A Strange Voyage

25:26Meaning Americans can buy a bond, knowing that the federal government will one day pay them back with interest. This creates our first speculative market. There's not a ton of rules. We have to make them later when things begin to go wrong and people lose their shirts. Some Americans are buying and trading shares, mainly of banks and insurance companies, but it's not a huge part of the economy. or a huge part of most people's lives. Things take off, the first time, in the 1830s because of the railroads. It's funny, in a way, our construction of the railroads, it's like a mega version of the Dutch and their ships.

26:01Building a railroad system in America is this hugely expensive, hugely risky project with enormous upside if it works. And so the barons turn to the people and make the request every market ultimately relies on. Trust me? Many Americans do. It's not a project where everybody's investing. It's not like your moving guy owning crypto. The people buying into the railroads are mostly already wealthy. Elites. It works out very well for some of them, terribly for others. Many railroad projects go bust. The investors get destroyed. There's also a ton of overbuilding. Three big financial crises. But we also get hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad track.

26:44The market, providing this vision of the future, showing us what can be, will be, with enough capital deployed. Fortunes are made. And some of what we think of when we use the word stock market is created too. Big banks like J.P. Morgan, financial newspapers. But again, if you're a normal middle-class person, you probably would not have been a part of this. Normal people, regular people, enter the stock market in the 1920s. In this 10-year run where it seems like the number will only ever go up. Normal people borrow enormous amounts of money to buy stocks on margin because they're convinced they're on the cusp of what people are calling the new era, a sweeping age of permanent prosperity enabled by technology.

27:30The number will never go down. RCA, the radio company, is that decade's NVIDIA. Obviously, the number goes down. The Wall Street crash of 1929, the Great Depression. But that crisis will actually lead to a much better stock market. A much safer place to put your money, a market that can even fund more impressive ideas. To explain how that happened, I've enlisted someone much more qualified than myself. Mihir Desai, I'm a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Mihir starts the story of our modern stock market right after that 1929 crash. It really begins with a set of securities laws that are passed in the 1930s that really enable us to kind of make sure that we can give money to people and make sure that they will do the right thing by us.

28:16We require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order. There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investment. You're hearing, of course, FDR, American president and frequent radio broadcaster. There must be an end to speculation with other people's money.

28:42and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency. So when we create some institutions that protect those shareholders, like we started to do in the early part of the 20th century, that sets the foundation for allowing outside investors to feel like, okay, yeah, maybe this can work. This is the birth of the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is how we get a stock market that is more trustworthy than crypto or CalShift. But when the SEC is born in the 1930s, there are still way fewer people investing in the market than today. It's like a single-digit percentage of Americans.

29:17How does that begin to change? The first step is that after World War II, American unions successfully fight for lots of employers to begin funding employee retirement plans for the first time. A huge win for workers. It also means that American companies now need more money to fulfill these obligations. So the post-war kind of settlement was what? You come and work at Packard Motors, and we will pay you. And as part of our union negotiations, you will get health care, and you will get a retirement plan. And then what will happen is Packard will contribute to that retirement plan, and you can rest assured that for as long as you live, I'll write you checks.

29:59And so then they would invest in stuff to make sure that they could make those payments to you. So like my grandfather comes back from World War II. Yeah. He wouldn't have been checking the stock market every day. That's right. He would have had a retirement account through his work. Exactly right. And his work would have been responsible for making sure that he gets paid. In retirement. So you're making an assumption that the company you work for will always exist. And that was problematic. And that broke down, right? Because Packard ended up going bankrupt. And like we're on the hook for all this stuff.

30:28And there's an insurance bailout. And so people are like, well, maybe that's not right. So let's go a different way. And that different way is we had a revolution in the way pensions work in the United States, which is beginning in the early 1980s. We had a massive shift in this country from defined benefit plans to what's called defined contribution. So what does that mean? Just to explain a little more slowly, the shift that happened here, in our grandparents' era, a lot of people had worked for companies that for the first time offered retirement plans. The companies, not the workers, were responsible for funding these plans.

30:59And they did this by making very safe investments, often bonds, so they could write retirees' checks when the time came. That was the defined benefit plan. Defined contribution, which we shifted to, that includes something like a 401k. And it's different in a very specific way. Now, not just the company, but also you, the employee, are contributing money directly into an investment account. And employees are now deciding directly where to invest their retirement money. And that is really fundamentally different in the way you think about the world. Now you're an investor. What happens when you retire?

31:31The company's gone. They wash their hands of you, but you have this like nest egg. Well, what the heck are you going to do with that nest egg? Now you have to decide what to do with that nest egg. And you have to decide what to do with that nest egg all the time while you were earning. And that would be like my dad. Like my dad was born in 1955. He's in the workforce in the 80s. Yeah. And at this point, the company where he works is not securing his future. They are supplementing his investments in the stock market. And my dad would be like the first person in the lineage of my family who like has strong opinions about stocks.

32:01Exactly right. And, you know, and investments more generally. By the way, the whole thing that's happening all along here, PJ, just to be clear, is we're all getting richer, right? So I don't know the specifics of your family, but your father is probably earning more than your grandfather, and your grandfather is earning more than your great-grandfather. And so we're getting richer. So what does it mean when you get richer? Well, more and more of your income is going to be available for savings. Let me just say, everyone in America keeps getting richer is not actually a story most people feel like they're living in.

32:31But Mihir is talking about a relatively long timescale. 150 years ago, many Americans were still living in a cash-poor farm economy. They weren't earning a steady wage and setting cash aside. They were mostly just consuming what they produced. In 1876, not only did you not own a dishwasher, a car, a phone, or a flush toilet, you also just wouldn't have had much money in the bank, probably. Americans then even adjusted for inflation, something like 10 times poorer. Most of us do not feel rich in a country where housing is so criminally expensive. But relative to the U of 1876, you are probably richer.

33:12You may even have some cash. And if you do, you have to put it somewhere. From the 1980s on, you have more Americans putting their cash in the stock market. Through their retirement plans, through individual investing, this is where our savings for the future, in one form or another, start to go. That creates a huge pool of capital that can be used to fund American capitalism. And there's no question in my mind that a big part of the vibrancy of the American economy over the last 60 years is associated with that, with capital markets funding really interesting, great stuff. That is fantastic. and those returns are being distributed in a broad way amongst the population of people who save.

33:53So in Mehir's telling, by the 1980s, the institutions of America largely started saving for the future by putting their money in the stock market. And he thinks that was mostly a good thing. Where he starts to have more complicated feelings is towards what happened next. The beauty of a stock market is that you can accomplish more with strangers' money than you could on your own. The bigger that market gets, the more capital in it, the more society can achieve. The hazard is that as more strangers pour in, these strangers are increasingly making bets on companies they don't understand, led by people they don't know.

34:27And the question is whether the market remains logical. In the 90s and aughts, as more and more retail investors joined the market, the system mostly held. Individually, people may have made bad bets, but the logic of the market, with some exceptions, still made sense. Bahir believes not long after that, though, things began to change. Do you own any Bitcoin or Ethereum? The recent spike in the prices of the cryptocurrency has gotten everyone. Yeah, that's right. Elon Musk saying that he will now accept payment in Dogecoin for certain Tesla merchandise. Let's f*** go! You know what I'm saying?

35:05I'm like, this is exactly what needs to happen. When crypto emerged in the 2010s, thrived in the pandemic, it proved you could have a market where people made bets really just on attention itself, not on whether an asset had significant underlying value. And instead of crypto either being regulated away or petering out, what happened next was that the entire market just became more crypto-like. Robinhood is now number one on the U.S. App Store this week. Coinbase came in at number two after its listing. You had apps like Robinhood inviting everybody to buy stocks on margin from their phones. That app store dominance is seen as a little bit more evidence that investing is becoming a form of entertainment for a lot of people.

35:45You had the rise of meme stocks like GameStop in the 2020s. It's been two years since GameStop shares started going parabolic, spurred by retail traders. Anything tied to a meme, whether it's Doge, Bitcoin or GameStop, is getting a lot of attention from retail investors. If you believe our stock market has somehow been broken, Meheer thinks around here is where it happened. We enabled a world of attention gamblers, competing over who could make the wildest promises, not on who could fulfill them. We remade our market, so it's no longer just a place where we bet on which company will succeed. It's also a place where we bet on the future flows of internet attention.

36:23Not a gamble on a ship voyage. A gamble that tomorrow, more people online will say the phrase ship voyage. Let me try a metaphor out on you that I really like. So we usually think about financial markets as mirrors or lamps. Meaning? Two things. What is a financial market? It's a mirror. It's reflecting your value to you. And that's really important because I'm going to pay you on that basis. I'm going to tell you what you're worth. Massively important for capitalism to have a good mirror. It's also a lamp. What is a lamp? Projects light into the future. So what do financial markets do? They value everything and they tell you what things are going to be doing in the future, or they guess.

37:05That lamp is really important because when something goes up in value a lot, you say, oh my God, I want to go do some of that because financial markets are telling me that it's valuable. That lamp is hugely important for capitalism. Okay, so it's a mirror and a lamp. I think financial markets have become a prism. And what is a prism? So a prism is something that somebody holds up and it refracts light and it distorts reality. And what my concern is, now we have figured out, a subset of people have figured out, that we can use financial markets to manufacture wealth, redistribute wealth in all kinds of interesting ways.

37:39And that prism is not a mirror and it ain't a lamp. It's something completely different and it's really problematic. And that, I think, is what the last 20 years have been about. Because people started to believe things that nobody should believe. And then I think entrepreneurs started to feel like, oh, wow, I know how to play this game. The bigger the promise, the more extravagant the thing I say, the cheaper the capital. And that is screwy.

38:07When Mihir Desai looks at the American stock market of 2026, what he sees is a tool that's been somewhat mangled. Designed originally to allow humans to make bets on large enterprises, larger than one person or one family could afford. supersized, like most things are in America, and in the last two decades, bent into a shape where it's no longer as reliable as an instrument. And SpaceX, this specific company, this specific IPO, is a good way to understand that shift. We're going to take one last short break. When we come back, the story of SpaceX, founded in an earlier version of our stock market by an earlier version of Elon Musk.

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42:19Welcome back to the show. So we have heard the story, the invention of the stock market. We've heard Mahir Desai's theory for how it evolved from something reasonably sane to something perhaps less reasonably sane. The last story I wanted to learn was about SpaceX itself. Not a company I'd ever paid too much attention to before this year, before what is now the biggest IPO in history. In a sense, the biggest bet the stock market has ever made. So here's where I would start the story of SpaceX. One day in 2007, a not-yet-famous computer nerd was being interviewed on a soon-to-be-canceled PBS show called Wired Science.

43:00Thank you so much for being with us here at Wired Science. Well, thank you for having me. Elon Musk. He's young here, much less flashy. Dressed in a dark blazer, blue dress shirt, wearing a comically wide beige tie. Here to share the story of his success so far.

43:41How did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship, essentially? Well, when I graduated from college, there were three areas that I thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity. The three were the Internet, space exploration, and then changing the economy from a mine-and-burn, hydrocarbon-based economy to one which is silver electric, which I think is... You know, even back then, he talked a big game, but he was not trying to get involved in politics. He was sort of staying in the lanes of being this tech visionary, speaking about building things for the betterment of humanity.

44:16This is reporter Eric Berger, senior space editor, which is a fantastic job title, at Ars Technica. He's also written two books on SpaceX. He's been covering the company for over a decade. Why did you first start paying attention to the story of SpaceX so long ago? They started doing really interesting things. And I think this was against a backdrop of me becoming really frustrated with what NASA was doing. What was your beef with NASA? So I live in Houston, literally a couple of miles from Johnson Space Center. There's astronauts who live on my street. So I love the space agency, but they just, they weren't going anywhere.

44:55They were spinning their wheels. And it was increasingly clear that the agency was set up by Congress in particular to serve contracts to large defense companies. and they would slowly do things, but we were not going back to the moon or going to Mars in my lifetime. If you were one of the kids who grew up watching NASA land humans on the moon on TV, what you might have thought is that you were in the first chapter of a story of galactic manifest destiny, that humankind was beginning its final great voyage to the stars. That's not what happened. And some of these kids, as adults, felt cheated, including Elon Musk.

45:33You have said that we got lost along the way with our space program. What did you mean by that? He's asked about this in that interview. What I mean by that is, in 1969, we were able to go to the moon. And here we are, over three decades later, and we can barely get to low-Earth orbit. And I think, by any measure, that is a step backwards. Musk believed that the NASA of his youth had been replaced by something else. It started in the 1980s, when NASA, after some high-profile disasters, found itself being grilled by Congress. Today, the House Science and Technology Committee begins an intensive series of congressional hearings into the causes and the ramifications of a great national tragedy.

46:12Last week, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board released its report on the causes of the space shuttle accident that occurred seven months ago. And today, the committee will begin a thorough examination of its conclusions. Afterwards, in Musk's view, the agency had just become too risk-averse. Eric Berger agrees. NASA really can't afford to fail in the public eye because the administrator and the whole agency is called out on the carpet. And in industry as well, the companies that work for NASA, the contractors, kind of had the same mentality. Like, they could not fail. They were worried about losing their NASA contracts.

46:47And Elon sort of changed that up and said, you know what, this is really hard. We're going to blow stuff up. We're going to make mistakes. But we're not going to let that slow us down. We're going to use that to go faster. You said in your endeavor here to explore space that we are committed to failing in a new way, if nothing else. What did you mean by that? Just how it sounds? Well, I mean, we're committed to succeed, really. But if we do fail, I would hope that we at least add to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make fewer mistakes. I know this might sound like fake humility, but Musk probably understood that the odds were very much against him.

47:27private rocket companies are a place other people, more successful, more experienced than him, had already failed, notoriously an industry that turns billionaires into millionaires. And Musk is spending what is, at the time, his limited fortune on this very quixotic endeavor. I told the team I'd have enough money for three flights, and then that'd be it, you know, curtains if we didn't make it in three flights. There's a documentary called Return to Space that chronicles these early days at SpaceX, when it seemed so clearly a folly. This former PayPal guy wasting his payout blowing up dozens of rocket engines in early pressure tests.

48:08Even once the company finally settled on its own proper rocket design, the Falcon 1 in 2006, that rocket failed at launch after launch.

48:21Here's Eric Berger. They tried three times and it failed each time. And the company almost went under as a result of that. You know, if NASA brought out a rocket and it failed one time, two times, the program would be shut down, right? SpaceX was about to run out of Elon Musk's money. And without a successful launch, the company wouldn't attract anybody else's. The third rocket fails and Elon basically says, you know, we need to launch the next one in six weeks, which in launch terms is super fast. So instead of shipping the fourth rocket out there on a barge like you would normally do to save time, they get a C-17 from the U.S.

48:57military, they rent it, and they put the first stage, which looks like a large ballistic missile, into the cargo container area of the C-17. And they're launching from Kwadralene, which is a small atoll in the Pacific. Basically, you fly from L.A. to Hawaii and then fly again from Hawaii further into the Pacific to get there. And so the first leg of the journey, they're descending into Hawaii, and all of a sudden the rocket starts imploding because the pressure differential hadn't been calculated correctly. Oh, God. And so one of the engineers has to climb inside the rocket to open vents, and the military pilots want to just say, hey, we need to dump it.

49:34We can't have this in the cargo area. Anyway, it was quite dramatic. They get to this tropical island, which looks not dissimilar to Gilligan's Island, and they perform surgery on the rocket, do all sorts of crazy things to fix it and test it, and they put it on the launch stand in September 28, 2008. Five, four, three, two, one.

50:01We have liftoff. Musk, watching now helplessly as his final try takes off. He's too nervous to sit. He stands, he mutters, he curses, he beseeches the monitor. You know what, baby? Please tell me that's the stage lights. And it miraculously reaches orbit. Stage approaching CECO. And that would be a nominal CECO, which means Falcon 1 is the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground.

50:37And they've become the first company to ever privately build a vertical takeoff rocket like that and get to space.

50:46Musk and SpaceX, having survived a string of near-death encounters, enter a period of real success. The company starts to make money. NASA called and told us that we'd won a$1.5 billion contract. And I couldn't even hold the quote. I just bled it out. I love you guys. NASA begins hiring SpaceX to bring cargo and later astronauts to the International Space Station. The first promise of SpaceX has been fulfilled. Of course, Musk has much greater ambitions, which will require much more capital. This would have been a totally reasonable time for him to take the company public, offer shares on the stock market, raise capital.

51:26Instead, Musk does something atypical. He says publicly that SpaceX's very long-term mission, travel to Mars, is incompatible with the stock market and its short-term thinking. So instead, he'll use a mix of revenue and private investor money to keep advancing. And in 2017, we see the next big leap forward for SpaceX. The company discovers how to drive down the cost of a rocket launch by fundamentally redesigning the rocket itself. Before SpaceX, here's how every rocket launch worked. A rocket is basically one giant disposable engine, not like a plane which lands and flies again. With a rocket, you attach your payload, satellites or a capsule with astronauts, to the top of a skyscraper-sized booster.

52:11The payload would reach orbit and go to work, but the booster, the biggest, most expensive part, would fall back to Earth after launch and burn up. One launch and your rocket's gone. SpaceX invents reusable rockets. Rockets like in sci-fi movies. A rocket that takes off, but then returns to Earth. I hate to betray my medium, audio, but it's worth just looking up one of these launches online. Two, one, zero. Ignition. And liftoff. The sight is something to see. A rocket ship takeoff, which you've seen a million times, B-roll in your brain. But a rocket ship landing? I hadn't. Thrusters engaged.

53:00These four-feet-looking things deploy. Something that weighs about 25 tons lands gently on a very small landing pad. That was as smooth as I'd seen it. We had phenomenal shots all the way through the landing burn. Nobody had ever done that before. Tonight, SpaceX makes history reusing the same rocket to send something into space. For the first time, it will reuse a rocket that's been to space and back again. The mission could advance SpaceX's goal of bringing down launch costs. The reusable rockets do bring down launch costs. They drive them down wildly. From now on, if you want to put something big into outer space, SpaceX is the cheapest way to do it.

53:40The company describes it as what they're calling a rideshare mission. So this is kind of like the Uber of these satellite launches, I guess. That also enables a new, very profitable business Musk has launched, Starlink. Satellites beaming internet to consumers from the sky. To a lot of people, it becomes indispensable. As Ukraine tries to drive back Russian forces, it has one big advantage in its effort. Starlink internet satellites provided by the Elon Musk company SpaceX. Meanwhile, the rockets keep getting more efficient, more ambitious, more easily reusable. the lead SpaceX holds continues to widen.

54:20The mega rocket Elon Musk hopes will bring humans to Mars one day, blasted off over South Texas skies Tuesday night. That's the story of SpaceX through 2025, a very impressive private company that against the odds picked up NASA's drop torch and drove human progress towards the stars. Professor Mihir Desai believes that the stock market can be a mirror or a lamp, a tool to measure how valuable a company is today, how valuable it might be tomorrow. SpaceX, up until this month, was not publicly traded. But had it been, you could have bought it because you believed launching satellites is a good business today or because you believed in Musk's claims about tomorrow, that tomorrow he'd be running rocket ships to Mars.

55:05A mirror and a lamp. That's how you might have understood it until very recently, when Elon Musk decided he wanted to compete in the AI race and started changing the way he talked about SpaceX. Elon Musk, since he founded the company years ago, has obviously become a much more complicated figure. He swallowed up Twitter, was swallowed up by it, used it to promote crypto, Tesla stock, fringe right-wing political ideas. He's also in that time developed a real mastery of attention and the internet, an ability to persuade his followers into a kind of magical thinking, a cult of Musk. an ability he sometimes even uses to influence markets.

55:43And that power is maybe his best shot at competing in the AI race, a race that at first caught him flat-footed. He founded XAI in 2023, well behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Musk doesn't have the most data centers or the best LLM, but the lever he could pull is to amass lots of capital. And in February of this year, he makes a move. He takes his extremely unprofitable AI company, XAI, and stuffs it into SpaceX.

56:19XAI, all hands. We've got a very exciting presentation for you. We reached out to SpaceX for comment, didn't get a response. But this February, Elon Musk appeared at an all-hands meeting at XAI, speaking to his employees, but really addressing a larger audience, the public, the internet. This was broadcast online. He's here right after the XAI and SpaceX merger to justify it, to paint a grand vision of the future that his new conglomerate is going to lead humanity toward. You have to go out there and you have to explore the universe to understand it. And that's the motivation behind the combination of SpaceX and XAI, is to accelerate humanity's future in understanding the universe and extending the light of consciousness to the stars.

57:04I found this rhetoric not very illuminating, sci-fi slop, but I wanted to understand the real business case underneath it. So I asked Eric Berger, what did you make in 2026 when SpaceX buys XAI? Like, was that a moment you paid attention to? And if so, what did it mean to you? You know, 2026 has been a really interesting year for SpaceX watchers because it has become increasingly clear that SpaceX is not a space company, it's an AI company. So I think the acquisition of XAI was part of the process of realizing that. You know, Musk started talking in 2025 about orbital data centers, and it became clear that he was predicating all of the company's future valuation on providing data center services from space.

57:49Orbital data centers at the 100 to 200 gigawatt per year level. Not cumulative, I mean per year. Elon Musk has talked about this theory a lot. The data centers make more sense in space, where they can run on cheap infinite solar. And he reiterates that dream in this all-hands meeting, at its most hyperbolic scale. He says SpaceX plans to launch a terawatt of compute per year. What he's claiming is that every year, we'll create nine times more compute than our entire current global capacity. And all of it will be in space. Reporter Eric Berger pointed out to me why even the early parts of that plan would be very hard to work out in practice.

58:32Because obviously it's a heck of a lot cheaper to build stuff here on Earth rather than having to build a very specialized piece of equipment that's radiation hardened and has huge solar panels and launched into space. That's still super expensive. And so SpaceX is trying to make that trade with the Starship rocket and becoming very good at building satellites. but it's not at all clear whether they'll get there. But Musk promises they go even further, beyond orbital data centers circling the Earth, beyond a mere terawatt per year. But what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year? In order to do that, you have to go to the moon.

59:10So by having factories on the moon, building AI satellites, and having a mass driver, which is the kind of thing you really need to learn about or read about in science fiction, but we're going to make it real. we're actually going to have a mass driver on the moon. This entire all-hands meeting was so sci-fi that after I watched it, the next YouTube video to autoplay was, I swear, just the movie Contact. What I notice is how the version of Musk telling this far-out story is just so different from the Musk I encountered in that old PBS interview, way back when he was 35. It's not just that he looks synthetically younger than the less wealthy version of himself from decades before, It's that this version of Musk has also surgically removed from his personality the part of himself that could publicly admit weakness, the possibility of failure.

1:00:03He's describing this improbable future like it's an inevitability in the staff meeting. Watching him speak, what I notice, it's not that he himself is that charismatic. He doesn't possess the magnetism of a great politician. It's that the audacity of his promises contains its own charisma. You don't have to believe him. You just have to believe that other people might. That a promise this big cannot be constrained by the gravitational well of ordinary skepticism that normally reigns in public markets. Musk saying, look at the future I see. Look at the future through my prism. Here's Professor Mahir Desai.

1:00:42Musk is the master of the prism. He is a reasonably good business person, but what Musk is massively good at is financial markets. I mean, he figured out financial markets in a way that no one else figured out financial markets. And SpaceX is the latest version of this. It is him using financial markets as a prism to manufacture, you know, even more wealth and power. Now, that is, of course, all been enabled by our beliefs in technology. Now, of course, look, I'm not denying AI is amazing. It's amazing. but is it being oversold in a remarkable way in order to enable this kind of cycle to continue that's certainly my view and that is the prism what you're saying kind of just to make sure i understand it it's not that he is not a good businessman like he has generally built things yes but the skill that drives it more than that is that he's good at story he's good at story and he's good at financial markets he knows when to raise money he knows how to raise money he knows how to propagate a myth.

1:01:41And that's what's crazy about this era of magical thinking, which I thought would bust several years ago, is I think it'll die, but it dies hard. And it dies hard because lots of people, including now, lots of retail investors don't want it to die. And so I think it propagates. Will it die ultimately? Yeah, I think ultimately it will die. When and how? Don't know. And if you try to kill it by shorting it or otherwise, you will get your face ripped off. Right. And that is not a pleasant thing to do. And so we have to wait. And that's kind of what we're waiting through. History made on Wall Street today.

1:02:17SpaceX going public. The biggest IPO ever launched. A game's favorite penalty shares of SpaceX at$172 per share. Do you own any Bitcoin or Ethereum? The recent spike in the prices of the crypto currency. Launched today, turning SpaceX employees into millionaires and its CEO into a trillionaire. So that's one view. that the SpaceX IPO, in the end, is the story of a catastrophically bad bet. The end part of a story about how a tool for measuring the future eventually became abused. I know a lot of people who would agree with that version of the story. Me, I try not to make bets about the future into microphones.

1:02:56Never seems to go my way. Before we close the show, I wanted to go back to the place where I'm much more comfortable. The past. Lodvig, the historian whose office is not too far from the bridge in Amsterdam where all this started, the financial madness that's enabled so much human endeavor and folly. I'm just curious, like, for me as a human being alive in 2026, the fact of the stock market just feels like the highway systems or telephones or even the ocean, like, it just feels like a thing that always will exist, has to exist, like, at least a necessary feature of functioning capitalism. Like, as someone who studied the stock market from its inception, do you see it as necessary or almost like historically contingent?

1:03:37Like, is it something that had to be as a force or could we have had this world without it? I think we may have had this world without it, but we would have then needed another kind of institution that performed a similar function as a stock exchange, right? So in the US, for example, the stock exchange has historically been much more important economically than in large parts of continental Europe, Even in the Netherlands, although the foundations of modern stock trading are here, especially the 20th century, the stock exchange was hardly any important at all. It was mainly banks that financed the Dutch economy.

1:04:18But I think if there wouldn't have been a stock exchange or banks, then the world would have been very different from what it is today. Maybe a better place, actually. A less money-driven, less individualist also world. But my take on that is that at some point in time, an institution like the Stock Exchange would have developed anyway. Just given the nature of man and given the entrepreneurial character of some people, right? People like Elon Musk, I guess, but also other people in history who have just not been satisfied with what was there before them and wanted to do new things and conquer new worlds and try out new ways of funding that activity.

1:05:20Lodvig Petrum, his book is called The World's First Stock Exchange. We'll have links in the show notes to the books by our other guests, Eric Berger and Professor Mahir Desai. This is our very last episode of the season, which means a lot to us and very little to you guys. What that actually translates to is we will be away for a month where we will play some of our favorite episodes, both episodes of Search Engine you might have heard and some bonus episodes you might not have. And then we'll be back in August with some brand new stories for you. Thanks for being with us this season.

1:06:02Thank you.

1:06:32thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tenkati and Hilary Schuff if you have a business and would like to advertise on our show please email us pjvote85 at gmail.com subject line advertising that is also the place to send questions if you have a question you would like us to look into if you would like to hear Ciro ads on our show you can sign up for Incognito Mode that is our paid feed you also get bonus episodes You can find it always at searchengine.show. Your contributions there are what keep us running.

1:07:07Thank you, as always, for listening. It's been a pleasure to make the show this season. We can't wait to see you again in August.

1:07:30Thank you.

1:08:02Thank you.

1:08:37Thank you.

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