A year ago, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI were riding high. After a rapid run-up, the private space and AI companies were worth a combined $500bn.

Today, as a leather-jacketed Musk presided over the biggest initial public offering in history from his company’s grandly named Starbase in Texas, those days seemed almost quaint. SpaceX (which absorbed xAI earlier this year) vaulted to an astonishing valuation of more than $2tn as its shares started trading on Wall Street.

For Elon Reeve Musk, immigrant from South Africa, self-appointed tech visionary and social media rabble-rouser, the Wall Street apotheosis was complete. An opening jump of nearly 20 per cent in SpaceX’s share price confirmed him as the world’s first trillionaire, with the tech world seemingly at his feet.

It is hard to find changes in SpaceX’s business prospects that account for a fourfold valuation jump within the space of a year. Rather, it is testament to Musk’s unrivalled grip on the public imagination, transmuted into Wall Street gold.

When the history of SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO is written, it will go down as a textbook case of Musk’s ability to conjure a compelling vision of the tech future for both Silicon Valley and Wall Street, ably backed by an army of promoters in the financial world. (With fees estimated at about $500mn, it’s probably not surprising that there were few warnings from the Wall Street establishment that the shares might be overvalued.)

SpaceX has recorded remarkable achievements in its 24-year history and its interplanetary future may be every bit as glorious as its promoters claim. But as a strict business proposition it is still a very long way from justifying the $2tn-plus price tag.

True to form, Musk has been busy in recent months spinning up new visions capable of embellishing his company’s prospects. One was the idea that SpaceX will leapfrog its AI competitors by sending data centres into space — something that became, almost overnight, a central plank in the rationale for SpaceX’s valuation. Another was a project that would make xAI the AI backbone for much of the business world, even though it is far behind its rivals in that market.

The lack of detail about swing-for-the-fences projects like these has itself been part of Musk’s method. As he sketches out the long-range dream, it is left to others — the media, investment bankers, his army of stock market followers — to fill in the details. What starts out sounding like science fiction fantasy doesn’t take long to seem not only plausible but even downright likely.

Wall Street has been more than willing to translate Musk’s tech dreams into financial projections capable of supporting the sky-high valuation, implausible as those numbers may seem. Goldman Sachs, the lead bank on the IPO, predicted that revenue would soar to $474bn by 2030, most of it from AI.

Another Musk gambit has been to lean into his own imperiousness. Breaking with normal practice, he declared, more than a week ahead of time, what investors would have to pay for SpaceX’s shares. The message: he wasn’t about to haggle over price. What might have torpedoed lesser CEOs was part of the unapologetic display of autocratic power that has enabled him to float a company over which he has an almost unprecedented level of control.

Of course, it was easier to strike a domineering stance when he knew there would be a huge imbalance between supply and demand on day one. The IPO involved only about 4 per cent of SpaceX’s shares, but a high level of demand was built in, partly because some index investors will soon be required to add the company to their portfolios.

Even without the index funds, SpaceX’s sheer size — at about 2.5 per cent of US stock market capitalisation — has made it too big for many investment managers to avoid. Who wants to be left on the sidelines if it goes on to become the first $10tn tech company? And if the company turns out to be a dud, well, so what: it’s hard to blame your investment manager when all their peers were making the same bet. Some moonshots are just too big to ignore.

Then there is the retail factor. Musk has already amassed a loyal army of individual investors through Tesla. For a generation schooled on meme stocks, crypto and online betting markets, taking a punt on his SpaceX dreams looks almost pedestrian.

All of this combined to make SpaceX’s scintillating first day as a public company perhaps the least surprising event of Wall Street’s year. There will be plenty of time in future for the markets to reassess — when, for instance, more SpaceX insiders become free to sell their shares, or as analysts get to track its business performance and map its red-hot market capitalisation against other AI and tech giants with more modest valuations. 

For now, though, this is Musk’s moment.