How history came to have its first trillionnaire in Elon Musk
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
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.
Belief as capital Once upon a time, value was material, then it became transaction. Today, it seems, it has become conceptual. SpaceX 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. The $2.1 trillion thus does not represent how things are today but what a small group of supremely wealthy, and almost as powerful, actors believe about the future. And the more these actors invest in this future and lobby governments to draft policies in favour of it, the more the future is likely to manifest. Thus money becomes control. Of course, this is not altogether unprecedented: episodes of collective belief from the railway mania to the dot-com bubble were based on particular visions of the future. The present is distinguished by expectation alone having become valuable, rather than simply reflecting the value of some asset. SpaceX’s two-trillion-dollar valuation does not misread some underlying and obscured reality. It is the reality, and in the only sense that late-stage capitalism recognises. If a belief accrues enough capital, the belief itself becomes valuable. But the present moment is also stranger. Political power increasingly panders to financial scale rather than preceding it. That means once the fiction is sufficiently large, encompassing pensions and public infrastructure, it suffices to protect itself; state optional.
The BriefWire