From January to May 2025, for nearly 130 days, the world’s richest man set out to position himself at the summit of global power. Without any elected mandate, he was preparing to hack the most powerful country on Earth the way one hacks a piece of software. His maneuvers had all the characteristics of a coup d’état.
However, he soon had to reckon with the realities of the slow proceduralism of decision-making, the resistance of state bureaucracies, and his lack of control over the presidential agenda. How could one person feasibly hijack a political movement that is entirely devoted to one man, Donald Trump, who thinks in no time horizon beyond than the most immediate present? Musk, however, seeking technological transcendence, lives only in the future: for him, the present is merely a temporary anomaly, a force of inertia that must be countered. The present is the time of contingency, lethargy, and democratic obstacles. This gap between the two men was ultimately resolved through Musk’s banishment.
For Musk, this meant it was time to return to business: his antics had seriously damaged the reputation of his companies, which were now losing value. After having tasted power, could Musk really return to his activities as before?
SpaceX’s IPO, on June 11, 2026, provides a window into his intentions. Like the Roman senator Catiline, Musk’s forced exile may be more of a secession than a retreat: marginalized after colliding with the opposition and loyalty of Trump’s clan, has Musk transformed himself into a Roman conspirator determined to bring down the Republic? After all, his political exile may be only a single episode in the much longer story of his imperial project, and the SpaceX IPO may represent the beginning of this counter-offensive. Unable to hack the state from within, Musk is organizing a coup d’état from Wall Street, this time taking place on his preferred playing field: the future.
Unable to hack the state from within, Musk is organizing a coup d’état from Wall Street, this time taking place on his preferred playing field: the future.
Science Fiction as Software
SpaceX has turned its stock market debut into an instrument for seizing power over the future. But is that not what all entrepreneurs do when they enter the public market? Is not every corporate valuation a way of capturing the future of the market through numerical narratives? After all, investors never buy what a company is; they bet on what they believe it will become. Whether it is Mark Zuckerberg with the mirage of the Metaverse or Sam Altman claiming to be on the horizon of AGI, the IPO is, by nature, an act of financial storytelling, a performative statement: one sells a promise and monetizes a narrative that instantaneously creates an economic reality.
What distinguishes Elon Musk is that, from his perspective, the future is not a narrative: it is a program for further action. Where Silicon Valley produces speculative fables to orient markets, Musk executes computing tasks. He does not imagine the future; he has already read it and now seeks implement it. The science fiction stories that formed the horizon of his South African childhood have become software, and the inspiration he drew from them, a source code. The invented story has been transformed into a line of code. It is no coincidence that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series acts as his ideal theoretical framework: history is treated there as a statistical prediction, where individuals are obstacles to the proper functioning of the algorithm. Asimov’s Robot series makes the underlying point clear: robotics do not present moral problems, but a collection of bugs to be corrected. Robert A. Heinlein’s writings reveal the idea that technical autonomy is born from man’s hostility to the environment and thus it should not burden itself with regulations or attempts at conciliation. The lunar colonists of Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress do not negotiate with Earth; they transform it in their own image. It is Heinlein, again, who provides Musk, in Stranger in a Strange Land, with the name of his generative AI (“Grok”) which is used as a neologism for intimate understanding and absolute assimilation. In Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, Musk finds the blueprint for his civilizational architecture: a post-scarcity society where democratic debate is abandoned in favor of algorithmic governance administered by the shipborne artificial intelligences—the “Minds”—before whom human intellects have become too slow. For Frank Herbert, the famous mantra “Fear is the mind-killer” from the Dune saga acts to disinhibit against any form of biological panic, whether about the launch of a SpaceX rocket or the publication of a devastating tweet on his X network. In both cases, there is no room for hesitation. Finally, it is from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that he draws the art of “debugging through absurdity,” that is, the strategy of solving problems by reformulating the questions underlying them instead of finding real answers. “Don’t Panic”: these are the two words Musk had engraved on the dashboard of his Tesla that he sent into orbit. Faced with the chaos of the cosmos, the engineer never panics; he recalculates.
The Clinical Ethos of “Design by Constraint”
The rejection of collective emotion, the reduction of every dilemma to a technical question, the use of humor to trivialize radical decisions: these are the principal attributes of this clinical ethos inherited from Musk’s literary inspirations. Where other entrepreneurs would seek deliberation or compromise, he insists on reconfiguring the system: this demand is an integral part of his pre-programmed management routine.
The rejection of collective emotion, the reduction of every dilemma to a technical question, the use of humor to trivialize radical decisions: these are the principal attributes of this clinical ethos inherited from Musk’s literary inspirations.
Musk applies this ethos to more than just himself or his public statements. It provides a mantra that lies at the core of his industrial method and entrepreneurial success: “design by constraint.” This refers to an engineering approach entirely dictated by raw physics rather than by any aesthetic or marketing promises. For example, faced with the very high costs involved in going to space, Musk stated that he will create fully reusable rockets. No compromise was allowed, even in the event of failure; either it worked or SpaceX would cease to meaningly exist. For his Cybertruck, the billionaire wanted to use a stainless-steel alloy so hard that no automotive press could bend it. Instead of being flexible with potential alternative and easier to use materials, he forced his designers to invent a vehicle with sharp angles, square blocks, and no curves whatsoever. The same radicalism is at work in Tesla’s autonomous driving systems. Since human beings perceive the road only with their eyes, a car equipped with simple cameras should suffice. Consequently, considering radar systems to be mere auxiliary crutches, he had them removed from the design, forcing his engineers to make it work without them.
The constraints imposed by Elon Musk are always both radical and irreversible; they must be obeyed regardless of the cost. The colonization of Mars proceeds according to the exact same logic: it is not a distant dream, but an extreme physical frontier whose hypothetical benefits and dangers are refracted on to the present, necessitating the reorganization of today’s industrial apparatus. The future therefore no longer resembles a narrative: it is a certainty which must be pursued now.
The SpaceX Civilizational Franchise
Because the future functions as a retroactive constraint rather than an aspiration for Musk, this approach does not produce a story in the classical sense of the term: there is little point for him in discussing the particularities—even those which may be desirable—of his Mars project. Certainly, he speaks about Mars extensively, in terms of the “survival of the species” or a “multiplanetary civilization,” but this discourse sits almost exclusively in an apocalyptic, and thereby technical, register: it is valuable for rocket production rates, refueling architecture, or launch windows.
It is particularly striking that the colonization of Mars is neither extensively commented upon nor even sketched out by Musk, who says nothing about what daily life or culture on Mars might look like. Mars is never desired for its own sake, as one might desire a Promised Land or an El Dorado, but as a necessity, to guarantee a new “living space” for humanity. In this respect, Musk breaks radically with the narratives of a Zuckerberg (with the Metaverse) or an Altman (with AGI), who still preserve the image—even if vaguely—of a final horizon of progress.
This approach is therefore neither a utopia nor a dystopia; it is a radical atopia.
This approach is therefore neither a utopia nor a dystopia; it is a radical atopia. Utopia and dystopia are still rooted in a place, a fixed city, whether ideal or totalitarian. In Musk’s case, the future is emptied of all topographical substance: Mars is not a horizon to inhabit but a computational constraint, a technical milestone to be conquered. His project unfolds as a roadmap without a precise destination, a purely kinetic movement, where permanent movement definitively dissolves the goal.
The public should not expect to find in Musk a great linear story. This is precisely his strength, perfectly aligned with the new laws of the attention economy. At a time when organic and centralized narratives are dissolving into a continuous and unstoppable flow, the future is now embedded within social ecosystems. The entertainment industries have understood this perfectly: the great cultural franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, One Piece, etc.) no longer sell simple stories, however addictive they may be; instead, they build social worlds that audiences can “inhabit.”
Musk’s industrial and geopolitical apparatus functions according to this new cultural logic. He no longer publicizes his brands through savvy business ideas or traditional marketing; he too builds an ecosystem of civilizational franchise, an infrastructure of meaning and practices into which all audiences—from customers of X or Tesla, to major investment banks or entire nation states—can enter, immerse and organize themselves, and establish roots. A civilizational franchise shaped as an “inhabitable world”: the Muskverse.
SpaceX’s IPO therefore does not offer investors a story of a possible, profitable future, but rather the keys to an autonomous narrative matrix. This stock market debut marks a change in an anthropological paradigm: SpaceX’s transition from the company that sells assets to the “inhabitable world” that delivers a civilizational franchise capable of generating its own realities.
A multitude of heterogeneous actors can identify themselves in this narrative and project their sovereignty into it: space agencies and military staffs subcontract their strategic independence there; venture-capital funds and armies of retail investors tie their financial destinies to it; elite engineers invest their labor power in it, while millions of citizens and content creators relocate their digital and political lives there.
Musk presents himself as the conductor of this civilizational franchise: he produces generative infrastructures that in turn organize this space of collective projection. Within this framework, investors think less of financial flows or future profits and more of in terms of their capacity to maintain control by preparing for and pre-empting the inevitable new world to come.
The rules of classical industrial capitalism are thus challenged. In a traditional economy, one would judge xAI’s valuation as absurd, Musk’s management style as toxic, and the plundering of Tesla’s resources for the benefit of Musk’s other projects a governance scandal. Some still make these points, but without really being heard. Musk benefits from a “franchise effect,” that is, a systemic blurring that converts his various companies into a narrative playground where each entity immunizes itself through the others.
Musk benefits from a “franchise effect,” that is, a systemic blurring that converts his various companies into a narrative playground where each entity immunizes itself through the others.
In this story, Mars acts as the founding myth of the frontier, Starlink as the planetary infrastructure, xAI as the civilizational intelligence, X as the global agora, and Tesla as the futuristic mode of transport. Evaluated separately, these structures defy financial logic. Connected within the franchise, they justify one another by forming an ecosystem that the market is now effectively commanded to believe in.
These companies are no longer distinct industrial entities but interconnected physical and software devices that keep the world in a state of tension: every successful launch is an episode, every failure a story tension that restarts the arc or prompts a reboot, every outrageous promise a technological plot twist. Thus, this “inhabitable world” sells the possibility of continuing the story indefinitely. This explains the extravagant valuations, investors’ absolute tolerance for losses, and the quasi-religious adhesion of the markets: the unprecedented emergence of a true civilizational fandom around the Muskverse. Musk brings forth a sui generis techno-Caesarism that replaces territory with time and the present with the future.
Musk’s temporal and logistical Caesarism emancipates itself from the spatial and managerial constraints which restrict his competitors. Zuckerberg’s attentional and residential Caesarism through Meta is founded on the capture of available brain time and the sedentarization of bodies within closed digital environments. Altman’s oracular and gnostic Caesarism through OpenAI asserts a sovereignty of an almost theological nature through the promise of total computational truth. Thiel’s infrastructural and coercive Caesarism through Palantir produces an invisible and archaeo-futurist power that directly appropriates the sovereign functions of the state.
Where the others manage databases or state infrastructures in the present, Musk pushes forward through pure movement. By constantly selling deadlines—the roadmap—rather than a finished product, he indexes finance and geopolitics to distant temporal points. Musk does not intend to conquer the lands of nation states, but to seize their horizons. This is the final function of the SpaceX IPO: to transform this civilizational franchise into a mechanism of compulsory extraction. A financial-Caesarism in which IPOs become the founding acts of a new temporal empire.
The SpaceX IPO as a Financial-Caesarist Coup
Friday, June 12, 2026: the future noisily arrived on Wall Street. SpaceX’s IPO is valued at more than $1.77 trillion at opening, under the ticker SPCX, before quickly surpassing the $2 trillion mark thanks to a historic $75 billion fundraising round, making Elon Musk the first “trillionaire” in human history.
One can speak, instead, of the first trillionaire Caesar: this stock market debut marks the transition of power from a market that evaluates to a sovereign who mechanically levies taxes on global savings. SpaceX’s charter grants Musk sweeping privileges: his voting power is multiplied by ten, allows him to preside over his own Board of Directors, his dismissal is now rendered statutorily impossible, and mandatory arbitration has been imposed against minority shareholders. Added to this is an unprecedented requirement in the history of IPOs: the obligation imposed upon banks, law firms, and auditors participating in the operation to subscribe to Grok, his artificial intelligence assistant. Breaking with all conventions and short-circuiting the typical process of stock valuation, the trillionaire also unilaterally fixed his share price at $135 more than a week before the IPO, without any possibility of negotiation. Musk is a sovereign who dictates his price, not an entrepreneur seeking the market’s approval.
A new reign is beginning. Numerous financial commentators have expressed their astonishment by this upheaval of the classic mechanisms that usually govern financial transactions. The SpaceX IPO is not merely a valuation; it is above all the imposition of an autocratic charter accepted by enchanted markets. For, despite shareholder rights reduced almost to nothing, despite governance concentrating all powers in a single hand, despite abyssal losses, demand is overwhelming. Goldman Sachs, the lead bank for the IPO, predicted revenues of $474 billion by 2030, driven primarily by AI—a numerical translation of a narrative, not of a balance sheet. The fact that participating banks received nearly $500 million in fees perhaps explains the notable absence of critical voices within the financial world. Thus, the famous saying “Don’t bet against Elon” has ceased to be friendly advice intended for daring speculators: it has become a structural injunction.
The famous saying “Don’t bet against Elon” has ceased to be friendly advice intended for daring speculators: it has become a structural injunction.
Indeed, there is no need to subscribe to the “inhabitable world” of the Muskverse because one finds oneself, de facto, enlisted within it. After Nasdaq modified its rules to permit fast-track integration of mega-private companies into its 100 index, FTSE Russell immediately followed suit. Through this regulatory power play, index funds—which millions of citizens hold through their 401(k) retirement plans or pension funds—were forced to buy massive quantities of SpaceX shares during its first week of trading without deliberation, without consent, and without even being informed. Since SpaceX immediately represented an overwhelming share of American stock-market capitalization, fund managers claimed they had no choice: ignoring the stock would mean diverging from market performance. The enchantment was no longer merely ideological but mechanical.
It was within this financial trap that individual investors found themselves ensnared. Speaking in The New York Times on the eve of the IPO, an employee of Indiana University, recounted his desperate attempt to direct his retirement funds to avoid SpaceX, before giving up in the face of resistance: “It doesn’t feel like anybody is watching out for retail investors or the common person anymore […]. It feels like the system is rigged against us.” This feeling of powerlessness is the existential embodiment of what the privatization of the future can concretely mean. Thus, the SpaceX IPO can be read for what it truly is: a techno-Caesarist manifesto, the imposition—through the rewriting of market rules—of a privatized future for which we have not given our consent.
The Privatization of Time?
If the past is closed and the present saturated, the future remains the only space where things are not yet fixed. Because it is, by its very essence, a time of indeterminacy, it remains the final refuge of our collective freedom: the only place where an individual, a group, or an entire society can still choose its destiny.
Yet Musk is not content to propose one vision of the future among others: he wants to fix its infrastructure so there can be no alternative. States that today depend on Starlink for their defense can no longer project themselves into a sovereign future. They have outsourced their horizon. Their future is now leased to them by a private individual who may tomorrow unilaterally alter the conditions of access.
But by relentlessly chaining the future to physical and software variables, the showrunner of the Muskverse runs the risk of finding himself at a dead end, where his world becomes anthropologically and biologically uninhabitable. The engineer of this locked future exposes himself to two possible specters: backlashes or bugs.
By relentlessly chaining the future to physical and software variables, [Musk may find] himself at a dead end, where his world becomes anthropologically and biologically uninhabitable.
For the first specter, a Fordlandia-like destiny may well haunt his empire. In 1927, Henry Ford, another titan of industrial capitalism, also sought to build his own “inhabitable world” deep in the Amazon jungle. A self-contained city, gridded and rationalized, where work, housing, morals, and schedules would all be controlled in order to most efficiently extract the rubber used for his automobiles. Fordlandia collided violently with reality: workers revolted against the discipline of time clocks, and the trees, poorly planted to maximize yield, were devoured by parasites. Design by constraint was overtaken by biology.
At Starbase—the private production and launch base established in Texas near the Mexican border—and in Tesla’s factories, Musk’s code is already encountering the same biological resistance. 12-hour workdays, 38 consecutive days on production lines, workplace accidents covered up and silenced, and the nervous exhaustion of Musk’s fanbase suggest his world may be on the brink of suffocation. Reducing civilization to software carries a risk: one may forget that flesh grows tired and that the Earth resists.
The other specter is the bug that may haunt the system itself, precisely the one which Iain Banks—Musk’s great inspiration—warns of. Techno-Caesarism produces its own planned obsolescence. Sooner or later, the system digests its Caesar once he has become too slow or too human. Musk may therefore be building a world that will ultimately exclude him. For within the Muskverse, once the infrastructure has been put in motion, what use can a leader still have?
And what if this privatized future already contains within itself its own abolition? So long as Musk is not endowed with the power to abolish reality, reality will always remain capable of “striking back” again and again—to borrow a term from Jacques Lacan—precisely where the engineer believed he had locked everything down: either through the refusal of living beings to submit to machines, or through the refusal of machines to submit to the laws of men.
Paul Vacca is a novelist, essayist, and professor at ESCP Business School. He is a regular contributor to Le Grand Continent, Rolling Stone France, and the Brussels-based weekly Trends-Tendances, where he analyzes contemporary cultural, political, and societal shifts. He also writes cultural and literary long-form essays for Les Échos Week-end. As an associate expert at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, he explores the reconfiguration of the cultural landscape and power structures in the age of algorithms and AI.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Elon Musk (54816836217)” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “Starship SN9 Evening Rays” by Jared Krahn licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; all other assets used are in the public domain.
