Yesterday marked the initial public offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, on the New York Stock Exchange. At $1.8 trillion, it is now the most valued corporation on earth.
SpaceX is an amalgamation of three main activities: rockets, AI infrastructure and Starlink, which provides satellite access for both military and domestic consumers. Only Starlink makes a profit, and so overall, SpaceX is in substantial debt. Yet investors are rushing to buy its shares.
SpaceX promises to build new data centres to orbit the Earth and be powered by solar energy. Future revenue streams will, apparently, be plentiful. Musk also argues that his rockets will take people to Mars and the Moon. He claims that ‘space tourism’ will increase and rocket launches will become as common as aeroplane landings.
Space will become ‘the largest economic frontier in human history.’ and there will be ‘new trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars, and beyond’.
SpaceX wants to colonise Mars by creating a new city of one million people. More prosaically, as there is a shortage of critical earth minerals – so vital for the semiconductors that power AI – the company will mine them from asteroids and planets in space.
Much of this is pure madness, but it is dressed up in an end-times rhetoric about saving humanity. Here is what SpaceX’s prospectus states:
The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale. By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.
This megalomaniac vision partially explains why the shareholders will have no control over its CEO, Elon Musk. Instead, SpaceX will resemble a feudal monarchy where the founder has absolute control. As Quintin Slobodan’s book, Muskism, notes ‘What is being sold as tech sovereignty is really an entry to Musk’s walled garden, to which he holds the master key’.
Even the Economist magazine, which is a right-wing pro-business outlet, has noted that ‘apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today.’ Yet about 60% of the US population owns a small amount of shares. They are encouraged to ‘invest’ for security in their old age and so many will buy shares in SpaceX in the hope of striking gold.
The waste of human resources is scandalous. The UN claims that world hunger, which affects one in eleven people, could be ended if $93 billion were spent each year until 2030. Yet, if there is no economic crash, Musk is expected to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Climate change is a real problem as temperatures edge upwards towards 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. So there is a real danger of human extinction. Yet Musk only offers climate apartheid, aiming to create an escape route for the very wealthy on Mars.
Before even his apocalyptic vision arrives, there is an imminent environmental problem. SpaceX’s plan to launch a million satellites, even though there are currently about 14,000 in orbit. The corporation admits this will lead to a ‘continued proliferation of satellite constellations in Low-Earth Orbit’ and ‘a risk of collisions with space debris’.
This then is the darker side of SpaceX’s launch, but it reflects the current state of global capitalism. By almost every measure, capitalism is in decline, particularly in the core of the system.
First, growth rates have decreased significantly since the 1960s. Gross Domestic Product is a very imprecise measure as it incorporates any activity that can be defined as economic, for example, the waste of petrol in traffic jams! Nevertheless, the World Bank estimates that increases in GDP in OECD countries have declined from about 6% per year in the sixties to 2- 3% today.
Second, productivity rates have also declined. Productivity is difficult to measure as it is affected by both the amount of effort that workers give and the levels of capital investment. There has been a slowdown in total factor productivity in advanced economies since the mid-2000s. This has resulted from both the Great Recession of 2007 and a longer-term trend.
Finally, the driver of the system is profit, but again, the rate has declined. Only a regressive distribution of income – away from workers and to capitalists – has propped up the system. The huge capital investment required for the ‘compute’ which underpins AI, will lead to a further decrease in the rate of profit.
This is the context in which the competition between the rival imperialisms of China and the US has taken place. Both are obsessed with getting ahead of the other in AI.
In an expanding system, rivalry and competition can more likely be contained. But when the wider system is in decline, there is not just a zero-sum game but a fight over who will win a share of a declining pie. It is like bugs fighting in a closed jam jar – when it is shaken, they are more vicious to each other. The neurosis of American capitalists is spreading via the influence they exert over political and media institutions.
Musk’s megalomania is not just an individual trait – it reflects some of the difficulties of the wider system.
