On June 12, 2026, SpaceX landed on planet Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, completing the largest IPO in history. The market response immediately pushed Elon Musk’s estimated net worth past $1 trillion.

Media pundits collectively threw their underpants in the air, presenting the figure as a monument to those magnificent men in their market machine and Musk’s unparalleled status as evil engineering genius. The reality of the ledger, however, like zero G, invites a rather more nausea-tinged reaction.

• Postgraduate engineering degrees held by the ‘Chief Engineer’: 0
• SpaceXnet loss in 2025: $4.9 billion
• Post-IPO valuation of SpaceX: ~$1.77 trillion

The market conjured the world’s first trillionaire by assigning a historic valuation to an enterprise that lost nearly $5 billion in a single twelve-month period. This titanic fortune does not exist in vaults or productive liquid assets; it is a paper note of confidence from the bros. It reflects a market pricing of a deliberately manufactured personal myth, while the names of the actual, qualified engineers designing the Falcon 9 and Starship remain entirely unknown and uncelebrated.

• One trillion in dollars per year since the birth of the universe: ~$72.50
• One trillion in dollars per year since the formation of the Earth: ~$222.00 per year
• One trillion in dollars per hour since Musk’s birth in 1971: ~$2.11 million

To comprehend a trillion dollars, one must leave standard economics behind and adopt a cosmological scale. Had Musk been accumulating his wealth at a steady rate since the universe burst into existence, he would have needed to set aside just over seventy dollars a year. To achieve the same figure within a single human lifespan, the market has effectively valued his time—including his infancy sleeping in a cot in Pretoria—at over two million dollars for every single hour he has been alive.

• Average distance between Earth and Mars: 140 million miles
• Cash value represented by each mile of that interplanetary void: ~$7,142

The stated justification for this unprecedented concentration of capital is Musk’s frequently repeated ambition to colonise Mars. If one were to lay out physical dollar bills end-to-end across the average astronomical gap between Earth and Mars, a trillion dollars would not merely bridge the chasm—it would span the empty void between the planets nearly 110 times over.

• Current global population: ~8 billion
• Which represents for each person on the planet: $125
• Current World Bank international extreme poverty line: $2.15 per day
• Estimated annual cost to eliminate global extreme poverty: $170 billion

The view from Earth reveals the gap between cosmic absurdity and human reality. Divided equally, Musk’s paper fortune could hand $125 to every man, woman, and child on the planet. For the 700 million people existing on the absolute margins of survival, that single sum represents nearly two months of income. According to institutional consensus, the structured application of $170 billion a year could eradicate extreme global poverty entirely. Musk’s single paper trillion could fund that global relief effort for nearly six full years.

Fun fact: Saving every penny of your extreme poverty income — without eating, without spending anything at all—you’d need to have started 1.27 billion years ago when Earth was populated exclusively by bacteria, 800 million years before fish, 1.03 billion years before dinosaurs appeared, and you’d only be finishing about now.

• Cost to prevent 42 million people from imminent starvation for one year: $6.6 billion
• Amount contributed by Musk to the UN World Food Programme plan: $0.00
• Estimated cost to bankroll the anti-terror legal defence of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon: Undisclosed but certainly fuck-loads.

When presented with an actual itemised crisis plan by the UN in 2021 to stop 42 million people from starving, Musk questioned the maths and walked away from his own wager. The former billionaire has consistently declined to deploy his historic wealth toward global stabilisation or humanitarian relief. Instead, his direct financial and promotional priorities have been on backing those who failed to evolve from that aforementioned primordial bacteria. He has quietly funded the legal fees of far-right agitators like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and thrown his immense weight behind nationalists like Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party.

• Number of countries where Musk has actively boosted far-right or nativist movements: At least 18
• Public proclamations regarding the inevitability of British civil war: Repeated and ongoing
• Public endorsements of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD): ‘Only the AfD can save Germany’

Across six continents, the ownership of a global algorithmic megaphone has been used to destabilise democracies for his own demonic convenience. While governments struggle with structural crises, Musk has used his platform to declare that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in the UK, branded European prime ministers as tyrants, and provided live campaign webcasts for Germany’s AfD, telling a global audience to ‘move beyond’ the historical guilt of the twentieth century.

The march of time: Marie Antoinette, who play-acted being a shepherdess, said ‘Let them eat cake’ and had her head cut off as a result. Now, Musk, play-acting being a spaceman, says ‘I’ve got all the cake and I’m not giving you any’, and people cheer and give him yet more cake, celebrating a loss-making starship enterprise and a vow to fly to Mars that is receding into the cold, dark distance of unfulfillable bollocks. 

Yet the ultimate manifestation of this trillion-dollar cosmic ambition is remarkably small. Rather than building a multiplanetary future or relieving the suffering of the planet he occupies, the world’s first trillionaire chooses to spend his actual, finite human afternoons hunkered down in a prefabricated hut in Texas, frantically tweeting into the digital void about the imminent collapse of Western civilisation.

This story was first published on Chris Page’s Substack psipook.substack.com