Hello and welcome to sleep money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times.

Hello.

With Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello, hello.

We are talking Elon this week.

We are going to talk about SpaceX, the IPO thereof, all of the money, all of the value,

all of the crazy, all of the colonization of Mars.

We are going to talk about Iran's economy and whether it makes sense to invest in people

trying to put $300 billion to rebuild it. We are going to talk about tobacco bonds and what this

means for America's municipal finances. We have a Slate Plus segment on digital privacy and

the latter of as well. It's all coming up on Slate Plus segment on digital privacy and the lack thereof as well.

It's all coming up on Slate Money.

Okay, guys, we need to talk about the $2.5 trillion elephant in the room. We didn't really talk about it last week. We need to talk about it this week. I am talking, of course, about SpaceX. It is a company that provides internet to lots of people around the world. It is a company that shoots rockets into space. It is a company that provides internet to lots of people around the world. It is a company that shoots rockets into space.

It is a company that owns the company formerly known as Twitter and now known as X,

along with its associated AI, known as GROC.

And somehow, if you put all of these weirdly disparate businesses together, it is worth

$2.5 trillion or thereabouts. It goes up or down by large amounts every day because it's

a volatile stock. The thing it doesn't do is make anything like as much in the way of profits

as all of the more mature trillion dollar companies like Google and Amazon and Apple and what have you.

But then again, it's a much younger company.

It only went public a week ago, so you can't expect it to be making a fortune quite yet.

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