One hundred quintillion US dollars flying out of the Milky Way, is Elon Musk really that amazing or just boasting?

The "open - source" pioneer of China's new energy technology, the self - proclaimed Iron Man, and the king of Tesla EDM;

▲ He created an "open - source" era. Isn't it reasonable to compare him to the "origin" master? Note that circling this person who is "coming back to open - source" is actually a veiled criticism.

The "emperor" of Mars, the godfather of Dogecoin, the supreme master of Kek laughs, Gekron Rust, the helmsman in five cutting - edge fields, the top figure in the cryptocurrency circle; a modern renaissance man, the seller of the moon, the sower of neural lace, a Jesus - level technology salesman, the former Protector General and co - equal king conferred by President Trump;

The Twitter fanatic, the master of drawing pies in the capital market, the king of over - promising, the maniac of sleeping in the factory, the father of Cybertruck Minecraft, Apartheid Clyde (Note: It seems to be an internet meme, literally translated as "Apartheid Clyde", and it's not clear if it's a standard term), the heir to the robber barons;

The lord of xAI Grok, the weaver of Neuralink's brain - machine network, the madman of Starship recovery, the mole digging tunnels, the human CPU working 120 hours a week, the destroyer of the Everything App who changed Twitter to X;

The man who makes analysts lose sleep, makes meme coins worthless, makes NASA both love and hate him, and makes archaeologists in 2500 scratch their heads. The most powerful human self - walking narrative/sower in the early 21st century, the father of twelve children, a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States, the great Elon "Open - Source" Musk, has just effortlessly pulled off another big stunt —

At 2:42 a.m. on June 20th, Musk, the "open - source" master, posted the following message on his X homepage: In the future, 1 trillion times 1 trillion dollars will be spent to produce antimatter to travel to other galaxies.

A few minutes later, the "open - source" cult leader added another sentence: By then, things will no longer be measured in dollars, but only in mass and energy.

▲ Grok has automatically switched to Chinese.

This tweet exceeded 20 million views within a few hours, so that Jared Isaacman, the current administrator of NASA, commented below: "I support antimatter propulsion."

Expanding the numbers, 1 trillion times 1 trillion dollars is 10 to the 24th power dollars — you read that right, it's 1 octillion dollars. For comparison, the total population of the Earth, rounded up, is only 8 billion, which in exponential form is only 8×10 to the 9th power.

According to real - time data from Forbes, with the listing of SpaceX on June 16th, Musk's net worth has reached the border of 1.3 trillion dollars. He is not only the world's first trillionaire, but his assets also lead other billionaires on the top list by an entire order of magnitude.

Is the "open - source" cult leader going crazy again? Actually, no. He has just once again resorted to what he is best at, using the end of physics to write a long - term check for the current capital market.

01

Antimatter is not a mystery, but how to produce it is almost like a mystery

Although this is another routine analysis of Musk's secondary - market operation techniques, we still need to clarify the basic physical concepts.

Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter. Electrons carry a negative charge, while anti - electrons (positrons) carry a positive charge; protons carry a positive charge, while anti - protons carry a negative charge. Once they meet, an annihilation effect will occur instantaneously, and the conversion ratio of mass to energy is almost 100%.

Assuming that the annihilated matter is 1 gram of normal hydrogen and 1 gram of anti - hydrogen, the theoretical energy released can reach 1.8×10^14 joules. In a more understandable description, it is roughly equivalent to the explosive power of 43,000 tons of TNT, about three times the power of the "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima.

▲ In the "Avatar" series, the "Entrepreneurial Star" spaceship, which can fly at near - light speed between stars, is 1.6 kilometers long and its main propulsion method is antimatter.

The advantage of the matter - antimatter annihilation effect lies in its almost 100% mass - energy conversion. Its efficiency is about 750,000 times that of chemical fuels, about 1000 times that of uranium fission, and about 300 times that of hydrogen - helium fusion. In the movie "Avatar", the "Entrepreneurial Star" interstellar spaceship is set to use a nuclear fusion/antimatter hybrid engine. The propulsion system provides 95% of the power through antimatter annihilation, and its cruising speed can reach 70% of the speed of light. At this speed, even considering the necessary acceleration and deceleration phases of interstellar travel, a one - way journey to Proxima Centauri (4.2 light - years away) would only take a little over 7 years.

So, from the perspective of basic principles, it is reasonable for Musk to focus on antimatter. In fact, when he posted those two tweets, his fans dug out an old post from 5 years ago. At that time, a follower asked the question "Will SpaceX ultimately use antimatter propulsion?", and Musk's answer at that time was "Ultimately yes". So this "1 trillion times 1 trillion" is a bit like bringing up a joke from five years ago.

Of course, it is reasonable from a theoretical perspective, but from a technical perspective, it is a different story.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland currently has the world's only antimatter production facility — the Antiproton Decelerator (AD). Its working principle is to first start CERN's Large Hadron Collider, use high - energy protons to hit a metal target, and generate antiprotons and other antiparticles through collisions. About 4 antiprotons are produced for every 1 million collisions. After these antiprotons are decelerated by the AD, they can be captured using a Penning trap with a uniform magnetic field and an electrostatic field.

▲ At the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the yellow - circled part is its Large Hadron Collider system buried underground. Even those without a concept can realize the cost of "manually producing" antimatter at the current stage just from its scale.

However, this production mode has a big production - capacity problem. If CERN stops doing other things and operates at full capacity to produce antimatter for a whole year, the output is about at the nanogram (10⁻⁹ grams, 0.001 micrograms) level. Since the discovery of antimatter, the cumulative output of all high - energy particle laboratories around the world is still less than 1 microgram.

Both the Large Hadron Collider and the AD are energy - consuming giants. In a report in 1999, NASA estimated that the production cost of each gram of anti - hydrogen, according to the currency value at that time, was as high as 62.5 trillion dollars, and the main cost lies in energy consumption. Based on the efficiency of existing accelerators, about 2500 trillion kilowatt - hours of electricity are needed to produce 1 gram of anti - hydrogen. In comparison, the total global power generation in 2025 is only 31.78 trillion kilowatt - hours.

In addition to production, transportation is also a huge problem. It was not until March this year that CERN completed the world's first road transportation of antimatter — using a 2.5 - ton magnetic trap device to transport 92 antiprotons over 8 kilometers. And the cost of the entire device is in the tens of millions of dollars.

02

Why now? The narrative necessity after SpaceX's listing

Just looking at the timing of the tweet, the situation changes. On June 12th, SpaceX listed on the NASDAQ at $135 per share, with the ticker symbol SPCX, raising $75 billion and being valued at $1.77 trillion, setting a record for the scale of human IPOs. Four days after the listing, the stock price had risen by more than 70% compared to the issue price, and the market value exceeded $3 trillion, surpassing Amazon and Microsoft and ranking fourth among global listed companies.

Musk personally holds about 42% of the economic interests, corresponding to more than $1.06 trillion; plus his 13.8% stake in Tesla (about $337.6 billion), about $2.25 billion in X/Neuralink/Boring Company combined, and about $1.8 billion in cash and other assets. In other words, the vast majority of his $1.3 - trillion net worth is in un - unlocked equity.

▲ SpaceX's business looks extremely cool, and its overall trend is currently good, but the biggest problem is that its financial scale cannot support its current market value.

So, when Musk throws out this astonishing figure of 1 octillion dollars, it's less about him seriously considering the antimatter - driven mode for interstellar travel and the corresponding budget for antimatter fuel production, and more about his usual way of describing magnitudes based on physical common sense. In short, it's using exaggerated rhetoric to tell the market and investors that since the valuation of his SpaceX is comparable to the GDP of a large country, the physical ceiling of antimatter propulsion is high enough to be worth investing in with civilization - level resources.

Note the sentence Musk added. I believe it's no coincidence that he made the statement "Dollars will eventually be replaced by mass and energy" during the IPO period. This is to continue an ultimate narrative beyond Mars for SpaceX with a $3 - trillion market value. When investors ask "What's next after the Starship fills Mars?", the answer is already waiting on X: antimatter, other galaxies, and a civilization - level scale.

In short, all these words can be summed up in a sentence that gives domestic cyber - dissenters PTSD — My goal is the stars and the sea. And this actually touches on a real economic proposition. Once the energy models of controllable nuclear fusion, space solar energy, and even mass - produced antimatter continue to evolve and the marginal production cost approaches zero, the function of money as a scarcity - accounting tool will indeed collapse. Musk ties the timing of this event to the end of his own business map — implying that the ecosystem of SpaceX/Tesla/xAI will ultimately lead to a post - dollar civilization.

Of course, this narrative technique was previously named by Nobel - laureate economist Paul Krugman in his New York Times column as a "human Ponzi scheme".

This is not a fraud in the legal sense, but a capital cycle where the valuation is completely attached to the long - term narrative and decoupled from the current cash flow. The first of Krugman's five accusations is that "the valuation is attached to the narrative rather than the operating cash flow".

SpaceX's current market value of $2.1 - 3 trillion clearly cannot be supported by its current profits from launch services and Starlink subscriptions. What can inflate the bubble is the grand narrative from the Starship to Mars colonization. Of course, we now know that there is also an extension of antimatter interstellar travel.

▲ Musk draws pies and brags because his business requires him to do so. This is the essential difference between him and people like Madoff.

But Krugman's judgment doesn't necessarily mean that we should completely condemn Musk. After all, there is a fundamental difference between him and Madoff — the former has real products and real records of cost reduction in technology. SpaceX has reduced the launch cost from tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to a few hundred dollars per kilogram, a reduction of two orders of magnitude. If this cost - reduction curve is replicated in antimatter production, even if it's only reduced by one order of magnitude, the budget of "1 octillion dollars" will collapse exponentially.

Although the main purpose of the "open - source" saint is to increase the valuation of his own company, as a businessman with real dreams, it's not surprising that he has such a vision of technological exponential evolution. So the key is how much of all these pie - drawing can ultimately be realized.

03

What on earth is he up to? The narrative is just fuel...

Looking at three things together, the real intention of Musk's operation is actually very clear.

Firstly, it is to raise the valuation ceiling of SpaceX. With a current market value of $3 trillion, SPCX has already surpassed Amazon and Microsoft and is only one step away from Apple and Nvidia. Going further up, the imagination of the Mars narrative is starting to run out — Mars is the "second Earth". After all, market pricing has an anchor. As the Starship project makes clear progress, investors are gradually realizing that even the latest rocket vehicles cannot fulfill the promise of going to Mars, and the driving force to support the market value will quickly disappear. At this time, the existing anchor must be discarded and a new one put in place.

"Other galaxies" means countless Earths, so the anchor disappears, and the valuation can be infinitely discounted. This is why he posted this tweet just one week after the IPO and when the stock price was soaring in after - hours trading.

Secondly, it is to philosophically deconstruct his status as a trillionaire. As soon as he became the world's first trillionaire, he immediately said "In the future, things will not be measured in dollars". This is both a modest statement of "I don't care about money" and a declaration that he is paving the way for a post - dollar civilization. To some extent, this is a pre - emptive defense of "