Heat Radiation Management

The Scale of Musk’s $640 Billion Fortune

The sheer magnitude of Musk’s wealth has entered unprecedented territory. After gaining $187 billion in 2025 alone, Bloomberg estimates Musk’s net worth at $640 billion, making him the first person to ever surpass the $600 billion threshold. This financial momentum carries into 2026, with his wealth already increasing by $20.9 billion this year.

To visualize this capital, one can look toward the massive valuations of North American professional sports. Musk possesses enough liquidity to purchase every team in the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL simultaneously and still retain over $103 billion in surplus.

Technical Obstacles to Orbital Computing

The ambition to relocate computing power to orbit is driven by the skyrocketing energy demands of artificial intelligence. However, the technical realities of space-based data centers suggest that physics may clash with profit margins. While the vacuum of space offers unique advantages, it also introduces extreme environmental stressors.

On Earth, data centers typically rely on convective cooling—using fans to move air across heat sinks—or liquid cooling systems that often require massive amounts of water. In the vacuum of space, convection is impossible because there is no medium like air or water to carry heat away from electronic components. This forces a reliance on thermal radiation, which is a significantly less efficient method of heat transfer. To compensate, orbital servers would require expansive radiator arrays to emit waste heat as infrared radiation into the void.

• Solar Energy Access: Unlike Earth, orbit provides consistent solar energy without the interference of clouds or storms.
• Regulatory Ease: Operating in space bypasses terrestrial issues like land rights, water usage, and local zoning permits.
• Radiation Exposure: The lack of a thick atmosphere requires specialized shielding and more durable components to protect sensitive electronics.
• Thermal Management: In a vacuum, traditional cooling methods fail, necessitating massive radiators to manage waste heat.
• Logistical Costs: Every kilogram of hardware must be launched, meaning the weight of cooling systems and shielding adds significant expense.

On Earth, the expansion of data centers is often slowed by environmental impact assessments and the complexities of securing massive amounts of water for cooling. Moving these operations to orbit avoids the legal and environmental friction associated with large-scale terrestrial industrial footprints.

For more on this story, see SpaceX says it’s worth $1.75tn as it nears stock market debut.

Heat dissipation remains a primary complication. While large radiators could theoretically manage the temperature of high-performance servers, these structures add mass that must be accelerated during launch. Furthermore, the difficulty of performing hardware upgrades in orbit means that if technology becomes obsolete too quickly, the infrastructure may continue to function while its performance fails to meet market demands.

This creates a fundamental tension between the need for high-performance hardware and the cost of deployment. While terrestrial data centers face constraints regarding land availability, local zoning laws, and the capacity of the electrical grid to handle high-density computing, orbital centers would face the opposite: an abundance of solar energy but a severe deficit in cooling efficiency and mass-to-orbit economics.

The Rapid Expansion of the Musk Ecosystem

Musk’s ability to pivot between industries—from electric vehicles to space travel and AI—is rooted in a long history of technical entrepreneurship. He began selling his first game, Blastar, for about $500 as a child before building a conglomerate that spans multiple sectors.

His current ventures are increasingly interconnected. After founding SpaceX in 2002 to revolutionize space travel, he joined Tesla in 2004 and later established Neuralink in 2016, The Boring Company in 2016, and xAI in 2023. The potential for a SpaceX IPO, which could value the company at $1.5 trillion, would further consolidate his influence over both the terrestrial and orbital economies.

This interconnectedness creates a potential feedback loop within the Musk-led economy. SpaceX provides the launch capability and the Starlink satellite constellation; Tesla provides the battery technology and energy management expertise; and xAI provides the advanced intelligence that could eventually optimize these complex, multi-planetary systems. The development of Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle, is a critical component of this vision, as it aims to drastically reduce the cost per kilogram to orbit, making the transport of heavy data center infrastructure more economically viable.

“I operate on the physics approach to analysis. You boil things down to the first principles or fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there.

The transition to orbital computing would represent a shift from a terrestrial-based digital economy to one that is truly space-faring. If the energy requirements of artificial intelligence continue to grow exponentially, the limitations of Earth’s power grids and the environmental impact of massive terrestrial cooling systems may make the transition to space an inevitability rather than a choice.

As AI research continues to push the limits of energy consumption, the intersection of SpaceX’s launch capabilities and xAI’s computational needs may force a decision: either solve the terrestrial energy crisis or attempt to move the heavy lifting of the digital age into the stars.

Find more reporting in our Science section.