On May 20, 2026, SpaceX filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion—what would be, by far, the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. The filing included a clause: Elon Musk was awarded one billion performance-based restricted shares, which vest only when the company establishes “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” A science-fiction scenario—a million-person Mars colony—had been translated directly into a contractual financial instrument. The fiction was not an irrelevant quirk of the prospectus, but rather integral to the prospectus itself. This is not a one-off or an anomaly, but representative of a pattern that is becoming more evident by the day. Understanding it is essential for grasping how empire is being remade in the present conjuncture.
The most consequential illiberal infrastructure now being constructed may not be emerging from political parties or state institutions at all. It is being built by a small cohort of tech oligarchs.
Illiberalism studies has focused, with good reason, on state capture, democratic backsliding, and the rise of authoritarian populism. But the most consequential illiberal infrastructure now being constructed may not be emerging from political parties or state institutions at all. It is being built by a small cohort of tech oligarchs who are translating speculative fiction into governance structures, capital formation strategies, and political projects that bypass, hollow out, or replace liberal-democratic institutions entirely. I develop this process as “materialized science fiction”.
Fictive Valuations
The SpaceX prospectus is a case in point. Alongside its Mars colony clause, the filing disclosed $4.9 billion in losses in 2025 and $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, driven by soaring costs in its AI division—the result of Musk’s merger of SpaceX with xAI, which now also includes X (formerly Twitter). The prospectus simultaneously warns that its technologies “may ultimately be unsuccessful” and invokes the mission of extending “the light of consciousness to the stars.” Yet the filing’s claims of a $28.5 trillion total addressable market (TAM)—finance-speak for the revenue possibilities were a company or product to capture one hundred percent of market demand—tells a different story about where the money actually lies: $23 trillion is attributed to AI, while space travel accounts for just $370 billion. Mars colonization contributes a fraction of the anticipated revenue. It contributes everything to the valuation.
The SEC filing performs a double operation: selling a speculative fiction to investors while legally disclosing that it is fiction. The valuation is not derived from cash flows. It is derived from the credibility of the narrative—and the narrative’s financial work is precisely proportional to its distance from the revenue projections. This distance helps demonstrate that what is being sold is not a business plan but a civilizational worldview, and it is the worldview that licenses the speculative premium no AI company filing alone could command. The mechanism by which this conversion operates is visible in the prospectus’s reservation of 30% of the IPO for retail investors—participants with no means of adjudicating a $23 trillion AI market claim, but with a well-documented history of buying Musk’s grand narratives. Tesla’s valuation, which has been sustained for years at amounts no cash flow model could justify, was the proof of concept for this latest endeavor. It is becoming increasingly clear that Musk’s latest moves with SpaceX are pushing his previous strategies to their extremes.
The SEC filing performs a double operation: selling a speculative fiction to investors while legally disclosing that it is fiction.
How much of the valuation rests on fiction? In a recent Reuters podcast, it was estimated that even with generous forecasts, SpaceX’s real businesses—Starlink and rocket launches—account for roughly half of the IPO valuation. The other half is Mars, orbital data centres, and what one analyst called “sort of 50% businesses and then 50% Elon Musk’s imagination, from a valuation point of view.” In the same podcast, the astrophysicist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, laid out what the science actually says: Mars surface radiation is lethal, its soil toxic, its atmosphere unbreathable, and transporting a million people would require at least ten thousand launches—with a standard failure rate implying ten thousand deaths. The orbital data center target of 100 terawatts would be roughly a thousand times total global capacity; the heat dissipation infrastructure alone would dwarf anything ever built in space. These are not engineering challenges that one can realistically assume will be solved in the future, near term, or otherwise. They are rather science-fiction scenarios deliberately encoded into compensation milestones. The Mars colony clause will almost certainly never vest—which means it functions not as a performance incentive but as a narrative device embedded in a legal-financial instrument. The fiction sustains the valuation precisely because it cannot be falsified on any near-term timeline.
Imperial infrastructure
But the SpaceX prospectus is also political infrastructure. As the Financial Times reported, SpaceX has proposed one of the most aggressive corporate governance regimes in US history. Musk holds supermajority “class B” stock with ten times the voting power of ordinary shares, giving him over 80 percent of voting control. He serves as both CEO and chair. The prospectus warns investors that he “will continue to control the election and removal” of directors and that this “will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters.” Mandatory arbitration eliminates public shareholder lawsuits. Officials responsible for New York and California public pension funds called it “the most management-favourable governance structure ever brought to the US public market at this scale.” The science-fiction milestones consolidate this control further. The Mars colony and orbital data center targets are tied to the vesting of additional class B super-voting shares—up to 200 million if SpaceX reaches $7.5 trillion and establishes its colony, and 60 million more if it hits $6.6 trillion and builds the orbital network. Each milestone would increase not just Musk’s wealth but his political authority over the entity.
This is not a company in the conventional sense. What emerges on the horizon is a privately governed jurisdiction exerting unparallelled extraterritorial powers.
This is not a company in the conventional sense. What emerges on the horizon is a privately governed jurisdiction exerting unparallelled extraterritorial powers—a corporate polity with its own internal economy (SpaceX spent $506 million with Tesla on Megapack battery systems in 2025 alone, plus $131 million on Cybertrucks—one Musk company propping up another’s product line), its own territorial base (Starbase, formerly Boca Chica Village, incorporated as a Texas city in 2025 with 97 percent of the vote—most residents are SpaceX employees or their families—with a SpaceX vice president as mayor and all commissioners running unopposed, and already warning residents they may lose the right to use their property).
SpaceX’s own constitution is designed to make its sovereign techno-king irremovable, and its civilizational narrative works to legitimate the arrangement.
What makes this imperial, rather than merely oligarchic, is the role science fiction plays in the structure. Empire has always required legitimating narratives. The British Empire had its civilizing mission; the American century had manifest destiny. Silicon Valley’s tech elite are constructing a legitimation narrative for empire, drawn not from religious or nationalist mythology but from science fiction. The selection is precise: they take the scale and ambition of the genre while discarding its political and moral content.
Silicon Valley’s tech elite are constructing a legitimation narrative for empire, drawn not from religious or nationalist mythology but from science fiction.
Materialized science fiction
When Musk stood before the Secretary of Defense at Starbase in January 2025 and declared, “We want to make Star Trek real,” he was performing a political operation. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished, and humanity works toward collective betterment. Musk took the aesthetic— big spaceships, epic adventures—and left its political foundation behind. He wants the Enterprise, reimagined to replace critical parts of incumbent, terrestrial military-industrial complexes.
Musk has cited Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as particularly influential—novels whose central insight is that civilizational survival depends not on lone geniuses but on collective institutions and democratic deliberation. Every time a charismatic individual seizes control, Asimov presents it as a catastrophe. Musk discards all of this, recasting SpaceX as a civilizational imperative and positioning himself as Hari Seldon, the lone visionary who sees what others cannot—so that questions about labor practices or whether Mars colonization serves any public good become mere friction. He wants to be Seldon, but without the Foundation.
Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after devices in Tolkien that corrupt and betray their users. In Tolkien’s work, the palantíri lead to madness and downfall—the point is that such instruments of total vision cannot be safely wielded. Thiel reads none of this. The name transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight. Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic makes the politics explicit, framing the company’s government work in martial terms: “We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors.” In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel went further: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The fate of the world, he wrote, “may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” Not democracy—capitalism. Not collective effort—a single person.
This is what I call materialized science fiction: the systematic translation of speculative narratives into governance structures, financial instruments, and political infrastructures.
This is what I call materialized science fiction: the systematic translation of speculative narratives into governance structures, financial instruments, and political infrastructures. Science fiction does not somehow cause these projects, but it provides a scaffolding wherein certain ambitions become thinkable and certain concentrations of power come to seem like common sense.
Empire remade
Recent critical work has rightly questioned whether “empire” adds analytical precision to our understanding of tech power. Nick Srnicek’s Silicon Empires and a wave of recent scholarship have mapped the structural dimensions of platform power with increasing sophistication. Quinn Slobodian has argued—in work that extends his and Ben Tarnoff’s analysis of Muskism—that the proliferating language of “digital empire” and “data colonialism” can function as emotional mobilization while obscuring more than it reveals. Empire talk, in this account, relies on a two-dimensional picture of the past: centralized domination, seamless extraction, a clean division between colonizer and colonized. Actual empires operated through middlemen, compradors, and exchange; actual users of digital platforms are not colonized subjects but “digital creoles”—simultaneously exploited and beneficiaries, their pension funds tethered to the very companies harvesting their data. What separates these analytical accounts is that the former leans into polemic while the latter strives for precision. The former traffics in shock, while the latter tries to concern itself with class formation, complicity, and co-creation.
Musk and Thiel were not self-made sovereigns. They were made by the U.S. state they now seek to supersede.
This critical response to empire talk serves a noble purpose, but it also has a blind spot. What Slobodian’s framework does not address is how tech oligarchs are themselves consciously constructing imperial forms—and doing so through a specific mechanism that the “digital empire” literature, with its focus on data extraction and platform economics, has also failed to identify. Nor does it reckon with the genealogy of the power being wielded: Musk and Thiel were not self-made sovereigns. They were made by the U.S. state they now seek to supersede. SpaceX was built on NASA contracts and Department of Defense launch dependencies; Tesla on federal subsidies and regulatory forbearance; Palantir on CIA venture capital channelled through In-Q-Tel, with early revenues drawn almost entirely from National Security Agency and military clients.
The U.S. state did not merely permit this accumulation. It deliberately seeded it, in the reasonable expectation that private capital could extend American imperial reach into new domains—commercial space, algorithmic warfare, global communications infrastructure—where direct state action was politically costly or technically constrained. The question is whether that bet is paying off on the state’s terms or the tech oligarchs’.
The evidence increasingly suggests the latter. Musk is not like a megacorp CEO from cyberpunk fiction. He is rather drawing inspiration from and translating these fictions into material, institutional forms. The SpaceX prospectus is not a metaphor for empire: it is a legal-financial instrument wielded in service of Musk’s ambition to create sovereignty beyond the reach of any existing democratic polity—a Mars colony clause that encodes extraterritorial jurisdiction into equity compensation. Starlink’s satellite constellation gives a single company, controlled by a single individual, decisive leverage over global communications infrastructure: in 2022, Musk refused a Ukrainian military request to activate Starlink coverage near Crimea during a counteroffensive against the Russian fleet, a private citizen’s decision that shaped the course of an active war. Starbase is a private company town. Palantir’s surveillance architecture serves the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and military clients worldwide. So, far from analogy alone, what is on display here are the institutional forms of an empire under construction. One that is being built with state capital but which operates beyond state control. What began as a project to renovate existing empires has given way to a scenario wherein those brought in to do the renovations are attempting to replace those existing empires with their own.
The science-fiction framing is essential to how this power is legitimated—and to how it escapes the analytical frame that both the “digital empire” literature and its critics have established. The empire debate has been trapped between polemic and economics: emotional invocations of colonialism on one side, more precise accounts of platform capitalism and asset-manager complicity on the other. What both miss is the narrative infrastructure through which these projects are made thinkable, fundable, and politically defensible. Materialized science fiction is the mechanism that makes the SpaceX prospectus legible to investors, that makes Palantir’s naming operative, that makes Thiel’s rejection of democracy sound like futurism rather than reaction. “Muskism” is a handy name for the symptom, but materialized science fiction identifies one of the mechanisms by which it creates and reproduces itself.
Materialized science fiction is the mechanism that makes the SpaceX prospectus legible to investors, that makes Palantir’s naming operative, that makes Thiel’s rejection of democracy sound like futurism rather than reaction.
Science-fiction framing obscures the political content of what is actually being built: what Fred Turner has called the “Texan Ideology”—resource extraction fused with millenarian conviction—is now armed with drones, algorithms, and orbital infrastructure. It aims to make oligarchic power concentration look like civilizational progress. It makes the rollback of democratic accountability sound like futurism rather than regression. The limits of this logic were tested, partially, in early June 2026, when S&P Global declined to modify the eligibility criteria for its flagship S&P 500 index to accommodate SpaceX’s IPO, refusing to grant exceptions to profitability thresholds and seasoning requirements “solely based on market capitalization.” Yet Nasdaq and FTSE Russell had already moved in the opposite direction, rewriting their own rules to fast-track SpaceX into their respective indices within days of listing. Two of three major index gatekeepers rewrote the rules for their flagship benchmarks; one did not.
Whether the S&P 500’s refusal represents durable institutional resistance or merely a delayed accommodation remains to be seen. On 12 June 2026, SpaceX closed its first day of trading at over $2 trillion, making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The question for illiberalism studies is whether its analytical frame can accommodate what is being built here. The illiberal turn is not only happening through the institutions that scholars already study, like political parties, constitutional courts, and executive decrees. It is being assembled in SEC filings, encoded in compensation clauses, incorporated as company towns, and launched into orbit. If empire is being remade, this prospectus is its charter.
Ali Rıza Taşkale is an external lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Previously, he was a Marie Curie–Sklodowska Fellow in the same department. His research has been published in leading academic journals and cultural platforms, including International Political Sociology, Science as Culture, Global Studies Quarterly, Urban Studies, Critical Studies on Security, and Theory, Culture & Society. He is the author of Post-Politics in Context (Routledge, 2016). His new book, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.
Image made using “Elon Musk at the Memorial for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. All other images used are in the public domain.
