SpaceX Just Had the Biggest IPO in History. The Space Economy It Points To Will Need a New Kind of Money.

4 min read

SpaceX raised about $75 billion (roughly R1.24 trillion) this week in the largest public listing ever, jumping 19% on its first day of trading and valuing the company at around $1.77 trillion. The headline is the money raised. The bigger story is what it signals: a space economy that is becoming real, fast. And an economy that operates beyond Earth's borders, beyond its banks and beyond any single government, will eventually need money built the same way. That is the quiet case for crypto in space.

Key takeaways

  1. A record listing. SpaceX raised around $75 billion (about R1.24 trillion) and rose 19% on debut, the largest IPO in history and a marker that commercial space has gone mainstream.
  2. A trillion-dollar frontier. The global space economy is projected to roughly triple from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion (about R30 trillion) by 2035, according to McKinsey, growing far faster than the world economy. South Africa is part of the backbone, co-hosting one of the largest science projects on Earth.
  3. Beyond legacy fiat. As crypto has matured, the need for central banks and government-backed money has fallen away. Space, controlled by no government, is the natural home for decentralized money, and for many such currencies, freely chosen.

The Biggest IPO in History

SpaceX sold roughly 555 million shares at $135 each to raise about $75 billion, then climbed 19% on its first day on the Nasdaq. That values the company at around $1.77 trillion and, on paper, makes its founder, the South African-born Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire. The biggest listing in market history has a South African at the centre of it.

Beyond the spectacle, the listing is a signal. Private capital is now backing space at a scale that used to belong only to governments. Rockets, satellites, communications, imaging and the services built on top of them have become a real, investable industry.

A Trillion-Dollar Economy Above Us

The numbers behind that shift are striking. The consultancy McKinsey projects the space economy will grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion (about R30 trillion) by 2035, expanding far faster than global GDP. Independent forecasts point the same way, with Morgan Stanley estimating the sector will reach roughly $1.1 trillion by 2035. Much of that value comes from the everyday services space quietly powers: navigation, weather, agriculture, logistics and connectivity.

South Africa sits closer to this than many realise. The country co-hosts the Square Kilometre Array, the largest radio telescope project in the world, rising across the radio-quiet Karoo alongside the existing MeerKAT array, with the national space agency SANSA running ground-station and earth-observation work. The broader African space economy is already worth close to $25 billion and is projected to reach nearly $40 billion by 2030. South Africans are helping to build this frontier.

Space Is the Natural Home for Decentralized Money

Legacy fiat money runs on national central banks, commercial banks, correspondent networks and business hours, each one anchored to a country and its rules. For all its reach, it has been a failed experiment from the start. It quietly drains savings through the hidden tax of inflation, it hands officials the discretionary control that lets corruption flourish, and its opacity is what makes large-scale money laundering possible in the first place.

Crypto has changed what is possible. As the technology has matured, the case for the experimental central bank or a government-backed currency has fallen away. Digital, borderless and permissionless money settles peer-to-peer, every hour of every day, with no institution standing in the middle. For a growing range of uses, there is simply no longer a compelling reason to route value through legacy fiat at all.

Space makes the point obvious. No government controls orbit, the Moon, or anywhere a future settlement might form, and no single country's currency has any natural claim out there. A frontier beyond every border is the perfect home for decentralized money, and it points to a future of many such currencies, freely chosen. A satellite, a rover or an autonomous station can hold and move a digital asset as easily as a person can, with no bank account required, and a neutral, fixed-supply money like Bitcoin is an obvious candidate to anchor it.

This is already further along than it sounds. Blockstream Satellite has been broadcasting the Bitcoin blockchain from space since 2017, beaming it to almost the entire planet for free so that anyone with a small antenna can stay in sync without an internet connection. The honest caveat is distance: the speed of light makes real-time settlement across planets genuinely hard, so the near-term story is resilience and connectivity in Earth's orbit, with off-world settlement economies further out. The direction of travel is clear, and the foundations are being laid now.

While South Africa is playing somewhat of a minor role in the space age already through the SKA, MeerKAT and SANSA as mentioned above, we are not pioneering the technology, but we have the incredible potential to do so, and bethe cutting edge leaders in this space.

Unfortunately however, our beaurocracy, massively over regulated market, red-tape and systemic corruption keep us light years away from achieving that status.

Perhaps one day.

Cape Crypto (FSP 53746) provides information, not financial advice. Crypto assets are volatile and you can lose money. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Sources

Leon Kowalski