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It sidesteps the questions that doomed the Green New Deal.
An exclusive interview with Senator Martin Heinrich on SunZia, the largest renewables project in U.S. history, which is now — finally — fully operational.
A natural gas well in Kansas is not the same as an offshore wind farm in Maine.
Or, the Senate releases its latest attempt at bipartisan permitting reform.
The Iran War laid bare the two energy regimes fighting for global dominance.
Welcoming the world’s first clean energy trillionaire.
SpaceX is now a public company. The rocket and satellite maker’s shares began trading this morning, surging 19% from their initial price of $135 to more than $160 at the market close. With the sale, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire; his wealth has roughly tripled since President Donald Trump won re-election in 2024.
I’ll let other observers judge the IPO’s success, the firm’s long-term prospects, and the meaning of a world where we now have trillionaires. So I will make a few other points:
I remain agog at Musk’s ability to raise enormous amounts of cash from public equity markets to do hardware and manufacturing development. To some degree, the idea of a venture-backed firm doing hardware engineering — or what some now call “deep tech” — is Musk’s most impressive creation. The SpaceX IPO raised $75 billion today. That money will now go in part to scaling and commercializing rockets, factory equipment, and allegedly, at some point in the future, orbiting data centers.
Let’s not forget how crucial the U.S. government is to Musk’s story. In the world of climate, energy and manufacturing, we wail about financing’s “missing middle,” the elusive type of investment that can help scale and deploy early-stage technologies by bridging the gap between expensive venture capital and cheap bank lending. But this is at least partially a solved problem. SpaceX and Tesla survived the valley of death with government help: The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office (which the Trump administration has dubbed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing) extended a $465 million loan to Tesla to build its Fremont, California, factory in 2010; NASA’s 2008 commercial resupply contract gave SpaceX guaranteed offtake for its Falcon rocket. Neither firm would likely have survived without those key injections of financial certainty.
To some degree, Musk has already made his mark on the American economy by creating a new culture of manufacturing engineering. I cannot recommend enough my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Emily Pontecorvo’s report on the new cadre of climate tech founders who came up at SpaceX and Tesla. As it happens, I spent Wednesday touring a clean energy factory founded by a Tesla alumnus, and I was struck by how many signs of Musk’s bottlenecks-focused management approach were visible, even at a company seemingly run more humanely than Musk’s famously “hardcore” firms.
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To that point, Emily and Matt asked a number of clean tech executives who worked for SpaceX or Tesla what they learned from the experience. Their responses are fascinating; you can read them in full here. These comments from Justin Lopas, the COO of Base Power, stuck out — he was asked the “one thing” he learned from working for Musk:
You can get way more done in a day and can move way faster than you think. This does not mean necessarily more hours (although solving any hard problem requires that too), but instead being thoughtful about sequencing work, not accepting delays from suppliers or external counterparties without solid rationale, parallel pathing, accelerating critical learnings to early in the project, etc
To step back, one irony of Elon Musk’s situation — at least to me — is that relatively few American politicians are eager to talk about what has actually driven his wealth. I’m not just talking about his firms’ reliance on public financing, although that counts too. I mean Tesla itself. Although Musk now describes that business as a “robotics company,” it is and remains an electric vehicle and battery manufacturer. (It recently began high-volume production of the Tesla Semi, a potentially game-changing long-haul electric truck.) After today, Musk’s Tesla stake makes up less than half of his wealth, but, still, he would not be a trillionaire without EVs, solar panels, and batteries.
But that is not a particularly convenient fact. That Musk is a clean energy trillionaire remains unpalatable to Republicans, who would prefer to cast EVs as an inferior substitute made to satisfy government mandates. And Musk’s antisemitism, far-right politics, and gleeful destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development — not to mention Tesla’s violation of labor law — have obviously destroyed his reputation among Democrats.
Yet his elevation to a 13-digit net worth nonetheless marks a new era in American capitalism. The richest Americans in history have almost always been oilmen: John D. Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire by creating the Standard Oil trust; when he died in 1937, his net worth of $1.4 billion represented 1% to 2% of the country’s gross domestic product. In the 1960s, J. Paul Getty became the country’s richest person by negotiating Saudi and Kuwaiti oil concessions. Yet Musk became a billionaire not by harnessing commodities, but through his mastery of software, hardware, and clean energy.
Musk’s fortune now exceeds 3% of U.S. GDP. He is the richest American in history, judged as a share of national production. And it was electricity, lithium, and modern factory production — and, if you wish, the kerosene and methane that fuel SpaceX’s rockets — that got him there. As the science fiction writer William Gibson almost said, the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed in your retirement portfolio yet.
Many thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend.
The former ExxonMobil CEO left his legacy both on the Earth and in the sky.
Lee Raymond, the former ExxonMobil chief executive who became one of the country’s most important and influential climate science deniers, died in Dallas on Saturday. His death was announced today.
Raymond would probably count as a world-historic figure even if viewed only through the lens of the fossil fuel business. As Exxon’s chief executive, he personally negotiated the company’s merger with Mobil, creating the modern oil and gas juggernaut ExxonMobil in 2000 — and uniting two major pieces of the old Standard Oil monopoly. He ran Exxon from 1993 to 1999, and then ExxonMobil until 2005, at a crucial period in the history of that company, turning it from a diversified conglomerate that sold office furniture, real estate, and uranium fuel into a streamlined and exorbitantly profitable oil and gas business. Even before taking over the company, he managed its response to the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill; he later oversaw a worker safety push that would be widely copied by the industry.
In a way, he transformed Exxon from a company that was itself a portfolio — that distinguished itself via managerial competence across business lines — into a ruthlessly focused oil and gas supermajor meant to sit inside other people’s portfolios and churn out cash. Under his leadership, ExxonMobil became the world’s most profitable publicly traded company; it later lost that title to Apple.
Yet even if Raymond had merely played a bit part in the history of oil and gas, he would remain essential to the modern ordeal of climate change. Today, people throw around the “climate change denier” label often enough that it has lost some of its charge. But Raymond was the genuine article, a true villain. It was Raymond who turned ExxonMobil into one of the world’s most important funders of falsehood and denial about fundamental climate science research.
Raymond, an engineer by training, straightforwardly rejected the mainstream scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels cause climate change. Even though Exxon’s in-house climate research arm knew by the late 1970s that “there is no doubt” fossil fuels worsened the “potential problem of CO2 in the atmosphere,” Raymond did everything he could to elevate more industry-friendly perspectives. And he was willing to muddy the truth to win.
Under Raymond’s leadership, Exxon spent millions of dollars funding a shadowy network of think tanks and pseudo-scientific groups who published memos, briefings, and advertisements meant to cast doubt on climate change. As the journalist Steve Coll wrote in his book Private Empire,
Under Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil had persistently funded a public policy campaign in Washington and elsewhere that was transparently designed to raise public skepticism about the science that identified fossil fuels as a cause of global warming. ExxonMobil ran some aspects of its campaign clandestinely; that is, it did not initially disclose the full scope and purpose of contributions it made. […] What distinguished the corporation's activity during the late 1990s and the first Bush term was the way it crossed into disinformation.
In his capacity as CEO, Raymond made it clear that he personally rejected bedrock science. “Is the Earth really warming? Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming? And do we now have a reasonable scientific basis for predicting future temperature?,” he asked rhetorically during a 1997 meeting of the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing.
He answered all three questions in the negative, concluding, “Let’s agree there’s a lot we really don't know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond.” (In fact, we now know that even ExxonMobil’s primitive in-house climate models, then 20 years old, basically got global warming right.) He also claimed — we now know incorrectly — that any policy passed in the 1990s would be “very unlikely” to affect the future trajectory of mid-21st-century emissions declines.
The campaign worked. Exxon’s activism during this period, conducted sub and supra rosa, helped prevent the passage of major global and domestic climate policy in the 1990s; it also kept the United States from developing expertise in the solar, wind, and battery industries that other countries now dominate.
One of the ironies of this era is that much of modern climate science is derived from oil geology. You cannot grasp the all-important role that carbon plays in the Earth system — the way it has functioned as the thermostat for Earth’s climate over the long run — without a rich understanding of what the fossil record tells us about the Permian, Carboniferous, or the Upper Jurassic periods.
Take the Permian, for instance: When it began 299 million years ago, the Earth was relatively cool, with atmospheric CO2 levels somewhere around 200 to 400 parts per million. But soon enormous volcanoes ignited subterranean stores of fossil fuels, dumping thousands of gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere and initiating an era of rapid global warming and ocean acidification. When the Permian ended 252 million years ago in the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history — an annihilation that climate scientists call “the Great Dying” — atmospheric CO2 was closer to 2,500 parts per million.
When Lee Raymond was born in South Dakota in 1938, the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration sat at about 311 parts per million. When he died last week, it read 421 parts per million. Look at it this way, I suppose: Many people would feel captive to a change of that magnitude. But Raymond did something about it.
