Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the Dogma of Ownership Rights

EDITORIAL, 22 Jun 2026

#956 | Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

Elon Musk, formerly referred to as “billionaire Elon Musk,” is now a trillionaire.  Last week his dominant aerospace and space services corporation, SpaceX, offered investors an opportunity to buy shares in the company at the price of $135 per share.  The initial public offering (IPO), the largest in history so far, raised an estimated $87.5 billion, which means that the total value of the enterprise, at least on paper, is now more than $2 trillion. Since Musk owns about 85% of SpaceX stock, this makes him the world’s first trillionaire.

Public reactions to these events have been vociferous. According to some commentators, the IPO represents the auspicious beginning of a new “space age economy.”  Others denounce it as a “Ponzi scheme” that will soon bankrupt buyers who have overpaid for the stock.  How one evaluates the IPO seems to depend upon one’s overall admiration or distaste for Musk.  The tycoon’s partisans portray him as a techno-corporate genius whose creations (including Tesla, Twitter/X, Starlink, SpaceX, and xAI) combine the creativity of a Leonardo with the organizational chops of a John D. Rockefeller. His enemies consider him an oligarch with a fascistic bent who poured a fortune into Trump’s election campaigns, became the nation’s second largest government contractor, and then directed the narrow-minded program that took a chain saw to worthwhile humanitarian and scientific efforts by federal agencies such as U.S.A.I.D.

On all sides the chatter continues – is SpaceX a bonanza or a bubble?  Is Musk Thomas Edison or Dr. Strangelove?  With respect to a broader and more significant issue, however, a strange silence prevails.

The issue is corporate ownership and ownership rights.

Musk’s stock holdings in Space X, like those in his social media platform Twitter/X, give him “super-voting” rights, which means that he alone has the power to decide how the company and its divisions will operate – that is, what activities it will engage in, where it will be located, what prices it will charge for its services, what it will pay its workers, how it will distribute or reinvest its profits, how it will relate to the U.S. government, and more.  The new trillionaire will thus wield near-dictatorial power over an economic empire extending from social media to reusable rockets, spacecraft, internet satellites, space-based AI data centers, and perhaps the resources needed to colonize Mars.  But this, precisely, is where the noise of objection ceases.  It’s fine to criticize SpaceX’s overpriced stock and Musk’s political connections – but not his rights and powers as an owner of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations.

Where ownership rights are concerned, the silence in capitalist societies is deafening.  Size, as they saying goes, is not everything.  Whether an entrepreneur owns a little corner store or a trillion-dollar corporation, capitalist dogma establishes two principles that are considered indisputable.

• First principle: the ownership of an enterprise is a just and appropriate reward for entrepreneurial skill and monetary investment.
• Second principle: ownership gives the owner exclusive rights to determine the goals, structures, personnel, location, and day-to-day operations of the enterprise.

In theory, these rights and powers can be modified to some extent by external factors such as market forces and government regulations.  But oligarchs like Elon Musk largely control both the market and the government, which means that they exercise near-dictatorial power over vast enterprises.  “Democracy is fine in its place,” they argue.  But its place is not the capitalist corporation.

Why isn’t this a topic of lively, angry discussion, especially among pundits and politicians who oppose Donald Trump’s political machine and its MAGA supporters?  The answer, I think, is that questioning the ownership rights and decision-making authority of entrepreneurs like Musk challenges dogmas considered sacred even by “progressives.”  This is why it is considered okay to talk about taxing billionaires or regulating AI corporations but not about the structures of ownership and control that are almost certain to make this sort of reform impossible or toothless.  Even raising the issue of alternatives to the late-capitalist system of ownership evokes Cold War images of Communism that put an end to the discussion.  The fearful exclusion of alternatives is how taboos work in politics as well as in religion.

Nina Simone sings, “I wish I could know how it feels to be free.”  What would it be like if we were free to challenge capitalist dogmas – to ask, for example, whether creative entrepreneurs deserve to be rewarded by owning the enterprises they help to create. Suppose we agree, at least for purposes of argument, that dreaming up a way to manufacture reusable rockets and investing money in that enterprise is worth a substantial reward, even if both the dream and the investment were heavily supported by other people’s work and resources.  Should that reward include the permanent ownership and control of a company whose value now exceeds that of the GDP of most of the world’s nations?  And should that control confer not only the right to reap corporate profits forever (or until the company’s liquidation), but also the power to make all basic operating decisions including whether and how to invest those profits, which governments or other corporations to collaborate with or compete against, how much to “invest” in political contributions and which candidates to support, whether to produce goods and services for peaceful or military uses . . . . and so on?

If we were having this discussion in a neutral, unstructured environment, we might decide that an innovative entrepreneur like Musk should be assured a handsome income and a role in the further development of the enterprise – but we might well impose strict income and term limits on his participation.  We might deny him the right to make corporate decisions that directly affect the public interest and that should be made democratically.  We might make all sorts of arrangements – but the late-capitalist system that structures our social environment makes the discussion seem hopelessly utopian.  The basic drive of this system, reflected in its definition of ownership rights, is to privatize production – that is, to disempower the public from playing a decisive role in economic decision-making.  Capitalist nations practice democracy so long as it does not challenge the near-dictatorial power of great property owners.  As Karl Marx once wrote, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament” (“Critique of the Gotha Programme,” 1875).

As large as it is, Musk’s SpaceX IPO is only the first in a series of enormous public stock offerings to be issued this year.  Offerings by the giant artificial intelligence companies Open AI and Anthropic are to follow.  These events should provoke a burst of discussion about oligarchical power, corporate ownership, and the need for real democracy.  Instead, we are offered reasons to keep quiet by investment gurus like Zachary Karabell, who advises readers of the Washington Post that “The SpaceX IPO Has a Bright Side”:

“As Musk grows his inordinate wealth, SpaceX shares will be distributed throughout the entire market in exchange-traded funds and mutual funds that more than half of Americans own . . . This isn’t as risky as it sounds. Most individual investors will only have a small exposure to SpaceX . . . But within a month, millions of people and thousands of institutions will own the company’s stock. The democratization of equity markets is a major shift in the U.S. economy. More people than ever are tied to the entire market’s success.”

The writer is apparently unaware that “the democratization of equity markets” is a deceptive myth accepted by virtually no serious analysts.  Democratic ownership?  The top one percent of the U.S. population measured by income owns more than 50% of all stock traded on American exchanges.  The top 10% owns around 90%, while the bottom 50% of the population owns only 1%.  If “democracy” is defined in terms of stock ownership, the trend is clearly anti-democratic. The share of the top 10%’s has increased over time from 81.7% in 1989 to 87–93% today and continues to rise.

Furthermore, the distribution of “indexed” SpaceX shares to mutual funds that help to finance retirement pensions and other benefits for millions of Americans has nothing to do with democracy.  In fact, it reverses the fundamental principle that democracy means mass participation in decision-making.  In the “deal” described by Karabell, retirees will eventually receive payments (by no means guaranteed) tied to the price of SpaceX stock in exchange for accepting an oligarch’s complete control of one of the world’s wealthiest and most politicized corporations.

This is the same deal that all working people and retirees in late capitalist society are expected to ratify. They and their political representatives are to submit to the effective dictatorship of corporate owners in return for a modest piece of their action.  They can talk about Elon Musk’s excessive wealth, political clout, and creepy personal habits as much as they like.  They can even advocate regulating corporate excesses and taxing the rich!  But questioning the sacred dogma of ownership rights is considered blasphemy – a taboo that induces most “leftists” as well as “centrists” to maintain their silence.

It’s this sort of inhibition, based on old Cold War stereotypes and fears, that keeps us from even imagining alternatives to the current system of oligarchical rule.  But – who knows? – perhaps the SpaceX IPO and its imminent successors will shock us into considering such taboo topics as public ownership, worker-controlled production, and participatory democracy.  There are times – and this is one of them – when such blasphemy is the only road to social salvation.

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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Jun 2026.

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