Aerospace company SpaceX made out like a bandit when it went public earlier this month.
A total of $85.7 billion in funds raised.
Elon Musk (SpaceX’s founder) emerged at the end of this IPO as the world’s very first trillionaire.
How about that.
On the surface, it may seem like all of this success is due 100 percent entirely thanks to 24 years of hard work on the part of SpaceX. After all, SpaceX carried out its hundreds of missions, landings and reflights all on the back of its own hard work, right?
It also provides broadband to 160 countries solely through its own private Starlink satellite network, right? It also shaped Grok to be the international generative AI chatbot giant it is today, right?
So it personally and completely earned all of these profits, right?
Not so fast. There’s another side here.
You have to take into consideration just how much of its runaway success is entirely dependent upon being able to operate while passively benefiting from economic value provided by society.
Think about it.
SpaceX controls thousands of acres of land, such as its core production and launch facility in Texas. It operates on these valuable lands without paying a penny in the value of these lands that exists independent on the company’s efforts. Same with its AI data centers in Memphis, which are needed to run and train Grok.
That’s okay. All good.
But have you ever thought of a satellite as a building. And the space that said satellite (building) occupies that no other satellite can.
And not only that, up high, Starlink’s satellite network requires government permission to occupy finite spaces in our planet’s orbit. A government granted license. It does so without paying society any money for these precise locations, the enclosure that satellites need to operate.
All of this is real estate. Whether it’s the ground locations you’re used to seeing or now the orbital ones. We just let them have it. And it’s only going to get bigger and more valuable.
SpaceX is as big as it is precisely because it’s going to profit from real estate enclosure in ways you may not even have thought of yet. But Musk certainly has. The prize isn’t space actually. It’s the treasure trove of minerals in the asteroids.
A value, quadtrillions, to be protected by Trump’s ‘Space-force’. It’s shaping up like Weylan Enterprises out of that film Prometheus.
The enclosure of vast Rental sums that in reality could be taken by society and given back to you as a citizen’s dividend.
But there’s more.
There’s also another threat on the horizon. Other countries, like China, are going to want to get in on the planet’s limited orbital space for their own satellites.
Not to mention the asteroids. We may be forced to choose soon. Private accumulation or a proper citizen’s dividend.
A rental value to be shared by everyone. Not the profits, just the rental value. The Rent, the whole Rent and nothing but the Rent. Just something you may like to think about.
