Elon Musk is about to take SpaceX public in what could be the largest IPO in history, valued at nearly $2 trillion. According to The Verge AI’s Decoder podcast, host Nilay Patel sat down with New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac to dig into the filing, and the picture that emerges is striking: Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, and he’s getting there partly by bending the rules that normally keep public companies accountable.
What stands out here isn’t just the size of the deal. It’s how much market machinery is getting reshaped to make it happen, and who’s staying quiet about it.
The X reality check
The SpaceX S-1 gave reporters their first real look at X, the platform Musk bought as Twitter in 2022. The verdict from The Verge AI’s reporting is blunt. X isn’t growing. Revenue has stagnated. User growth has stalled. The ‘everything app’ Musk pitched to investors, with one billion users, integrated payments, ride-hailing, even TV, never arrived.
More telling is where X now sits. It’s been buried twice inside Musk’s empire, first folded into xAI, then into SpaceX. As Mac put it on the show, X has become ‘an afterthought in the Musk empire,’ a non-factor next to a business like Starlink.
Patel had predicted this back in 2022. His viral piece ‘Welcome to Hell, Elon’ argued that buying Twitter would damage Musk’s reputation and his other companies. On the platform’s fundamentals, he was right.
Why being right didn’t matter
And yet. Musk’s net worth has roughly doubled, from around $300 billion when he bought Twitter to somewhere between $600 and $800 billion now. He’s more powerful, not less. That’s the tension the episode keeps circling: a failed product attached to a richer, more influential owner.
Mac’s argument is that the metrics that should matter, users and revenue, stopped mattering for Musk personally. X became a political and attention machine rather than a business. The financial windfall is coming from SpaceX and Starlink, with X riding along inside the structure.
The governance story nobody’s fighting
The part worth watching closely is what The Verge AI calls the bending of market rules. The reporting flags several pressure points around the SpaceX offering:
- Shareholder control. Structures that concentrate power with Musk and limit the say of outside investors.
- Index fund inclusion. Questions about how a company like this gets into the major funds that millions of retirement accounts track.
- Corporate governance. The broad set of checks that normally keep executives in line, weakened in the rush to get the deal done.
Here’s the uncomfortable dynamic. Major fund managers and investors aren’t calling foul, because nobody wants to miss what could be the biggest financial windfall in recent memory. The fear of missing out is doing the work that scrutiny usually would.
There’s also the $28 trillion ‘addressable market’ figure in the filing for SpaceX services. That number is larger than the entire world economy, which tells you how loose IPO marketing math can get when demand is this hot.
Why it matters now
This is bigger than one founder. SpaceX runs critical infrastructure, from Starlink to launch services governments depend on, and it’s increasingly tied to the AI race through xAI. When a company this central goes public on terms that sideline normal accountability, the precedent ripples outward. Other founders watching this will take notes.
For anyone building or investing in AI, a few practical takeaways:
- Read the governance, not just the growth. A soaring valuation can sit on top of a stagnant asset. X is proof. Check the share structure before the headline number.
- Treat giant TAM claims as marketing. A market ‘bigger than the world’ is a tell, not a forecast.
- Watch the silence. When sophisticated investors stop asking hard questions, that’s a signal about incentives, not safety.
Patel’s 2022 call on X was correct on the fundamentals and wrong on the consequences, which is its own lesson: in this market, being right about the product doesn’t predict who wins. You can hear the full conversation with Ryan Mac on Decoder at the original source.