Are we witnessing a process of transferring control over SpaceX to some other group, for example, the “Big Three” asset managers: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street?
SpaceX has suddenly changed its development strategy. Throughout the entire previous period, starting from the company’s founding in 2002, top management stated that the company would not go public (will not hold an initial public offering (IPO)). This was explained by the fact that investors’ short-term profit expectations would not allow SpaceX to pursue its strategic projects. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that an IPO would be held in a few months.
Within top management, there were disagreements regarding going public. But previously, even the most radical supporters of an IPO proposed only spinning off the Starlink project, making it a separate company, and taking that company public. According to media reports, Elon Musk personally blocked the implementation of these plans for the past five years.
Now, however, it is assumed that SpaceX as a whole will be taken public, and that this will be done very quickly — by mid-2026. The company is planned to be valued at $1.5 trillion, and shares (no more than 2.5% of the total) will be sold in the amount of $30–40 billion. If everything goes according to plan, this IPO will become the largest in history. The previous record belonged to Saudi Aramco — $29 billion raised in 2019.
Moreover, the declared goals of SpaceX’s are changing fundamentally. According to reports from several media outlets, the funds raised will be spent on deploying AI data centers in space. This version was confirmed by SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen in an address to employees. According to him, the IPO will provide SpaceX with “a significant amount of capital that enables us to ramp Starship to an insane flight rate, deploy AI data centers in space.” Eric Berger, an authoritative journalist and senior editor at Ars Technica, commenting on such a sharp change in SpaceX’s course, noted, “If AI is something of a bubble, 10 years from now, SpaceX may be sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of satellites in space for which there is limited use. Maybe shareholders would rather SpaceX make them multimillionaires than make humans multiplanetary.”
The topic of deploying AI data centers in space popped up like a jack-in-the-box at the beginning of October and has caused a frenzy over the past couple of months. Its mention by top management may be either an attempt to fuel this hype to obtain a higher valuation of the shares, or evidence that something has went wrong inside SpaceX.
Throughout the entire previous period, it could not be denied that one of the real purposes of SpaceX’s existence was the exploration of space, and that the company was moving rapidly along this path. John Holst, a respected American spaceflight analyst with a military background, in his 2020 article “Blue Origin: Old Space in New Space Clothing,” defined the difference between SpaceX and other “private aerospace” companies as follows, “When I started this analysis, I wondered if Blue Origin’s slow pacing resulted from Bezos’ apparent treatment of the launch business as a hobby. < …> Blue Origin’s New Glenn won’t change the industry <…>. As I, and others, watch SpaceX now (because it’s the only company that is fundamentally changing the industry). <…> In the meantime, SpaceX is competing with itself. <…> The company’s activities and pacing are daunting.” Now, however, too much points to the fact that SpaceX is going to become a “normal” commercial company and begin doing what such organizations exist for — generating commercial profit.
Twice a year, SpaceX conducts secondary share sales — those held by company employees and early shareholders. Also, in early December 2025, it was announced that the share price at the next such sale, in early 2026, would be calculated based on a company valuation of $800 billion. This raises additional questions about the situation. Why would anyone sell shares cheaply now if in six months they could sell them at a higher price?
Let us recall the history of SpaceX’s valuation. In 2010, after the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, the company was valued at $1 billion. In 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion for approximately 10% of SpaceX, meaning the company’s valuation was $10 billion. At that time, the valuation was determined by the buyer, who announced the price at which they were willing to purchase a stake in the company.
In the subsequent period, SpaceX’s top management itself began to set the share price directive-style, which buyers accepted. As part of regular secondary share sales, the following prices were set. In the fall of 2021—$100 billion, with a package of 0.7% of shares sold. In the summer of 2024—$210 billion.
In the fall of 2024, Trump, who had entered into a political alliance with Musk, won the US presidential election. Immediately after this victory, in December 2024, the valuation rose to $350 billion. In the summer of 2025, during the conflict between Trump and Musk, the company’s value stood at $400 billion . Now, after Musk reconciled with Trump and SpaceX received small symbolic contracts under the “Golden Dome” missile defense program, the company is valued at $800 billion. (It was modest $2 billion for the development of a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observation satellites compared to the entire “Golden Dome” program and SpaceX’s valuation.) Note that the value of the Finnish-Polish company ICEYE, one of the world leaders in the creation of SAR satellites and currently deploying a European military space intelligence system, is estimated at $2.8 billion.)
The Musk fan club explains such growth in SpaceX’s valuation by the fact that the company has created a unique set of technologies that open up incredible commercial prospects. In the summer of 2024, at a valuation of $210 billion, this could be considered reasonable to some extent. Let us also believe that Musk’s friendship with Trump could have been valued a year ago at an additional $150 billion in SpaceX’s worth. But over the past year it has become clear to everyone that any truce with Trump can end any moment. Moreover, literally just recently, this fall, the Amazon Leo company of another American multibillionaire, Jeff Bezos, demonstrated that it is capable of creating an alternative to the Starlink system — Amazon Kuiper. Moreover, Bezos will be able to launch these satellites using New Glenn rockets created by his other space company, Blue Origin.
Let us note that in the summer of 2025, Cathie Wood’s company ARK Invest published a forecast report titled “ARK’s Expected Value for SpaceX in 2030: ~$2.5 Trillion Enterprise Value.” ARK is one of the key players in Elon Musk’s “support group” on the financial and media fronts. At the same time, even ARK emphasized that for such a valuation to be achieved, the following conditions must be met. 1) Flawless success of the super-heavy Starship rocket project. This is the key condition for SpaceX’s financial viability. And this has not yet happened. 2) The Starlink project has reached operating profitability. It is planned that this will happen in 2030. 3) SpaceX has created an autonomous colony of Optimus AI robots on Mars. Half a year ago, Elon Musk’s fans were dreaming about this. Now this story has already been forgotten.
Where does such a growth in the company’s valuation over just a few months come from? Who and why will buy it at such a price? It seems that answering these questions will make it possible to better understand the structure of SpaceX as a company, the nature of Elon Musk’s relationship with the US “deep state,” the structure of the global financial and economic system, and also to put forward assumptions about what will happen to this system.
So what is the interest of the buyers? Why are they willing to pay a very high price for the shares? At present, one may assume that buyers are attracted by the first-ever promise to take SpaceX public, where they will be able to find an even bigger fool to whom they can resell their shares at a higher price. But why were shares being bought for the previous ten years? And most importantly, who exactly was buying them?
The concept of financial imperialism can help answer these questions
The development of this concept began in the early 20th century. Several versions of the concept were proposed for different historical conditions. The latest version was developed in the first half of the 2010s and articulated by several authors associated with the City of London (for example, Tony Norfield), the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London (Costas Lapavitsas) — SOAS, founded in 1916 to train personnel for administering Britain’s colonial possessions, and other British imperial institutions. This background of the authors of the concept can be explained by the fact that, as they themselves argue, the key countries in the global financial system are the United States and the United Kingdom. They cannot exist without each other and at the same time fiercely oppose one another. Within the framework of this confrontation, the Americans, for example, expose the “Panama Papers,” while the British put forward and popularize conceptual models of reality that are beneficial to them.
The essence of the concept of financial imperialism lies in the fact that modern global capitalism functions as a rigid hierarchical structure in which the financial system is the central mechanism of control. The financial system allows the dominant countries, primarily the United States and the United Kingdom, to govern the global economy through “structural coercion,” rather than direct violence.
This “structural coercion” operates like an “invisible web” embedded in everyday international economic operations. Thus, participation in international trade requires the use of infrastructure (SWIFT, correspondent accounts, insurance) controlled by the core of the system.
The triumph of this system of coercion was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998. The economies of the “Asian tigers” (Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea) were destroyed by a sharp reversal of financial flows. A change in risk assessments by Western investors led to an instantaneous outflow of capital, currency collapses, and the forced restructuring of these countries’ economies under the dictates of the IMF. In addition, the core of the system has exclusive opportunities to generate profit through arbitrary changes in interest rates, turning on the money printer, and so on.
The main structure of financial imperialism consists of offshore financial centers (the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, and so on). The key player in this field is the United Kingdom. Offshore zones create the legal gray area necessary for the functioning of the system. Financial flows from the periphery of the system (Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, etc.) are not invested within their own regions. Instead, they are siphoned off through the British offshore network, consolidated in banks in the City of London, and then redirected to US markets to purchase Treasury bonds or shares of S&P 500 corporations. As a result, the periphery of the system finances the budget deficit and capitalization growth of the core countries. Legally, this looks like a series of independent transactions, but economically it is a systematic extraction of resources.
In this system, control is exercised by the market. Institutional investors (the Big Three asset managers: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), as well as global banking conglomerates (HSBC, Rothschild, JPMorgan), do not issue orders, but redistribute capital to where conditions are most advantageous.
It should be noted that if until the 2010s the concept of financial imperialism was developed mainly by scholars representing the Marxist tradition, after the publication of the “Panama Papers” its discussion became widespread. For example, in 2017 the authoritative American scientific journal Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) published an article by Dutch researchers from the University of Amsterdam titled “Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network.” The article proves at a scientific level that the structure of the offshore system is hierarchical. Financial flows move from “collectors” in developing countries through “conduits,” such as the United Kingdom, after which they settle in financial centers.
Let us quote part of the article, “A small set of five countries – the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore and Switzerland – canalize the majority of corporate offshore investment as conduit-OFCs [Offshore Financial Centers]. Each conduit jurisdiction is specialized in a geographical area and there is significant specialization based on industrial sectors. <…> Each country is specialized in a geographical area: the United Kingdom serves as a conduit between European countries and LU [Luxembourg], BM [Bermuda], JE [Jersey], VG [British Virgin Islands] and KY [Cayman Islands]. The Netherlands is the principal conduit between European companies and LU, CW, CY [Cyprus] and BM. Importantly, the majority of investments from LU or HK [Hong Kong] do not require a conduit, and thus LU and HK companies invest directly in European countries and China … In contrast, investments from countries typically identified as tax havens (e.g., BM, VG or KY) do, and thus companies located in these jurisdictions invest in other OFCs <…> The specialization is not only geographical, but also present at the sector level. For instance, the Netherlands is specialized in holding companies, the United Kingdom in head offices and fund management, Ireland is prominent in financial leasing and head offices, Luxembourg in support activities, Hong Kong and Switzerland are characterized under the “Other financial activities category”, which encompasses commodity dealing, financial intermediation and derivatives dealing. <…> Future work could investigate the resilience of the network, in order to find points of action for legislators.”
The concept being described is open secret. Over the past decade, mass Western culture has been engaged in romanticizing the image of the “financial imperialist.” An important milestone in this popularization was the American television series Billions (2016–2023). The series involved the well-known American financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who was responsible for the realism of the depicted characters. Explicitly articulated and romanticized in the series is the self-perception of the titans of the financial world, which are described as the bearers of chaos, a pack of wolves that, if it comes together, can tear apart any beast, no matter how large, up to entire industries, countries, and continents. And they can do all this with a slight movement of their fingers, without even getting up from their chairs. It is also worth noting that the antagonist in the series, the billionaire Michael Prince, against whom all the characters ultimately unite, in his views and actions goes beyond financial imperialism into territory that, at a first approximation, can be called technofeudalism. That is, the creators of the series state the existence of a trend toward the transformation of financial imperialism into something new.
Elon Musk’s company Tesla
To illustrate the concept of financial imperialism, let us consider the company Tesla.
From the point of view of classical production, the company is a “mutant”: it merely preserves the appearance of a manufacturing company, but its internal mechanics are entirely subordinated to the logic of financial value extraction.
Tesla’s main product is not electric cars, but shares. Tesla’s market capitalization, exceeding $1.5 trillion, is completely detached from reality (the P/E ratio — price to earnings — for Tesla is close to 300, whereas, for example, oil companies have P/E ratios close to 10). The price of Tesla’s shares is based not on production activity and sales, but on investors’ expectations and faith. At the same time, physically, most of the production is located outside the United States. The plant in Shanghai produces half of the cars, batteries are produced by suppliers from Asia, and so on. But through mechanisms of transfer pricing, licensing, and intellectual property, most of the profits settle in the United States.
This entire structure functions because a “financial vacuum cleaner” is operating, згьзштп money out of the entire world. There are many channels for obtaining money. For example, Tesla shares are purchased by sovereign wealth funds of a number of countries — Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, and others. Tesla shares are traded on exchanges in Frankfurt, Milan, Vienna, Warsaw, Mexico City, São Paulo, Kazakhstan, and so on. Thus, for example, in 2020, millions of private investors from South Korea became one of the largest groups of Tesla shareholders. Tesla shares are included in a large number of index funds that are bought by pension funds around the world. In addition, Tesla regularly conducts additional share issuances — “printing paper slips,” which it then sells all over the world.
Real power over Tesla is in the hands of the “Big Three” asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), which own about 17% of the shares (Musk owns about 13%). It is the “Big Three” that determines, for example, the size of the compensation that Elon Musk receives. In essence, Musk is a manager, a hired “bubble inflator” (a teller of such unfulfilled stories as “It will be a very big deal when people can release their car [Tesla] to the fleet and have it earn money for them”), working for the “Big Three.”
As O. Henry wrote, “The only way to break up a trust is from the inside.” The contradiction between the manager and the owner of financial capital can lead, and often does lead, to the destruction of such systems. A vivid example is the conflict between Adam Neumann and the company SoftBank, one of the consequences of which was the bankruptcy of Starlink’s competitor, the company OneWeb, in 2020.
It was within precisely such a conflict that, in January 2024, a Delaware state court annulled Elon Musk’s pay package from Tesla in the amount of $56 billion, calling the amount “unfathomable” and ruling that Tesla’s board of directors was controlled by Musk and did not protect the interests of shareholders. However, in June 2024, the company held a repeat shareholder vote, at which Musk regained the compensation. In this vote, the decision of Vanguard — previously voting against Musk — to change its position was decisive. Following Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street also changed their positions. What specific reciprocal steps Musk took remains unknown.
In essence, Tesla is a gigantic financial bubble with a small amount of real production “attached” to it. This is precisely what allows the company to attract money for building factories practically for free and irreversibly (by issuing new shares), as well as to engage in dumping when selling cars, destroying competitors.
SpaceX as a financial imperialist
The architecture of SpaceX as a company up to the present moment has differed significantly from Tesla. What will happen next is a separate question, but SpaceX also clearly exhibits features of financial imperialism. They are expressed in the fact that the funding of the development of new products by SpaceX is carried out by investors from all over the world. Offshore financial centers play a key role in this process.
In March 2025, the Financial Times published an article titled “Chinese Investors Acquire Stakes in Elon Musk’s Companies.” It reported that since its founding in 2002, SpaceX received more than $10 billion from investors around the world. The emphasis of the article was that a significant portion of this money is of Chinese origin. Chinese investors secretly transfer money into companies controlled by Elon Musk using an offshore financial scheme.
Commenting on this information, Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, stated, “How can someone in Musk’s position have so many connections to China but still be a good person to reform the US government?” He pointed put that the influx of Chinese money into Musk’s business empire “adds to this picture that he is more interested in his reputation and his brand in China than he is in American interests”
In March and then in October 2025, the American outlet ProPublica published materials in which it reported a number of important details about how exactly Chinese money finances the development of SpaceX. Official court records prove that SpaceX allows investors from China to buy stakes in the company on the condition that the funds pass through the Cayman Islands or other offshore centers that ensure confidentiality. The key operator ensuring the maintenance of this flow is the American investor-billionaire of Sikh origin, Iqbaljit Kahlon.
Kahlon began working at Peter Thiel’s venture fund Founders Fund immediately after it was opened. At the same time, the current Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, was also working there. In 2007, Kahlon began working with SpaceX, in which Founders Fund had invested. Around 2015, Kahlon persuaded Peter Thiel to sell him part of his SpaceX shares. This was a critically important deal that allowed Kahlon to gain direct access to SpaceX shares and establish direct relationships with the company’s management. In 2016, Kahlon founded the investment firm Tomales Bay Capital (TBC). Through TBC, Kahlon creates and manages investment funds that serve as special-purpose financial vehicles for purchasing shares of technology companies, mostly private ones. Kahlon’s main activity became the creation of funds to acquire SpaceX shares. According to his testimony in court, Kahlon owns billions of dollars’ worth of SpaceX shares.
Kahlon monetized his access to SpaceX through commissions:
— for the main fund (Tomales Bay Capital Anduril III), Kahlon charges most partners a 2% annual management fee;
— plus 20% carried interest (a share of the profit) from any increase in the value of the shares.
Kahlon performs the role of the “back-door doorman” of SpaceX, intended for the entry of foreign investors. This role is extremely important, and the person performing it must be extremely trusted, from the innermost circle. Commenting on Kahlon’s role in the company, SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnson, who worked at the company for 14 years, stated during a court hearing, said that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.”
Kahlon sold SpaceX shares to investors from China, Qatar (the royal family’s fund), India, Russia, Malaysia, Chile, and many other countries. From media reports it is known that the Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, through the Heritage Trust trust fund based in Delaware, acquired 1% of SpaceX shares in 2017.
Why do foreigners invest money in SpaceX through somewhat murky and risky schemes, and also pay gigantic commissions to Kahlon for this? Because every six months, SpaceX’s top management sets a new price for the company’s shares, which is noticeably higher than the previous one. And by waiting a few years, it is possible to multiply one’s investment by reselling the share package to someone else (while giving 20% of the profit to Kahlon).
Financial Times wrote that a Homaer representative pitched SpaceX shares with a minimum buy-in of $200,000 during one of the webinars. That is, a story is entirely realistic in which part of the money that an abstract Chinese person spent on lunch in a cafeteria or a haircut at a barbershop ultimately, via the owner of the establishment, goes toward sponsoring the development of US spaceflight ($0.2 million is precisely the price tag for owners of chains of such establishments).
It should be emphasized that SpaceX’s achievements in the field of spaceflight are obvious, unquestionable, and strategic in nature. For example, the deployed Starlink network of low-orbit broadband internet satellites has in many ways changed the rules of the game on the battlefield. In particular, it is with its help that Ukrainian unmanned boats attack our Black Sea Fleet. This article merely asserts that these successes have been achieved, among other things, on the foundation of foreign investments in SpaceX.
How large is the role of these investments?
In April 2024, the TechCrunch portal reported that SpaceX spent $559 million on research and development in 2018, and $661 million in 2019. These expenditures were mainly related to the Starlink and Starship programs. The years 2018 and 2019 became key for the company: in February 2018, the Falcon Heavy rocket was launched for the first time; in March of the following year, crucial flight tests of the Dragon capsule for crewed flights were conducted; and in the same year, SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites.
As for the super-heavy Starship rocket, whose creation would fundamentally change the rules of the game in space, the following figures are known. By May 2023, SpaceX had invested more than $3 billion in Starship and the spaceport for it. In 2023, after the first unsuccessful Starship launch, Musk stated that the company would spend about $2 billion on the project in 2023. It is believed that to date more than $7 billion has been spent on Starship.
Thus, the investments of foreign investors amounting to $10 billion in “real” money roughly correspond to SpaceX’s total research and development expenditures over the entire period of the company’s existence.
For comparison, the annual budget of Roscosmos, expressed in dollars, currently amounts to about $3 billion.
Comparing these figures makes one doubt the thesis of SpaceX’s efficiency. As an illustration, consider the following example. In July 2025, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin met with the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov. It was reported that one of the topics discussed was work on mathematical modeling in the testing of engines on a test stand, allowing the number of rocket engines “burned” during tests to be reduced. The price of the issue is reducing the number from five engines to two (the figures are very approximate and chosen at random). Such a negligible saving against the background of Musk’s activities is discussed at the highest level. At the same time, SpaceX fans admire the fact that by now some seven dozen Raptor engines have already been “burned” during testing.
SpaceX has excessively close relations with China
Elon Musk in the United States is often — and not without reason — criticized for his close ties with China. The piquancy of the situation is heightened by the fact that other organizations operating in the US space sector are categorically prohibited from having any ties with China.
In the United States, in 2011, as part of an appropriations bill for NASA, the so-called Wolf Amendment was adopted (Frank Wolf, at the time a member of the House of Representatives). According to the amendment, NASA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy are prohibited from using government funds for any interaction with China.
It is noteworthy that a few months ago, after yet another round of reproaches against Musk for his extensive ties with China, discussions unexpectedly began in the United States about whether it might be time to repeal the Wolf Amendment. In particular, in October 2025, the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University held relevant debates among members of the expert community. And when in November, the return of Chinese astronauts was delayed due to damage to their vessel, a massive information campaign was launched in the United States demanding the repeal of the Wolf Amendment so that Elon Musk could fly to the Chinese space station and rescue the Chinese astronauts.
The opinion about the need to repeal the Wolf Amendment did not find support among representatives of the US space community, and the beneficiary of such discussions received a public warning from representatives of the “deep state.” During recent hearings in the US House of Representatives devoted to the development of China’s space program, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin stated that the problem was not China’s rise, but US policy decisions that continue to plague the Artemis program. According to him, reliance on Starship for the Artemis III landing is not viable, including because of a high number of SpaceX Starship launches in order to refuel the lander that would take. He called for canceling Artemis III and starting over.
Griffin rose from an aerospace engineer to NASA Administrator. In the 1980s, he worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative program. In the 1990s, he headed the CIA-affiliated venture fund In-Q-Tel. In 2005, he was nominated by President Bush for the post of NASA Administrator. He was sworn in by Vice President Cheney, which is quite rare. It was Griffin who initiated the launch of the program to procure commercial orbital transportation services for cargo delivery to the ISS, which became one of the catalysts for the growth of “private space.” In December 2017, Griffin was nominated by President Donald Trump for the post of Deputy Secretary of Defense.
The warning was heard by many. Jared Isaacman also heard it. He was nominated, on Musk’s recommendation, as a candidate for the post of NASA Administrator after Trump’s election for the second presidency term. After the quarrel between Trump and Musk, this nomination was canceled; after their reconciliation, it was reinstated. Isaacman, who has such close ties with Musk, during his speech in the Senate two weeks ago publicly pledged allegiance to the anti-China agenda. In particular, he stated the need to get ahead of China in the lunar race in order not to undermine “American exceptionalism.”
So why is Elon Musk taking SpaceX public?
We do not have an exact answer to this question. But the following assumptions can be put forward.
Perhaps Musk is expecting an imminent collapse of the financial markets and is trying to lock in profits while the collapse has not yet occurred.
Perhaps the problem lies not in the financial system, but in SpaceX.
For example, it may have turned out that things are going very badly with Starship, and without this super-heavy rocket the situation with Starlink does not improve. The service life of Starlink satellites is about five years. At present, there are about 8,000 such satellites in orbit, which means that soon around 1,600 satellites will need to be replaced every year. In 2024, SpaceX carried out more than 130 rocket launches. This is a very large and record-breaking figure. But only about 1,900 satellites were placed into orbit (this is a huge number, but not in the context of deploying the Starlink system to a constellation of several tens of thousands of spacecraft). Without Starship, this number of launches would have to be carried out every year, just to maintain the Starlink constellation. But currently the Starlink system does not generate as much profit as is spent on the production and launch of satellites. To reach profitability, it is necessary to sharply increase the number of Starlink satellites in order to sell internet access not only in sparsely populated areas but also in cities (at present, the system’s bandwidth is insufficient for this). And it is impossible to increase the number of satellites without the Starship rocket.
It can also be assumed that completing Starship requires a gigantic amount of money, comparable to the $30–40 billion that is planned to be obtained from taking SpaceX public.
Another possible option is that serious problems have begun for Elon Musk himself, and, in essence, we are observing a process of transferring control over SpaceX to some other group, for example, the “Big Three” asset managers. This hypothesis is supported by the company’s sharp turn toward AI, and by the fact that, as the Financial Times reported in January 2024, a significant share of Elon Musk’s xAI company belongs to investors from Hong Kong. In a situation of a “crusade” by US spaceflight community against China in the struggle for American exceptionalism, many may consider such behavior by Musk unacceptable. If this is so, then what is happening can be interpreted as an attempt by Musk to squeeze as much as possible out of the situation.
This is a translation of the article by Andrey Pavlov first published on Rossa Primavera News Agency web-site.
