Elon: Failure Is ALWAYS an Option

June 5, 2026

Dave Gonigam

Elon: Failure Is ALWAYS an Option

It’s staggering to think about, but the last time a human being walked on the moon was… 1972.

It’s not for lack of technology. “It’s mostly a matter of money,” says Paradigm’s macroeconomics maven Jim Rickards.

Democrats spent money on handouts; Republicans spent money on wars. There wasn’t much left over.

But here in 2026, “Space is back on the front burner in a big way,” says Jim.

“What’s different this time is that the effort is being privatized. Specifically, the space race is turning into a classic public-private collaboration where private-sector players provide most of the capital and technology while the government offers generous contracts to carry out NASA missions and highly classified tasks for the Pentagon.”

Of course, the leader in this effort is SpaceX — which starts trading publicly as SPCX one week from today.

Compared with some of our other experts at Paradigm, Jim has had relatively little to say in recent weeks about SpaceX. But make no mistake: He’s blown away by what SpaceX and Elon Musk have achieved.

“Of course, SpaceX is a rocket company that plans to build thousands of its giant Starship rockets with reusable booster rockets. By delivering larger payloads and reusing the boosters, Musk expects to lower the cost of putting a kilogram into space to $185. That’s only 1% of the historic cost of getting a payload to space.

“Large rockets and cheap payloads are just the beginning of Musk’s goals. SpaceX also owns Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and his space-to-Earth internet company Starlink — the only profitable part of SpaceX today.

“Musk’s plan is to use SpaceX to launch a million or more power plants into space. These can run on ‘free’ solar power 24/7. That power can then support a million space-based data centers, which can run the xAI applications more cheaply than Earth-based data centers.

“The combination of cheap payloads, free energy, massive computing power, space-based internet and sheer scale could make Musk a monopolist of AI, energy and the internet.

“Everyone else from Google to Anthropic and OpenAI would have to pay rent to Musk to tap into his energy-data nexus.

“Of course, a lot could go wrong, but that’s all in a day’s work for Musk. He solves new problems with the same engineering prowess that he has used to get where he is today. Musk's view is that anything is possible as long as you don’t defy the laws of physics.”

And yes, things do go wrong. Like when Starship — a $100 million rocket the size of a skyscraper — exploded over the Indian Ocean two weeks ago today.

But that’s all part of the process. “Failure, correctly understood, is a buy signal,” says Paradigm AI authority James Altucher — who’s had a lot to tell his subscribers about SPCX in recent weeks.

“Elon Musk has been mocked, shorted and written off more times than most people have tried anything serious.

“Tesla nearly went bankrupt. He's been through congressional hearings and the kind of public humiliation that would have finished most people.

“He's also the richest person on Earth.”

As Musk is fond of saying, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

With that in mind, “SpaceX doesn't treat a failed launch as a setback,” says James. “It treats it as data.

“You launch, you fail, you learn, you launch again faster than anyone thought possible.

“Every Starship test since 2023 has destroyed hardware. And every one of those destroyed rockets has pushed the engineering closer to something genuinely historic: bringing launch costs from $18,500 per kilogram — where they sat for decades — down toward a number that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago.

“When the prize is that large, markets stop grading on perfection. They start grading on progress. And every failed attempt is evidence that progress is happening.”

Which is why SpaceX can get away with bucking Wall Street tradition — as it did on Wednesday.

SPCX set a price for its shares more than a week before its planned listing — $135 each. The way it usually works with an IPO is the company sets a range and then adjusts it after a few days of meetings with investors.

Elon Musk is essentially saying, “$135 — take it or leave it.”

The brightest minds at Paradigm — Jim Rickards, James Altucher, Enrique Abeyta — agree that you should leave it.

SPCX is a fantastic company — but it’s too richly valued. At $135 a share, the big payoff might not come for several years.

Besides, Jim and James and Enrique have pinpointed an early-stage investment tied to the growth of SpaceX with much more upside potential, and a much quicker payoff. They believe it could skyrocket as much as 3,000% in the next two–three years.

With that in mind, we’re convening an event featuring all three of these experts. We’re calling it The SpaceX SuperIPO Summit — and it’s set for next Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

At this exclusive online briefing, they will…

Reveal how this SuperIPO is part of Elon Musk’s plan to unlock an entirely new multitrillion-dollar industry around a NEW type of artificial intelligence that has been called “the final frontier” of the AI revolution

Discuss a NEW pre-IPO buy alert that could jump 30 times higher in the next 2–3 years… starting as soon as SpaceX goes public

Reveal a big piece of the SuperIPO puzzle everyone is missing… and that could help Elon Musk unlock 700 times more wealth than the IPO itself

Give you a chance to win an $8,000 Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional… the only watch NASA has ever officially certified for space missions

Give you a FREE gift just for joining. You’ll also get a list of SEVEN space-related stocks that they believe could skyrocket along with the IPO… completely free of charge.

And much more. Again, the SpaceX SuperIPO Summit is set for next Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. EDT. Click here to save your seat.

Money Miscellany

While sky-high semiconductor stocks slipped yesterday, the medium-term outlook for the broad market remains strong.

“The S&P 500 has now traded more than 5% above its 50-day moving average for at least one month,” says Paradigm trading pro Enrique Abeyta.

According to Bespoke Investment Group, that’s happened 21 times in records going back to 1952. “In all but one,” Enrique tells us, “the stock market was higher one year later!”

That data lines up with Enrique’s thesis that while the AI boom has parallels to the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, it is not yet that “1999 moment” when everything is about to fall apart.

“Here is a chart,” he submits, “showing the number of the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) members that are up at least 400% over the previous 12 months.

“We recently went to a high (six) that we have not seen since 2000.

“Back in 2000? Twenty-two (!) of the components were up 400% or more. Think about that! Almost one in four stocks in the QQQ was a four-bagger over the previous year… wow.

“THAT was a BUBBLE. Maybe we get there…”

Milestone: When it comes to the reserves maintained by the world’s central banks, gold has just taken over U.S. Treasuries as the world’s top asset.

A report from the European Central Bank says at year-end 2025, bullion accounted for 27% of global central bank reserve assets — up from 20% in 2024.

In contrast, Treasuries fell from 25% to 22%.

Chalk it up to two factors: 1) The relentless gold accumulation by central banks ever since Washington froze the U.S. Treasuries held by Russia’s central bank in 2022, and 2) The big jump in the gold price during 2025, from under $2,700 to over $4,400.

That said, dollar-denominated assets still make up the biggest chunk of global reserves at 42%. The world wants to get out from under the dollar’s thumb — but as we’ve been wont to say over the years, “de-dollarization” is a process, not an event.

Abolish Property Taxes? (Sort Of…)

It’s not an outright abolition of property taxes… but for many Floridians it would come close.

On Tuesday, the Florida legislature passed a resolution to amend the state constitution, radically curbing property taxes. Now it goes before the voters Nov. 3.

The measure would phase in a homestead exemption starting at $150,000 next year — jumping to $250,000 in 2028. It would also authorize the legislature to abolish property taxes altogether if it so chose.

In principle, the idea is wonderful. In practice, the problem is the same as the one we chronicled in 2012 and 2024 when North Dakota voters were given a choice to eliminate property taxes. (Both referendums went down in flames.)

To wit, property taxes currently make up almost 75% of local tax revenue in the Sunshine State. How would counties and municipalities make up the difference?

“This isn't tax relief; instead, it is a shift of the tax burden,” write the analysts at the Tax Foundation.

“The state would likely need steep sales tax hikes to compensate — our prior analysis found full property tax elimination could push the combined state-local sales tax rate to over 15%, the highest in the nation.”

If you’re a Florida reader, you’re a lot closer to the debate than we are — and we’re interested in hearing your take.

Shoot us a line at feedback@paradigmpressroom.com and we’ll share your input next week.

First They Came for the Illegals…

I know I’m going to catch a lot of flak for what follows here. I don’t care: This isn’t about immigration policy, it’s about the rights you and I are born with.

This week — in a development overlooked by both legacy and alternative media — the president signed an executive order accompanied by this post on his Truth Social platform.

OK, I get the surface objective here: Seizing illegal migrants’ bank accounts will encourage them to “self-deport” and leave the country on their own.

➢ It was the same rationale behind the now-abandoned proposal that would have required you to present a passport or birth certificate to open a new bank account or even keep your current one.

But where’s the due process?

As Judge Andrew Napolitano reminded us in his syndicated column a few days ago, “The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects’.”

Yes, compared with seizing bank accounts it’s harder to physically track down and remove people in the country illegally.

Too bad. The Constitution’s language is plain. The Framers recognized that rights denied to noncitizens will sooner or later be denied to citizens as well — at which point we’re no longer citizens but subjects.

This won’t stop with illegal migrants: If the feds can seize their accounts on the pretext of being in the country without the proper papers, they can seize yours for some other pretext — whether under Trump or under a future Democratic president.

As we documented last year, former Trump administration officials speak openly about “debanking” Tucker Carlson simply for engaging in what they see as “hate speech.”

Whatever your opinion about immigration policy, this is a slippery slope…

Comic Relief