Maybe it’s time to give Elon Musk control of the sun

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. 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. Start your day with essential news from Salon.