When the cost of something falls by a hundred times, you do things that were impossible before.
SpaceX reduced orbital launch costs from $18,500/kg to near $185/kg through Falcon 9 reusability, with Starship promising another magnitude reduction. Starlink's Direct-to-Cell satellites and planned AI computing infrastructure position SpaceX as essential platform for global communications and energy-intensive computing.
- SpaceX reduced orbital launch costs from $18,500/kg to approximately $1,850/kg with Falcon 9
- Starlink operates 9,600 satellites serving 10 million broadband users
- Starship aims to reduce costs another order of magnitude when fully operational
- SpaceX is the Pentagon's largest service provider for military satellites
SpaceX is revolutionizing space access by reducing launch costs by 100x through reusable rockets and positioning itself as infrastructure platform for satellite internet, military services, and AI computing.
Scott Galloway, the media professor from NYU, spent a few minutes on his Pivot podcast recently dismantling SpaceX's upcoming IPO with the subtlety of a jackhammer. The clip went viral this week—Galloway cracking jokes about the prospectus before wrapping up his analysis with a sarcastic jab about Ayahuasca, leaving his audience laughing.
While Galloway was getting the room to guffaw, SpaceX was landing another booster, touching down a rocket vertically on the launch pad—something that read like science fiction just years ago. Ten million people were simultaneously using Starlink's broadband internet through a network of 9,600 satellites. The physics, it turns out, doesn't care much for the jokes.
Elon Musk may be polarizing, but the work is undeniable. He is producing and deploying cutting-edge, fiendishly complex science to build products that are reshaping how the world works and how people live. In 2010, when Falcon 9 made its first flight, the cost to put a kilogram into orbit hovered around $18,500—the price tag of an industry cocooned in fat government contracts and locked into mediocrity. The Falcon 9, with its reusable first stage, slashed that cost by nearly a factor of ten. When Starship—the system pairing the Super Heavy booster (the largest rocket ever built) with the Starship spacecraft—reaches full operation, the ambitious projection is another reduction of orders of magnitude. If that holds, the per-kilogram cost could land at roughly one percent of what it was fifteen years ago.
Consider what happened to broadband when the cost per megabyte transmitted dropped a hundredfold. Or data storage. Or genetic sequencing. When the cost of something falls by a hundred times, you don't do the same thing cheaper—you do things that were literally impossible before. The next phase of Starlink is even more disruptive: the new generation of satellites will have Direct-to-Cell capability, meaning your phone will work in the middle of the Atlantic, deep in the Amazon, on top of Everest. Telecom operators worldwide will have to pay Starlink for this service. SpaceX is quietly constructing an infrastructure layer that much of the planet's mobile communication will depend on.
There is more. The company is planning to launch satellites dedicated to artificial intelligence computing, positioning them in sun-synchronous orbits to exploit abundant solar energy and the space environment's natural heat dissipation. It is an attempt to reinvent the data center for an era where AI's main constraint has shifted from software to energy availability. What sets SpaceX apart is not just one technology but a platform position in a market barely understood. Whatever business opportunities space exploration reveals in coming years, SpaceX will be better positioned to seize them than any competitor. Military satellites? The company is already the Pentagon's largest service provider. Internet for the next two billion people without access? Starlink owns that lane.
The real risk is that all of this depends on a single person. Musk is the vision, the culture, and the magnet that draws exceptional engineers willing to work with the intensity of people who believe they are saving civilization. Without him, the company becomes unimaginable. Yet Musk is also stretched across Tesla (with its own monumental challenges), Neuralink, the Boring Company, and ventures now folded into SpaceX like xAI, which houses X and Grok, the latter locked in fierce competition with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Walter Isaacson's biography describes a man of violent emotional swings, capable of oscillating between brilliance and cruelty in the same day.
If Musk sustains his energy and mental health over the coming decades, SpaceX could exploit a position without parallel: no real competitors, the ability to attract the planet's sharpest engineers, and positioning to harvest opportunities from markets that do not yet exist. In 1415, when King João I summoned the Portuguese nobility to conquer Ceuta, many surely thought it was a joke too. Astronomical spending, untested technology on unknown routes, a small nation on Europe's edge betting it could sail around the world in search of riches. Ha. Ha. Ha. The Portuguese Age of Discovery poured vast capital into the frontier of human knowledge, chasing new trade routes and financial returns. Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, and Cabral were not navigating for love of adventure but because King Manuel I wanted the financial returns of controlling the spice trade—worth more than gold. They changed the world, created unprecedented wealth, and the skeptics of Lisbon had to update their sense of humor.
Galloway is funny. His critiques of Musk are often legitimate, and SpaceX's valuation will certainly remain hotly debated and volatile, as has been true of other great technology platforms that now have settled value and are inseparable from our lives. We can argue whether the valuation carries an "Elon Magic Multiple"—another joke making the rounds—but it is undeniable that he is investing at the frontier of knowledge, creating wealth, and changing the world. That has real value and is already part of history. History does not tend to remember the skeptics.
Citas Notables
Goste ou não de Elon Musk, é difícil discutir com a física.— Guilherme Pacheco, author
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does Galloway's skepticism matter if the physics is working?
Because valuation is not physics—it is belief. Galloway is asking whether the market price reflects real value or hype. The rockets land; the question is whether that justifies the asking price.
But SpaceX has reduced launch costs by a factor of ten. That is measurable.
It is. And when costs fall that far, entirely new markets open. Starlink would not exist at the old price. Neither would the AI satellite plans. The cost reduction is not just cheaper access—it is permission to imagine things that were impossible.
You mention Musk's emotional volatility. How much of SpaceX's success is actually dependent on him?
Almost entirely. He sets the culture, attracts the talent, makes the bets no one else would make. The risk is not that SpaceX fails tomorrow. It is that if something happens to him, the company loses its north star.
Is that a fatal flaw?
Not necessarily. But it is a real one. Other companies have survived the departure of their founders. SpaceX has not been tested that way. We do not know if the culture survives without him.
The Portuguese navigation comparison—is that fair?
It is a useful mirror. Both required enormous capital, both seemed reckless to skeptics, both opened entirely new economic possibilities. The difference is that the Portuguese had centuries to prove themselves right. SpaceX is doing it in real time, with the world watching and joking.
So who gets the last laugh?
History does. The skeptics are forgotten. The people who built the thing are remembered.