SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is apparently worth $2.1 trillion because of its rocket launch business, its internet service business, and because of something it says it will build decades from now.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
The map has become more important than the territory. And the mapmakers are increasingly burning the territory to keep the map warm. The SpaceX IPO on June 12 ended with Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionnaire — a word that still invites a red underline on Google Docs. That word has become because money has changed. It still is a social fiction. But remarkably, the character of the fiction has changed so fundamentally that it is now redrawing the society that holds it. That is, financial markets have become detached from reality, but instead of redefining ‘financial markets’ today, one might have more success redefining ‘reality’ instead.
Money, through history, has allowed strangers who did not have shared values to cooperate with each other. Thus price signals replaced trust. It is not an inherent evil: society, and human civilisation more broadly, has crenellated over this mechanism for centuries. However, for most of this time, money was legible. Put differently, the price of something carried information — about scarcity, labour, demand, and so on. Today, price is becoming less informative. People still transact and society labour on but the signals are becoming so corrupted — summiting a new peak with the SpaceX IPO — that the map is finally consuming the territory.
Published – June 18, 2026 09:15 am IST
