Last month, SpaceX went for the largest stock market listing in history worth $1.77 trillion. Taken together with his shares in Tesla, Musk’s equity stake of around 42 percent in SpaceX made him the first trillionaire. Venture capitalists like Peter Thiel who invested early in SpaceX are set to make a killing when they are allowed to sell their shares over the next few months.But beyond the obscene concentration of capitalist wealth in the hands of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires, SpaceX’s IPO highlights another alarming trend that is often overlooked: the rapid rise of founder-controlled tech monopolies.
Even though SpaceX’s shares are now traded on the stock exchange, Musk remains in full control of the company. This is because he holds a special class of supervoting shares giving him 82.4 percent of voting rights. Most shareholders have shares with one vote; Musk’s have ten. SpaceX–a company dominating rocket launches and owning satellites, the X social media platform, the Grok chatbot, and vast AI infrastructure–is listed with a man at the top who cannot be removed by any shareholder vote.
Founder control is not about Musk alone. The same pattern holds for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta/Facebook and Larry Page & Sergey Brin at Alphabet/Google. We are witnessing an unprecedented concentration of corporate control in the hands of tech billionaires in charge of AI as well as vast spheres of social media, internet search, data centers, and now space infrastructure.
But how did we end up here? Since the early 20th century, Wall Street and U.S. political elites have pushed the liberal ideology of shareholder democracy: the principle that stock ownership confers voice. Everyone should invest their savings in the stock market, so everyone benefits. And every shareholder has a say in how companies are run. Or so the story goes. Alas, this story has always been a myth. Most people on the planet never had the means to invest in shares. And those who did–primarily Western middle classes–never had a real say in how their pension funds invested. Nor did these institutional investors have power over large multinational corporations. Powerful CEOs and billionaire shareholders did. The massive expansion of venture capital since dot-com supercharged this trend and led to the concentration of corporate control in the hands of tech billionaires.
Founder control is not an accidental outcome of finance. It is also not the product of Silicon Valley’s increasingly techno-authoritarian ideology. Instead, it is the consequence of fierce competition among venture capitalists seeking to maximise returns. After the dotcom crash, a new generation of insurgent venture capitalists broke into the Silicon Valley establishment by offering supervoting rights which enabled founders to keep control even after the IPO.
When Musk was still building SpaceX from scratch, his early backers–Thiel’s Founders Fund, the PayPal Mafia network, and eventually venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz–made a calculated bet: offer founders like Musk permanent control and win the deal. It worked. They won the deals and made billions.
Most people assume that the IPO process addresses this power balance. (In other words, that banks, regulators, and institutional investors impose accountability on founders in exchange for access to public capital markets.) This assumption is wrong. Take SpaceX again. By the time Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley entered the picture, it was too late already. The banks were competing ferociously to underwrite the most lucrative deal in stock market history. They did not challenge Musk’s 82 percent voting control. They accommodated it. And they tried to sell it at an obscene price to almost every pension fund and retail investor on the planet.
This has been the case across every major tech IPO of the past two decades. Meta, Alphabet, Airbnb, Palantir, and now SpaceX: the same structure, the same result. Insiders–founders and their early venture capital backers–make fortunes selling into an overpriced public market and keep control of tech monopolies. Ordinary savers, through their pension funds, ISAs, and index trackers, provide the capital that generates those fortunes. In exchange, they receive shares with no meaningful voting rights and have no say in how their money is used. This helps to explain why capitalism is now dominated by a small fraction of billionaires running tech monopolies.
SpaceX is the endpoint of a twenty-year project by Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists to hand permanent control to tech founders. We are told that having tech oligarchs in total control of AI and space technologies is for the public good. However, the recent protests against AI and the popular support for the Democratic Socialists in the U.S. signal that most people never bought into this story.
But reining in tech billionaires’ power and stopping the trend towards a techno-authoritarian regime of total surveillance requires an organised, international mass movement aiming at overthrowing capitalism. As daunting as this task may seem, taking it on is more urgently needed than ever.
David Kampmann is a political economist and fellow at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of Silicon Valley, Venture Capital and AI. David holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics.