We are strictly guided by scientific calculations,” Khrushchev said. “And calculations show that in 20 years we will build a mainly communist society.”
In almost every respect, Musk and Khrushchev are polar opposites. Musk is a one-of-a-kind entrepreneurial genius, whereas Khrushchev was a sly, reckless and bloody-handed Soviet thug. The diehard communist once famously threatened to bury capitalism, while Musk rails against the dead hand of the “administrative state” (even if he profits mightily from government contracts).
However, one common inspiration was the ear trumpet-toting scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the grandfather of the Soviet space programme and a leading figure in the Russian cosmist movement. Tsiolkovsky is best known for illustrating the “tyranny of the rocket equation”, which explains the fundamentals of space flight. “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever,” he wrote in 1911.
Musk has cited the above Tsiolkovsky quote as an inspiration. “I find that incredibly exciting,” he said.
As Michel Eltchaninoff describes in Lenin Walked On The Moon, our contemporary tech titans are in many ways “the children of Russian cosmism”. And Tsiolkovsky’s intellectual heirs have embraced Musk as one of their own. Last year, they staged the reading of a play in honour of the two men in Tsiolkovsky’s hometown.
Musk’s grandiose visions have certainly inspired a generation of vibe investors, who have consistently backed his ventures in defiance of conventional valuation metrics. Over the past 24 years, SpaceX has racked up cumulative losses of $37bn, according to The Information: way more than any other company that has gone public before. “We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future,” the prospectus candidly admits amid 37 pages of risk factors.
SpaceX is undoubtedly an astonishing company. It has made 650 orbital space launches and transformed the space economy. But the forthcoming market launch at anything like the touted valuation would appear to defy financial gravity in much the same way that Khrushchev’s plans once flouted economic logic.
For Musk, SpaceX’s listing is only a milepost on the way to extending “the light of consciousness to the stars”, a mission Tsiolkovsky would surely have applauded. But history shows that sweeping visions can end in crushing failures. Three years after delivering his boastful 1961 speech, Khrushchev was ousted amid denunciations of his “hare-brained schemes”. At least, controlling 94 per cent of the B voting shares in SpaceX, Musk is unlikely to suffer the fate of his hapless Muscovite predecessor.
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