SpaceX's $75 billion IPO is the kind of number that makes everything else look like a hobby. A 19% first-day pop on a company that is literally launching rockets into orbit. It is also, inadvertently, the perfect foil for Andrew Yang's thesis that the next startup gold rush is boring: housing, wireless, groceries. The things Americans overpay for. The delta between those two startup visions is not just about ambition. It is about who venture capital is for and who it imagines it is serving.
The Cost-of-Living Startup Versus the Rocket Ship
Yang's argument is structurally correct and historically ignored. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found that the economic gains from the tech boom of the past two decades were captured almost entirely by the top quintile of earners, while the cost of non-tradable goods like housing and healthcare continued to rise for everyone else. The moonshot economy is real. It just does not land where most people live. SpaceX going public is a triumph of long-horizon risk capital. But it also crystallizes the selection bias of the VC ecosystem: betting on the infinite frontier while the cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Phoenix remains structurally unaddressed.