Signing you in

That is, roughly, the proposition behind Friday’s flotation of SpaceX on the Nasdaq, the largest initial public offering in stock market history which saw the company’s value soar to close to $2 trillion. While it has been fiercely debated whether the company is drastically over- or underpriced, the question itself feels somewhat irrelevant. This is because whatever the ticker did once it started trading, what should have been decided long before the opening bell was another deceptively simple question: what is SpaceX, exactly?

Is it a rocket company? A satellite communications provider? A social media platform, or an AI frontier lab? A data centre provider? The answer, actually, is yes. Its Falcon 9 flies more often than the rockets of any nation on Earth combined, while Starlink serves more than 10 million customers across 160 countries. Its Starshield division operates the Pentagon’s satellite constellation. This is while X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now uses its own LLM model called Grok, which will soon need so much computer power that it will attempt to create vast data centres in space.

While we may not know which industry SpaceX is actually in, what is certain is that it is an Elon Musk index fund – a single security whose value is a bet on the priorities, attention span and political fortunes of one egomaniacal man.

[ Investors in Elon Musk’s SpaceX will need to strap in for a bumpy rideOpens in new window ]

But to consider the alternative in which SpaceX does “badly”, it’s helpful to define who loses. The shareholders, sure. Though even that word is doing some heavy lifting: Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their own rule books to usher SpaceX into their indices within days of listing, and up to 30 per cent of the float is earmarked for retail investors. So once the stock sits in the big indices, every tracker fund must hold it – including the default funds where most pensions live. “Shareholders” thus no longer means a hedge fund that priced the risk and can lose out; it means, in the end, a nurse in Tullamore who never thinks about Elon Musk at all.

However, a pension fund in the red can rebalance; the deeper losses fall on those who came to depend on the product rather than the stock. In this definition of “badly” for SpaceX, the consequences are far greater than an underperforming share price.

Consider that a low-orbit constellation is not a bridge, built just once. Starlink satellites burn up after roughly five years, so the network exists only as long as the company keeps spending billions to replace it. A cash-strapped SpaceX might not collapse overnight; internet speeds degrade and small markets get deprioritised. Prices rise for rural customers who, by then, have no alternative, because governments never built them. Indeed, Starlink already raised its prices this year, monetising its customer base that has nowhere else to go. And perhaps eventually, a worsening of SpaceX share price ends in a dismal restructuring in a Texas courtroom, where the broadband connection keeping entire communities online is just another asset to be carved up between creditors.

[ SpaceX’s IPO is a disaster waiting to happen and Irish pension funds will be exposedOpens in new window ]

So how far away from the worst-case scenario is SpaceX? Well, it generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year against a $4.9 billion net loss. Starlink itself is profitable, but that figure leans on what my economics research shows to be an artificially low cost of launch. Worse, it is shackled to an AI division that lost $6.4 billion last year and swallowed $7.7 billion of capital spending in the first three months of 2026 alone – while Starship’s development costs, north of $15 billion and counting, sit in a launch segment that loses money despite flying more payload to orbit than the rest of the planet combined.

So the endgame is not unfathomable. A private company providing national infrastructure such as broadband for farmers, communication during a war, and the only commercial western access to the space station is not just too big to fail; it is too essential to be allowed to. If things take a turn for the worse for Musk, whichever state is most reliant on SpaceX services must bail it out, or pay exceedingly high costs to keep the company lights on.

Once again, profits are privatised, while failure is socialised. Ireland, as we don’t need to be reminded, has paid that particular bill before, and is still counting the cost.

Eighty years ago, Ireland decided electricity was too important to await the goodwill of private capital, and built the ESB. Regardless of SpaceX’s early trading signals, the question is the same one now

This is the background context for how surprisingly warmly we have been waving these billionaire-owned constellations into our national infrastructure. Starlink has been a genuine lifeline in black spots from the Black Valley to west Cork. Last October, Taoiseach Micheál Martin travelled to Elfordstown, Co Cork, to celebrate regulatory approval for a gateway serving Amazon’s Project Kuiper – Jeff Bezos’s answer to Starlink – making Ireland one of its first markets in the world. And only last month came the Amazon-commissioned study claiming that satellite broadband could add up to $863 billion to global GDP and support 21 million jobs by 2035, while simultaneously recommending that governments loosen the rules requiring domestic control over an offshore utility provider.

That’s not to say that satellite broadband itself shouldn’t be used. It is an incredible technology for islands, boats and the places that fibreoptic cables may never reach. But we do need to recognise the difference between a vendor and a partner. In Ireland, that means finishing the National Broadband Plan’s fibre roll-out to provide an open-access, State-contracted network on Irish soil, while not allowing the lure of artificially cheap satellites to act as a distraction. We also need to push for a real Irish stake in IRIS², the EU’s own constellation, built precisely to reduce this dependence on highly volatile American billionaires.

Eighty years ago, Ireland decided electricity was too important to await the goodwill of private capital, and built the ESB. Regardless of SpaceX’s early trading signals, the question is the same one now. A company that is simultaneously a rocket-maker, a broadcaster, a chatbot and an arm of the Pentagon – and losing money across them – may be many things, but a foundation for national infrastructure is not one of them. If SpaceX plummets, its shareholders lose money, but the countries that built their connectivity and defence on it lose rather more. And their taxpayers, as ever, will be sent the bill for what may be an inevitable Elon Musk bailout.

Background and Career\nFintan O’Toole was born in Dublin and grew up in Crumlin. He graduated from UCD with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy in 1978. He has held a number of other distinguished roles in journalism, academia and the arts before and since joining The Irish Times, including:

Books\nFintan O’Toole has written multiple acclaimed books on subjects ranging from Irish identity and history to global politics, including:

Journalism Awards and Notable Achievements\nFintan O’Toole has received several high-profile and prestigious honours for his writing and insight, including: