SpaceX’s IPO today was a roaring success, making its founder, Elon Musk, the first trillionaire in history.

There’s a lot to be said about this. The idea of a well-heeled entrepreneur taking the reins to bravely open the space frontier did not start with Musk. Rather it has been a recurrent trope in mid-to-late 20th century science fiction, epitomised most famously by D.D. Harriman, the swashbuckling hero of Robert Heinlein’s 1949 classic, The Man Who Sold the Moon. In the years since, a lot of men tried to step into Harriman’s shoes, but they all failed. Through a unique combination of vision, boldness, endurance, and luck, Musk has succeeded.

The SpaceX business plan being offered as the basis for the IPO is nonsense. Musk is certainly not going to launch a million AI data centres into space, powered by solar panels made from lunar materials. Unlike Starlink satellites, which enjoy a decisive positional advantage for their role as communications links by being in orbit, there is no benefit to putting an AI data centre in space. It can just as easily do its job on a rooftop, in an office or warehouse, in a tunnel, or on a ship or raft at sea.

On the contrary, any of those locations can be reached for one thousandth the cost of low Earth orbit. Furthermore, the power to drive them is available on Earth in much larger amounts and at vastly lower cost than it is on orbit as well. The idea that the high cost of electricity in space can be remedied by making ultrapure silicon from lunar trash rock, fabricating the resulting material into photovoltaic panels, and then catapulting them to Earth orbit for capture and assembly onto satellites is bat guano nuts. But that does not matter. Musk now has a trillion dollars. With that treasure chest, he can do anything he wants.

Musk does, however, have proprietary AI capabilities that could mount credible competition to the sector’s incumbents, as well as significantly deeper capital reserves than any of them for scaling. Anthropic, OpenAI and the rest will therefore face a serious competitive challenge. If they fail to respond effectively, SpaceX could plausibly evolve into a multi-trillion-dollar company. For now, the verdict remains open.

In the meantime, though, the SpaceX CEO has more than enough cash on hand to establish the first human settlements on the Moon and Mars, without breaking a sweat. Let’s hope that is what he chooses to do.

The difference between Musk and superficially comparable figures such as Jeff Bezos is that Musk has built things that arguably would not exist absent his direct involvement. Bezos got rich by building Amazon, but the idea of making money by retail sales over the internet was obvious. If Bezos had not existed, someone else would have prevailed in that arena, and the human race would have been no poorer for the exchange.

But successful electric car companies and reusable space launch vehicle companies were not guaranteed by the Invisible Hand or any other force of fate. If Musk had not created them, they would not exist. It is for that reason, and not because of his unprecedented wealth, that Musk matters.

Whether Musk or one of his competitors prevails in the onrushing AI race will be of little consequence to the rest of us, or even to Musk himself, who will certainly have the wherewithal to buy groceries either way. But at 55, he still has enough time ahead of him to make epochal history and help transform humanity into a multi-planet, spacefaring species. Several tens of billions — just a small fraction of his ample fortune — would be more than enough to fund such a project. He would be a fool not to. After all, he can’t take it with him.

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Dr. Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars and most recently of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.

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