On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
For more than two decades, Elon Musk resisted taking SpaceX public. He argued that the pressures of quarterly earnings reports and short-term shareholder expectations would be incompatible with a company whose mission — colonising Mars — operates on a timeline measured in decades, not quarters. That resistance is now officially over. According to reports from Bloomberg, The Information, and multiple financial news outlets this week, SpaceX is preparing to file confidential IPO paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as soon as this week. The public listing is tentatively targeted for June 2026 , and the numbers being floated are staggering: a targeted valuation of $1.75 trillion and a fundraise of more than $75 billion — which would make it the largest IPO in history , by a significant margin. For tech investors, space enthusiasts, and anyone who has watched SpaceX's rise from scrappy startup to the world's most dominant launch company, this is a moment ...