The world of finance is creaming its pants over the imminent public offering for SpaceX, Elon Musk‘s space-flight operation. It might be the largest such offering in history, according to Axios, which delivered the news under the headline “SpaceX’s monster IPO is unlike anything we’ve seen.”
SpaceX is predicted to become the first company to debut on the stock market already valued at more than not just $1 trillion, which is in itself a record, but $2 trillion — instantly dwarfing the wealth of Walmart, Meta or ExxonMobil. In fact, if SpaceX’s pitch goes through, it would rank behind only five companies in the S&P 500 Index — Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon. It will also, of course, cement Musk, who is already worth some $817 billion, as history’s first-ever trillionaire.
A trillion is an inconceivably large number — for that matter, so is a billion, which is a thousand million, while a trillion is a thousand billion. Yes, that’s basic math, but it helps to spell it out, as our feeble primate brains can barely wrap our minds around a single billion dollars, which is roughly the amount of cash the U.S. is burning through every day of the ongoing Iran war. So multiplying that figure a thousand-fold and giving all of it to one 54-year-old guy is truly the mental equivalent of [insert deflating balloon sound].
I’ve been thinking about Musk a little bit too much lately — since almost any amount is too much — and wondering if it’s finally time to give him complete control of the sun. First of all, why not? Pretty soon he’ll own everything anyway. But I’m not entirely joking. One of the more outlandish proposed solutions to climate change is to install orbiting fleets of mirrored satellites that can deflect sunlight, so cooling the planet. There’s a fancy name for this: solar geoengineering. At the rate things are heating up on Earth, threatening to fry us alive sooner than later, this scheme could supposedly reverse or slow the damage we’ve done.
There are many of things wrong with this idea, but Musk has actually promoted it: “A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth” he wrote on X last November.
Musk doesn’t just control SpaceX, but also owns its subsidiary Starlink, the world’s largest satellite company, which boasts constellations of 10,000 small satellites and counting. As Salon has reported before, these things can appear extremely bright in the night sky, vexing astronomers and essentially censoring the stars. Musk has also been accused of weaponizing Starlink in war zones, including Ukraine. But if any company can do something as weird as blocking the sun’s rays to chill our planet, like a B-list Marvel villain, Starlink and SpaceX may be the only ones with the infrastructure to do it.
To say global heating is bad right now is really downplaying the crisis. A March report from the World Meteorological Organization found that “Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history.”
Musk is, to put it gently, a s**tposter, so a lot of his ideas resemble stoner sci-fi notions that might be amusing if he wasn’t an election-meddling sycophant for fascism whose gutting of key U.S. agencies has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. So yeah, giving him control of the sun is probably one of the worst such ideas anyone could possibly come up with, though I don’t doubt he’s capable of even more.
In fairness, Musk didn’t conjure up this idea all on his own. Solar geoengineering could come in many forms, not just satellites. Other proposed methods include squirting aerosols into the atmosphere or using microbubbles to make the ocean whiter. Even studying whether this might be feasible or how much it would cost is far from a popular idea — even researching the topic is controversial and some countries have called for banning the practice before anyone tries it. But honestly, in another decade or so, we might feel profoundly different and start wondering why we didn’t try these crazy-sounding methods a lot sooner.
To say global heating is bad right now is really downplaying the crisis. A March report from the World Meteorological Organization found that “Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice.” The report confirms that the 11 years from 2015 to 2025 were the hottest on record, which has triggered extreme weather like cyclones, heat waves and floods that disrupt and end the lives of millions while racking up billions in damages.
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As if you needed weather nerds to tell you that. We just survived March 2026, one of the most chaotic and freakish months in my lifetime, and probably yours too. Across the U.S., people were slammed with record-shattering daily averages that are typically experienced in July. In parts of Arizona and California, temperatures hit 112ºF — a first in March, breaking a record that hadn’t been touched since March 1954, when the mercury reached 108ºF in Rio Grande City, Texas. If anyone, such as our dear leader, still believes that climate change is a hoax, I would recommend they go outside more.
None of these summer-style temperatures in early spring bodes well for the actual summer ahead, in which a “Super El Niño” is predicted to unleash itself, a weather phenomenon some are calling “Godzilla El Niño.” (It’s the monster reboot we really don’t need.) Both El Niño and its counterpart La Niña are natural shifts in global weather patterns, primarily focused on Pacific Ocean temperatures, but they can impact the whole planet. Basically, things get warmer than average during El Niños and colder than average during La Niña periods. But what makes this El Niño “super,” what will shove the above-average even higher, is — you guessed it — the artificial heating from burning fossil fuels, the principal catalyst for climate change.
In other words, we should probably prepare, once again, for one of the hottest summers of our lives, with a torrent of unpredictable storms and disasters to follow. At the rate things are going, 2026 will likely be the hottest year in human history. At least until next year.
Suddenly the idea of blocking out the sun with space mirrors doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Even if that means giving that power to someone as repulsive as Musk, who might just decide to weaponize the technology — turning it off for some countries and not others — as he’s done with Starlink in Ukraine or what’s been described as a “fig leaf of humanitarian aid” in Gaza. It matters who will control solar geoengineering, but in a world of bad and less-bad options, we might not have much choice.
I’m not sure we should reject the impulse to explore extreme ideas to stop global heating, since the current consensus seems to be doing next to nothing.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are rich folks who want to deploy thousands of mirrors in space to erase the night. A California-based startup called Reflect Orbital says that reflecting sunshine on places during times of darkness could charge up solar panels, grow crops and replace urban lighting. The company recently petitioned the FCC for permission to launch a prototype satellite made with a mirror 60 feet wide that could launch as soon as this summer. This project’s side effects could be “pretty catastrophic,” according to some experts, who describe it as “horrifying” and “a terrible idea.”
Fortunately, I know from reporting on previous aerospace startups — including one that pitched putting Coca-Cola ads in the night sky using satellites — that sometimes these proposals are just bluster, meant to generate some media and investor attention.
It’s hard to say which idea astronomers and climate experts hate worse — pointing sunlight away from Earth or toward it. But still, I’m not sure we should reject the impulse to explore extreme ideas to stop global heating, since the current consensus seems to be doing next to nothing.
No, the picture is not entirely doom and gloom — the push for renewable energy is breaking all kinds of records, too, reaching roughly 50% of global energy capacity last year. The problem is that while renewables are growing, so is energy demand (the AI “revolution” isn’t helping) and green energy doesn’t always replace older, dirtier technology, but often supplements it, in an “also and” situation. Ironically enough, the joint U.S.-Israel war with Iran seems to be waking some countries up to the necessity of switching to solar, wind and nuclear as fast as they can. Meanwhile, other countries are backsliding and reaching for coal. The war itself is producing more emissions than some countries do in a year, which might negate all these gains. It’s too early to tell.
It’s still possible, although maybe only just, that we can reduce emissions quickly enough to prevent the worst-case scenarios, in which our planet gets so unbearably hot that plants stop growing in many places, starving billions as the air becomes unbreathable. Maybe we’ll really let things go so far that we’ll seriously need to consider blotting out the sky someday soon.
Any serious solar geoengineering project is probably decades away, but perhaps that’s a good reason to accelerate development now. No one is going to say it’s our best idea, probably not even Musk. But given the way that climate change has become a literal weapon of war, maybe it’s worth at least researching as many possible versions of Plan B, C or D as we can.
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Personally, I could deal with crowning Musk as Earth’s first trillionaire and king of the sun if he takes the climate issue seriously — and also pays his fair share of taxes, honestly repents of his fascist inclinations and makes reparations for all the damage he’s done. Definitely not holding my breath.
Musk used to talk like he was God’s gift to the environment simply because he acquired the electric vehicle company Tesla, a company now in crisis thanks to his terrible image. But his recent actions, such as constructing 41 gas-burning turbines to power xAI or his undying support for our pro-pollution president are just a few examples of his massive heel-turn on the issue. Above all, his efforts through DOGE to slash and burn federal agencies, eviscerating the ability to conduct government-funded climate science, strongly suggests that his worldview is basically about giving up on our home planet, which might explain why he talks about Mars so much.
But if people are genuinely uncomfortable with granting Musk the ability to turn the sun on and off, why are we OK with giving him more money than God? I am never willing to believe that any billionaires actually “earned” their wealth, let alone an amount as obscene as a trillion. If you socked away $10,000 a day, every single day from the birth of Jesus to right now, you’d have about $7.4 billion — less than 1% of Musk’s wealth, even before he even hits trillionaire level. Instead of asking him about his brilliant ideas for solving climate change, I’d like us to ask him why he’s apparently so comfortable watching it all burn down.
In a sense, Musk won’t really be the world’s first trillionaire anyway. In the mid-2000s, Zimbabwe underwent a period of hyperinflation that resulted in printing banknotes worth 100 trillion dollars. Which wasn’t enough to cover bus fare. So technically, I suppose the people of Zimbabwe, circa 2008, were the first trillionaires. I’m sure the economics nerds will say that doesn’t count, but I think it’s a parallel worth considering. No matter how much Musk accumulates, or any of the other oligarchs driving the planet into oblivion, their money won’t be worth anything on a dead planet.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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