The system is opening up

"A terrestrial economy relaunched by a shared project and a demographics that rebounds."

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

·

Jul 9

Replying to @ThomasAlxDmy

You don’t seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

A month ago, on the heels of SpaceX's IPO, I published an analysis explaining why this company would be worth 30 to 50 trillion dollars within five years. Thirty million views, and quite a few people telling me I'd lost my mind. Elon had RT'd me. Yesterday, Elon Musk wrote that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if its goals are achieved. "More than the rest of Earth." Everyone saw it as a provocation. I see it as a theorem. Let me demonstrate it. Let's pose the problem. Total global wealth, everything eight billion humans own—real estate, stocks, factories, gold—weighs in at about 500 trillion dollars. Saying one company will be worth more than all that combined seems arithmetically absurd. And it is. In a closed system. Musk's phrase says just one thing, and it's the most important of the century: the system is opening up. Let's grant the degrowthers their one valid point: infinite growth is impossible in a finite world. Their error isn't logical; it's geographical. They thought the world ended at Earth. But Earth represents 0.0003% of the solar system's mass and intercepts one half-billionth of the Sun's energy. We're squabbling over crumbs at the foot of a buffet no one's opened yet. Open it, and hypergrowth stops being a slogan and becomes a physical trajectory again. A. For ten thousand years, wealth has followed a single variable: the amount of energy and matter that humans know how to capture and organize. Fire, agriculture, coal, oil, atom, silicon. Every leap of civilization is an energy leap. Our entire civilization runs on 20 terawatts. The Sun radiates twenty thousand billion times more, continuously, for free, for four and a half billion years. On the Kardashev scale, we're a Type 0.7 civilization. The Sun alone takes us to Type II. B. SpaceX isn't participating in this transition. SpaceX owns the only door to it. Starship divides the cost of orbit by a hundred, the constellation handles communications, and the world's second player is ten years behind. I've already listed what that unlocks: orbital data centers, factories in microgravity, asteroid mining, Mars. What interests me today is the stage no one prices: what it unlocks in people's heads. Because here's what demographers refuse to see. Western birth rates aren't collapsing because of housing prices. Our great-grandparents had six kids in unheated homes. It's collapsing because we've confiscated the future. You don't have kids for a world we're told is ending. You have them for a world that's beginning. The Western birth rate peak coincides exactly with the peak of technological optimism: jets, the atom, Apollo. Girard understood it: a civilization deprived of a frontier turns its rivalry inward, and that's precisely our era—culture wars, resentment, decline managed by committees. Give it back a frontier, and that same mimetic energy becomes emulation, construction, transmission. The colonization of the cosmos is the first project capable of unifying the West since 1969. We'll have kids again like we laid cathedral stones, for a structure we won't see completed. The first baby born in orbit will do more for European demographics than fifty years of family policies. Now, add it up. A terrestrial economy relaunched by a shared project and a demographics that rebounds. A complete orbital economy—energy, computing, industry, tourism—where every dollar passes through the same tollbooth. A solar system whose matter and energy exceed everything Earth will ever hold. And one single company that controls access. If A, wealth follows captured energy, and if B, SpaceX alone opens a reservoir a billion times greater, then the conclusion follows on its own: comparing SpaceX to terrestrial wealth is a category error. Earth stops being the denominator. "More than the rest of Earth" isn't hyperbole. It's rounding down. No one, in front of the first oil well in 1859, sketched Dubai. No one, in front of the first transistor, imagined computing would become the world's top industry. We're in 1859, and the well has just gushed. I stand by what I wrote a month ago: buy optimism. I'm changing just one detail. The size of the underlying asset. It's the universe.

Perpetual Education Fund origins

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2026/07?lang=eng

Warner Woodworth

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Folks, I was pleased in recent days to have some of you alert me to my work being featured in the LDS Church Liahona Magazine. Not featuring me, of course, because the writer was somewhat clueless. But back in the 1990s, I had seen so much suffering as I fought global poverty globally among Muslims and Catholics who struggled in the dozen or so nations I was working in, mobilizing rich friends to give of their time and substance. I think we had 5-6 Nonprofit organizations operating, mostly in the Philippines and West Africa. But I also felt deeply the pain among young LDS returned missionaries of what was called the Third World because I’d seen them through the years go serve the Lord, return home, and suffer miserable lives. They’d share stories of being unable to go to college. Therefore, they couldn’t get a decent job. So, the young women wouldn’t marry them. They were left in bitterness, loneliness, as well as lost credibility, hunger, etc.

I prayed about this tragedy for months, and finally God answered me. Directly. Clearly. He didn’t say stop my other work to simply focus on LDS RMs. But to stir up interests and convince top church officials to launch my humble little idea. I took it to a few LDS bureaucrats, and most of them laughed at the idea. I called it the creation of an LDS “Perpetual Education Fund” drawing from the early pioneer program known as the Perpetual Emigration Fund that funded my pioneer ancestors to be able to leave the UK, Sweden, Norway and take ship to America where they could cross the plains and Rockies and get to Utah. Here they built Zion and saved the dreams of the Prophet Joseph and later, Brother Brigham.

But church bureaucrats just chuckled. So, I worked my way into a sneaky one-on-one session with Gordon B. Hinckley, telling him he’s a renegade with more innovations to still implement. Years earlier he had accepted my idea of an LDS humanitarian NGO. It's now LDS Charities and is run by friends and former students in doing much good.

One time while doubting my proposal, he enquired if my ancestors had reimbursed the old pioneer Perpetual Immigration Fund after they began to succeed economically. I admitted they probably hadn’t. Then I teased him about his own ancestors. We both chuckled and I said, “Even they were too poor back then, and I’m sure yours didn’t offer paybacks because hardly anyone could.” But, I argued, "the church’s financing brought them to Zion and they saved the church. And you know it, President.” He laughed and got tears in his eyes as he often did, and then muttered under his breath, “You’re right about both our families.”

However, after a year of lobbying and more sad stories, he was still resistant. I’d argued, told dozens of cases or young elders serving in Zambia or Peru, and for 2 years enjoying a nice apartment, air conditioning, a bike or car, 3 good meals daily, and all the prestige a young elder gets with his fancy suit, standing at the pulpit preaching God’s will to hundreds of people, all in addition to helping convert, baptize, and change people’s lives. Then, they are released, go home to a hovel or shack, sleep on the floor with 4-5 siblings crawling around. No AC. Only one meal per day. No car. Not even a bike. Jobless. Potential girlfriends are disinterested because such elders lack schooling and therefore can’t get a decent job. A temple marriage? Nope.

But the Prophet seemed unmoved. So, I convinced one of my best NGOs to agree that we could try our own PEF with a stake President friend in Curitiba, Brazil to run our humble PEF experiment. We funded it from our Mentors International NGO coffers. The results seemed good. So, we then launched another experiment with RMs in Chile. But there, we put $100,000 in a Bank of America account in Santiago and let them disburse and later collect the monies. By then our results were convincing. Such that an old Mexican friend in Mexico who was a mission president there agreed to try it as well. After his mission, he stayed there living among the people and helping RMs.

Meanwhile, I got some BYU students of mine to spend a summer in Peru collecting the data I needed to argue more for the PEF. My team found a couple hundred RMs to interview. They collected the data. The cases had all the negative features above. But even worse: 82 percent had gone inactive. So, I took that data to Pres. Hinckley, but he still seemed unfazed. Yet I knew my crazy, inspired idea had legs, and it needed to go forward.

Shortly after the latest meeting we had, while church bureaucrats continued asserting my proposal was too radical, while I argued they needed to pray harder and become radical themselves, there was a bit of movement. On a Friday afternoon, the Prophet’s secretary called my home. She said he wanted me to be sure and attend the upcoming Saturday evening priesthood session. I asked, “Are you going to tell me what I should expect?” She said she wasn’t and she couldn’t. That’s when I knew! The next day, Saturday, March 31, 2001, it was announced. My phone started ringing off the hook all night as newspaper columnists, friends, students, and some church leaders began calling me and their congratulations, saying we needed to celebrate what they told me would never happen. But now it was in the pipeline.

From all this, I learned that when I worked hard on major LDS Church problems, if I don’t get discouraged or quit, but stay at it long enough and be as inspired and creative as I can, social change can happen. I’m burned out typing this up tonight but could say a lot more about the PEF rollout, its early management problems, how quickly it ballooned into a $1 billion program, and how it’s evolved over the decades since. I’m grateful my band of renegade students helped me get data so I could convince Pres. Hinckley first to create Latter-day Saint Charities back in the 1980s and then the 90’s, which just reported spending over $1.5 billion last year alone in assisting the global poor. PEF has been another huge blessing as thousands of returning elders and sisters have had much success in moving toward economic self-reliance. So, folks, take a look at the July 2026 Liahona for inspiring stories of transformation!

 

Longer lifespans

People are living longer everywhere.

29 And in the barren deserts there shall come forth pools of living water; and the parched ground shall no longer be a thirsty land.

30 And they shall bring forth their rich treasures unto the children of Ephraim, my servants.

(Doctrine and Covenants 133:29–30)

_____

The average person today can expect to live far longer than someone born in 1960, regardless of where they live.

This chart, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, tracks life expectancy at birth across four World Bank income groups. While high-income countries still have the longest lifespans, the biggest gains have come elsewhere. Upper-middle income countries have added more than three decades to life expectancy, while low-income countries have made substantial progress as well.

The data for this visualization comes from World Bank via FRED. It tracks life expectancy at birth by income group from 1960 to the latest available data (2024).

High-Income Countries Still Lead

High-income countries still have the highest life expectancy, reaching 80.3 years in 2024.

That is up from 68.3 years in 1960, a gain of 12 years. These countries started from a much higher baseline, meaning their gains have been slower but still substantial.

Examples include the U.S., Germany, and Japan.

 

Upper-Middle Income Countries Saw the Fastest Gains

Upper-middle income countries posted the largest increase, rising from 41.9 years in 1960 to 76.3 years.

That is a gain of 34.4 years, the fastest improvement of any group in the dataset. This category includes countries such as China, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.

Much of this improvement coincided with rising incomes, better sanitation, expanded vaccination programs, lower child mortality, and broader access to healthcare. Together, these changes helped push life expectancy in many middle-income countries toward levels once seen only in the world’s wealthiest economies.

The Global Life Expectancy Gap Has Narrowed

In 1960, people in high-income countries lived about 27 years longer than those in low-income countries.

Today, the gap stands at roughly 16 years. While a significant difference remains, low-income countries have added more than 23 years to average life expectancy since 1960. In other words, much of the world’s longevity progress has come from countries that started furthest behind.

However, the remaining gap shows that income, healthcare access, and living conditions continue to shape longevity worldwide.