Birth of a Network State: The Fascist Science Fiction of SpaceX
Elon Musk is not building an investment; he is creating a financial instrument for exit.
“It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so."
—Montesquieu
Birth of a Network State
Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) seeking to sell $75 billion worth of its shares to investors at upwards of a $2 trillion valuation, which would instantly make it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Details of the deal have begun to surface and it has never been more clear: SpaceX is fascist science fiction—literally and figuratively.
To understand how bizarre and dangerous this deal is requires understanding a bit of history of Elon Musk and SpaceX, some basic arithmetic, and a little imagination. But in short: one of the worst men in the world will have total, dictatorial control of a load-bearing beam of the U.S. economy, a beam which will have no way to stay intact other than financial mythology and government dependency—and no way to get rid of Musk when it goes sideways.
SpaceX is not being set up as a normal public corporation. It has a wide variety of unique features that give Musk total control over an expansive entity with enormous resources and unlimited ability to tap the public market. He will be entirely unencumbered by federal or corporate governance. And he will be free to spew his racist poison, to interfere in politics, and to amplify AI-generated teenage girls on his website with no concern of consequences.
Here are the biggest red flags with the SpaceX deal:
The valuation is more extreme than any company at this size in history. SpaceX made less than $20 billion in total revenue in 2025 but wants people to value it at more than 100 times that amount. That is totally unprecedented and has no basis in economic reality. It is purely a science fiction story.
With up to $75 billion raised, it will be the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s in 2019, by more than double.
Shares sold to investors (Class A) will have one vote per share. Elon Musk’s shares (Class B) represent ten votes per share. This effectively means shareholders are passive. They get financial exposure, but no control over the company whatsoever.
As CEO, CTO, and Chairman, Elon Musk gets to decide who goes on the Board, which is the only way to fire him. He has thus made himself legally permanent.
Musk’s compensation package is tied to meeting impossible, sci-fi goals: 1) a Mars colony with more than one million people; and 2) putting hundreds of terawatts of data centers in orbit.
The goals are self-consciously ludicrous but nevertheless SpaceX is being sold as a corporate dictatorship legally devoted to meeting its leader’s impossible vision. More importantly, its IPO represents the birth of what the Thiel-Musk-PayPal Mafia calls a network state.
While there are other proofs-of-concept of the network state, including Thiel-funded Praxis and Pronomos Capital, it’s worth comparing SpaceX and the network state idea directly.
How to Start a New Country
Balaji S. Srinivasan wrote the book The Network State: How to Start a New Country and has been near the center of Peter Thiel’s investment thesis and ideology for over a decade. Previously, he was the CTO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and was a partner at the broligarchs’ favorite venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Balaji defines a network state as essentially an online cult, using euphemisms like “highly aligned” and “collective action.” The idea is to collect enough money and power to demand recognition—by any means necessary. Elon Musk has been doing this for years—by pumping his companies’ stock price through paid influencers on social media, for example.
But when Musk bought Twitter, he exponentially expanded his ability to control the narrative, not just for himself but for politics writ large.
“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
According to Balaji, a network state must have a “clear leader” who raises money to acquire land—providing the online cult a way to expand into physical space. Every network state is effectively a dictatorship by a “founding influencer” who decides where everyone should live. For example: Mars.
“A network state is a social network with a clear leader… the founding influencer, who organizes the online community that eventually buys land in the physical world. Crucially, that land is not necessarily contiguous.“
Perhaps the most sinister line in Balaji’s manifesto is his desire for “a polity that prizes exit above voice” which is a line from Dark Enlightenment co-founder Nick Land, who lifted it from political scientist Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).
“A network state is thus an archipelago of digitally-linked, interconnected enclaves. It's also a country you can start from your computer… a city-state in the cloud… a polity that prizes exit above voice, a state that recruits like a startup, and a nation built from the internet rather than disrupted by it.”
Hirschman was a Jewish antifascist activist in Weimar Germany who escaped to the United States when the Nazis took power and fought for the U.S. Army in WWII. His book explores the idea that in any conflict, people have three choices: they can stay quiet; they can use their voice to change the system; or they can exit the system. If you’re unhappy at work, for example, you can try to change the management, or you can just quit. Your choice is mediated by loyalty.
Hirschman treated exit, voice, and loyalty as a tragic triangle of institutional decline while the Network State cult turns “exit” into a theology for elites powerful enough to abandon democracy, rather than help fix it. It makes the overt argument that democracy is a burden on those who don’t wish to change the liberal order, but would rather just leave it: “exit over voice.” Thus every network state is a dictatorship with no mechanism for change—except for people to leave it, regardless of the practicality.
“A parallel society… stands apart from mainstream society as a parallel version, as a fork. It's not set up in opposition to the mainstream on every dimension, but a parallel society is certainly differentiated from the mainstream on a key axis.”
Network states are explicitly reactionary against governments. That is, they seek to fix a “broken aspect of today’s world“ by “writing the history of… state failure.”
“[The Network State] combines (a) the moral fervor of a political movement with (b) the laser-focus of a startup company into (c) a one-commandment based startup society…
Each startup society is simply taking a broken aspect of today’s world, often a State-caused or at least State-neglected calamity, writing the history of that state failure, and then building an opt-in community to solve the problem.”
The structure of SpaceX, and the goals of its “founder influencer” are all in complete alignment with the network state. Elon Musk is not building an investment; he is creating a financial instrument for exit.
Exit, Stage Up
Elon Musk has been running away his whole life. As the child of two distant and abusive parents, Musk’s emotional problems started from infancy. But when the South African apartheid government fell in the early 1990s, Elon and his siblings ran away to Canada with his mom. According to Errol Musk, Maye was running away from Black people taking over the government.
Musk’s desire to create a safe, white space for himself, away from those he considers unworthy, could not be any clearer. His promotion of white supremacy and fear of Black and brown people is unrelenting—to the point that even mainstream media is noticing. His X posts revolve around two axes: technological escape; and pathological racism.
As a boy in apartheid boarding school, Elon Musk’s father was fascinated with rockets and learned about scientists like Nazi V2 Rocket designer Wernher von Braun—who later went on to lead NASA’s Apollo program. After WWII, von Braun was brought to Fort Bliss, TX during Operation Paperclip—a covert U.S. intelligence program which brought Nazi rocket scientists to America.
While at Fort Bliss in 1948, von Braun wrote an unpublished science-fiction novel, Marsprojekt, published as Project Mars: A Technical Tale in English in 1953. In it, von Braun wrote about a wealthy American who rallied Earth to fund a trip to Mars. On reaching the red planet, he discovers that there is already a civilization on Mars, an underground society ruled by technocrats under a leader called “the Elon.”
According to Errol Musk, von Braun’s book is why Elon Musk has his name—and why Elon is so obsessed with rockets and Mars.
But Musk’s obsession with von Braun didn’t stop with fiction. When he started SpaceX, he poached a scientist working at TRW, and got the original plans for von Braun’s rockets from NASA. SpaceX is built on von Braun’s technical legacy.
From the beginning, Elon Musk built SpaceX as a vehicle for his own escape—from the terrors of humanity—in all its colors—and from the terrors in his own mind.
Financial Führerbunker
Like Trump, Elon Musk is a textbook malignant narcissist. His messianic narcissism is only matched by Trump himself. Musk promotes his own sociopathy as an antidote to “suicidal empathy.” And his paranoia and sadism are evident to anyone who looks at his social media posts.
When this type of personality gets power, financial or otherwise, they see it as a confirmation of their own divinity, and that those who oppose them are evidently unworthy. Their psyche becomes a limitless engine of avarice and superiority. They believe they are destined to own literally everything. They become a black hole of ego.
So the prospect of any political opposition regaining power in America is existentially terrifying to Musk. After he bought the election for Trump, raided the government with DOGE, deliberately cut off food and AIDS drugs to millions of Black and brown people, showered himself in government welfare, and shut off all investigations into his companies, he has reason to worry. If the midterms happen as they should, he will be inundated with subpoenas.
SpaceX, in the form of a network state, is his financial führerbunker. Musk is trying to build an impenetrable quasi-nation-state he hopes will allow him to survive after Trump because Musk’s paranoia, narcissism, and pathological racism drive him more than money. His IPO is not about growth; it’s about survival.
Xenocosmography
Elon Musk’s vision, as indicated in his legal filings, of a million people living on Mars, is pure science fiction. It is not possible in his lifetime, or his children’s—period. The scientific challenges and immense costs are too numerous to list. But it is not a real goal to begin with; it is an impossible aspiration sold to people who don’t wish to think for themselves.
Underneath his absurd idea of populating Mars, however, is something darker still. Elon Musk is a de facto leader of the Dark Enlightenment—the neo-reactionary, antidemocratic ideology that has captured much of Silicon Valley, and the Trump regime. The two co-founders of the Dark Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, are both white supremacist eugenicists who believe that race should be used as a way to separate people into classes—or to simply eliminate people deemed to be unworthy.
Nick Land’s concept of “hyper-racism” is connected to his extreme desire for exit. In Land’s cosmology, outer space is the way for an elite group of white people to separate from the Earth, and to create a new species.
It is Land’s racist ideas, later commingled with Yarvin’s, which gave ideological form to Peter Thiel and Musk’s rage at what they see as the degeneracy of the world around them. It is the Dark Enlightenment which gave rise to the techno-religion of the network state, and the obsession with exit. SpaceX is not a vehicle for investment, it is the vehicle for Musk’s plans for escape.
And he wants the world to pay for it.
Systemic Lunacy
The impending SpaceX IPO is a symptom of not just Elon Musk’s lunacy, but of the entire political, financial and media system that enabled him. This includes everyone who added to his mythology as a genius and a visionary, avoided asking him hard questions for decades, and justified giving him money despite his overt fascist beliefs and psychopathologies.
Now there are no federal guardrails at all. After battering down every attempt to curtail his fraud through regulations—and by buying an election—Elon Musk is free to create an entirely new kind of entity that plays by different rules.
The SpaceX IPO is an unaccountable blank check in the tens of billions written to himself—one of the most toxic people to ever walk the planet—to do anything he wants.
Because of the sheer size of the proposed company, numerous index funds will be forced to buy it. Retirement funds will be exposed to it. And it will instantly become too big too fail. For reference, at $2 trillion the network state known as SpaceX will be worth more than these companies, combined:
Lockheed Martin
Northrop Grumman
Boeing
T-Mobile
Verizon
IBM
Salesforce
Oracle
The only real money-making business SpaceX has is Starlink—which made several billion in profit in 2025. But then Elon Musk added in his failing chatbot business xAI—which lost billions more. In total, the combined company lost more $4 billion last year.
SpaceX is not a stock in a company; it is a schoolboy’s racist fantasy. It is a dream of exit for not just Musk, but for an entire generation of people who have been influenced by his psychological operations, his fraud, and his misanthropy.
In 1915, the film Birth of a Nation justified white terrorism against Blacks, rewrote the history of Reconstruction, and helped revive the KKK. It told a story that helped convince a generation to go backwards.
Elon Musk wants to use the birth of a network state to chart the same course again. SpaceX is not about satellites, or Mars, or AI. It is about fear. It is about hate. It is about giving racism a safe space. It is about going up to go backwards.
In the hands of Elon Musk, SpaceX is a dangerous, potentially lethal parasite on America with no way to remove it. As soon as a sane government returns to power, SpaceX should be nationalized, or shut down entirely.
“I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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I was having a lazy afternoon and, mussing with my hubby about a time gone by when it seemed there was music and art and comedy everywhere, just how hilarious Jim Carey movies were. This is a terrible chapter and when it’s over, we must make sure it doesn’t come back.
I just feel they should all be in jail. period.