SpaceX: The Smart Money Was Always on David
Elon Musk has collapsed the cost of space travel by doing things his stodgy, "we've always done it that way" competitors could not, and still won't. The smart money knew that from the first.
NOTE: This week’s announcement of SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI — a combination valued at $1.25 Trillion — is truly a sensation: yes on its face, but also for reasons you likely haven’t considered.
Elon’s move is vertical integration of a sort few could have imagined even a year ago (unless they read RodMartin.org, of course): building space-based data centers powered by infinite, always-on solar energy and enabled by SpaceX’s launch dominance.
The need is clear, even if the idea seems extraordinary: there’s simply no capacity in the U.S. electrical grid for all the data centers and manufacturing we’re about to build. Even with Trump’s breakneck increases in oil, gas, and nuclear capacity, it’s difficult to see how America keeps up with China in the near-term.
SpaceX’s move pairs with xAI not just the world’s most capable, cost-effective launch-and-satellite platform, but its increasingly ubiquitous Starlink network. This means global high-speed access — even in jungles, remote villages, or the South Pole — to the most powerful tools the internet can deliver. And the troubles solar power faces on Earth are non-existent in orbit: no clouds, no rain, no night, no land-use issues, just always-on nearly-free energy.
It’s the stuff of science fiction. A year ago, if you had suggested the idea to virtually anyone except regular readers of The Rod Martin Report, you’d have been scoffed at.
Now, that “fantasy” is barreling toward a mid-June 2026 IPO, raising as much as $50 billion for execution on an out-of-this-world plan Wall Street is taking perfectly seriously.
That’s a story by itself. But it’s not the story you need to understand.
What’s really of consequence here is that it never really was a fantasy: it was just cost-prohibitive for the legacy technology annointed by leaders lacking either imagination or the capacity to innovate. In creating reusable rockets — which then-incumbents like Boeing and Lockheed were still laughing at ten years ago, and cannot match today — Elon Musk collapsed the cost per pound to orbit. If you reduce the cost of anything, you get more demand and more use. It’s what we did at PayPal. It’s what every entrepreneur sets out to do.
People think Elon’s assertion that by mid-century there will be a million people living and working in space is a fantasy too, but they’re wrong, and for the same reason. If it’s cheap and easy to reach space, people will go. They’ll mine asteroids, manufacture things in microgravity that cannot be made on Earth, and build ports and cities filled with shops, hospitals, and churches. They’ll settle the entire inner Solar System. And they’ll do it as fast as they settled the American West.
That’s what Elon’s news really means. It’s happening. The future is finally here.
Below, Richard Vigilante brilliantly explains how Elon achieved what countless governments and aerospace contractors could not. Learn, and do likewise. — RDM
