My favourite piece on CapX this week was Reem Ibrahim on SpaceX’s record-breaking $75 billion IPO – and why it is the most powerful argument for free enterprise in a generation. You can read it in full below.
It makes a good counterpoint to the week’s domestic politics, in which Andy ‘business-friendly socialism’ Burnham and his campaign in the Makerfield by-election continued to loom large. In this week’s Nimby Watch, James Ball catches the Labour leadership frontrunner running against his own pro-housebuilding record.
This week we also said goodbye to deputy editor Joseph Dinnage, who signed off with a column on why our politicians are still refusing to make the hard choices that would get Britain growing. Joe will continue to write for us, so you can look forward to more lines like this:
Rachel Reeves has been a friend to business, in the way Brutus was a mate of Caesar’s
Elsewhere this week: Glyn Morgan on what America’s predatory mercantilism means for Europe; Mani Basharzad on defending economic liberalism against the new market authoritarianism; Maxwell Marlow on the epidemic of illicit cigarettes killing Britain’s high streets; Shimeon Lee on a benefits system spiralling out of control; and Nima Sanandaji on why Sweden was never the high-tax poster child the Left claimed.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
SpaceX is capitalism’s greatest vindication
Reem Ibrahim
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched the largest ever public offering of stock today, selling $75 billion worth of shares.
SpaceX emphasised its remarkable achievements in its IPO filing: ‘We are the primary launch provider for the US government. In 2025, we launched 11 of 12 National Security Space Launch (‘NSSL’) medium and heavy lift missions and all five U.S. crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station for NASA.’
The company is best known for building reusable rockets, and for dramatically reducing the cost of satellite production and rocket launches. Since 2023, SpaceX says it has launched more than 80% of the world’s mass to orbit each year, with an over 99% mission success rate on its Falcon rockets. Certainly an extraordinary achievement for a private company in a sector once dominated by government space agencies.
However, its business activities extend far beyond launching satellites and cargo into orbit. Through Starlink, its low-Earth-orbit satellite internet network, the company has become a leading provider of telecommunications infrastructure. SpaceX has over 9,600 Starlink broadband and mobile satellites in low-Earth orbit, providing internet connectivity to approximately 10.3 million Starlink subscribers across 164 countries, territories, and other markets.
This technology has proven to be invaluable in moments of crisis. When authoritarian crackdowns or internet shutdowns occur, satellite broadband can offer one of the few remaining ways for civilians, journalists, dissidents, and aid workers to communicate with one another and the rest of the world. As Al Jazeera reported, when the Iranian government briefly cut off internet access last year, Starlink was used by citizens to tell the world what was happening.
SpaceX is a company sitting at the intersection of defense, communications, and extraterrestrial exploration. It is no wonder investors are excited.
The largest IPO of the year ahead of SpaceX was chip maker Cerebras, which has created a Wafer-Scale Engine that contains 900,000 AI-optimised cores and has revolutionised the speed at which artificial intelligence models can be trained and run. Its shares were priced at $185 and closed their May 14 debut at $311.07, a roughly 68% jump that gave the company a market capitalization of about $66.95 billion. Certainly a sign of the kind of investor appetite SpaceX is hoping to tap into.
Musk has indicated that he hopes to allocate a larger portion to individual investors, and so far, individual investors alone have requested more than $70bn worth of SpaceX shares. Over $1bn has been requested from a single family office investor, and requests have come from sovereign-wealth funds. Large asset managers have also shown interest, with BlackRock placing an order to buy at least $5bn.
That level of demand is striking not just because SpaceX is large, but because of what SpaceX represents: the triumph of private enterprise in an industry once dominated by the state. For decades, space exploration has been treated as government territory. Rockets were built through sprawling procurement systems, launches were ruinously expensive, and progress moved at a slow pace.
However, this was not always the case. As Rainer Zitelmann argues, in the early 19th and 20th centuries, early forms of space exploration (namely, the building of space observatories) were typically privately financed. ‘In a sense, the state-dominated Space Economy of the mid-to-late 20th century was the exception, and the recent rise of private space entrepreneurs can be seen as a return to the historic norm.’
SpaceX has embraced private capital and relentless experimentation. It has revolutionised the entire industry in ways that the state has not.
That is the real significance of this IPO. SpaceX is not just selling shares, but it is offering public markets a stake in one of the greatest capitalist success stories of the 21st century. The company’s rise is proof that free markets are not merely good at producing things people consume directly. Free enterprise can transform civilisation-defining industries.
SpaceX now launches national security missions, carries astronauts, connects remote communities to the internet, helps people communicate during crises and pushes humanity closer to exploring the universe.
Whether SpaceX can justify its extraordinary valuation remains to be seen. What is already clear, however, is that activities once assumed to be the natural domain of government can often be done better, faster, and more ambitiously through the dynamism of capitalism and the brilliance of entrepreneurs.
SpaceX is a lesson not only in what markets can achieve, but a reason to ask where else the government should get out of the way.
And if you want more…
– Reeves is closer to an IMF bailout than she thinks (Damian Pudner)
– What the World Cup tells us about free trade (Ben Ramanauskas)
– The £1,000 rule killing Britain’s cake sheds (James Hodgkinson)
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