The Musk Myth

In October 2024, a seventy-meter rocket booster fell back toward the launch tower it had left minutes earlier, slowing as it dropped while two huge mechanical arms waited open. The arms closed around it in midair, the catch worked, and the people watching it happen shouted, laughed, and threw their arms up because the machine had done the impossible-looking thing in front of them.

Then the clip replayed everywhere, passed along by people who had never cared about rockets and suddenly did. For a general audience, this became the image of SpaceX, reusable spaceflight made visible to ordinary viewers, controlled on camera, and repeatable at industrial scale. If you remember one piece of SpaceX footage, it is probably this one.

Seven Starship flight tests later, in May 2026, an upgraded Starship/Super Heavy vehicle flew from the same development campaign. Starship’s upper stage climbed to the edge of orbit, released dummy

the work still left.

Between the two clips is the book’s question. Much of the story is physical, in that it exists in steel and concrete, in code and battery cells, on launch pads and in orbiting machines. The rockets really do fly more often than most countries’ space programs. The satellites really do put a Montana farmhouse and a Ukrainian trench online. The cars really did force the old automakers to move faster than they wanted to move.

Two days before the May crash, on May 20, Musk offered the SpaceX story to public investors. A registration statement landed on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s servers, hundreds of pages that turned the private myth into shares the public could buy. Strip away the legal language and the proposition is unusually bold. The public was being invited to buy into a company valued between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion before