The Legacy of the Judgment of Paris

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Later today, SpaceX are going to try to launch the third version of their enormous, powerful, and very troublesome Starship rocket. Tim Cross is a senior science writer at The Economist. The launch has been postponed over and over again. It was supposed to happen on Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. We got the vehicle totally loaded. We hit a couple of different holds as we worked through that count. Again, new rocket, new pad. We're learning about a lot a lot about these systems as we execute them for the first time, and we're not able to basically troubleshoot all of these issues in those final seconds to get to launch. Is to try out a whole series of upgrades that are supposed to make it easier to recover the second stage of the rocket from orbit. And if that works, it'll be a big step towards SpaceX's goal of eventually building a vast fleet of these things. SpaceX's launches often get a lot of coverage, but this one gets even more than most, and that's because earlier this week the company kicked off the countdown towards another historic launch, this time of the biggest IPO ever. Next month they're hoping to raise up to $75 billion from investors. Tim, a lot of big bold ambitions there. Before we get to the IPO, just tell me a little bit more about what this space mission was supposed to achieve? So it's supposed to to help turn Starship into a fully reusable rocket. And reusability is what SpaceX has always been about, right? If you speak to Elon Musk, he'll say rockets are crazy. We build them, we fly them once, and then we dump them into the ocean or dump them into space and have to build a new one each time. His favourite analogy is air travel. You build a plane, you fly it to an airport, you blow it up, and you have to build a whole new one. You couldn't possibly have cheap air travel or really any air travel with a model like that. So SpaceX wants to turn rockets basically into things that are a bit more like aeroplanes. They've sort of done that with their existing rocket, the Falcon 9, the bottom half of that, the first stage, can be reused, but not yet the top stage. One of the things with Starship that they're trying to do is make it so that both stages can be reused. And this is what all these test flights really are in aid of, getting it to a point where you can land this thing in the condition that with a fairly minimal amount of work, it's ready to fly again soon. So all of these test flights are of course very expensive as our SpaceX expansion missions overall. Presumably that is the basis of the company wanting to list its shares publicly now? Yeah, it's interesting because if you look back in history, you can get endless quotes of Musk himself or Gwynshot Musk, he's got experience with public markets, obviously, through Tesla, and he's said many times he basically thinks they're too short termist, they're too obsessed with quarterly performance. This isn't suitable for a firm whose eventual goal is to build a city on Mars. But I think like you said, if you look at the IPO, the amount of money they're having to spend on the various ambitions they have along the way. So developing Starship is part of that, but building out Starlink and I think crucially building this fleet of space going data centers that they want, all that is looking like it's going to be very, very expensive . And I think the best guess is it's just too hard to raise that kind of money from private markets. This is being talked about as the biggest IPO in history. Is that right? We think so. So they want to raise about seventy five billion dollars, which is quite a bit more than Saudi Aramco, the previous record owner, raised when it went public in twenty nineteen. And the valuation is is really mind boggling as well. They're looking at around $1.75 trillion , which would put it well into the top ten of most valuable companies in the world. It's gone up about tenfold in the last two years. And it's somewhere on the order of 90 times more revenue than they brought in last year. If you want a comparison, Tesla, which also benefits from the kind of Musk Halo effect, that trades at just 16 times its revenue. So there's a huge amount of growth being priced into this, assuming they get anywhere near their target valuation. So, Tim, is it worth it? Talk me through the different bits of the company. Is it worth it? I mean, I think you'll have to decide that for yourself, but I could walk you through the plan. SpaceX essentially has three businesses now. So the one that everyone's familiar with is Launch. It's the Rockets. They are the biggest launch provider in the world by an enormous margin. So they take about ninety percent of everything that goes into space goes into space via SpaceX. They're their own biggest customer. So most of those launches are done internally for their own purposes, but they also fly missions for scientific agencies, for other commercial customers, for America's government. So that's their most well-known line of business, I guess. The second and slightly newer one is Starlink , which is the internet service provider that they have. So you can buy a Starlink aerial and bolt it to the roof of your house and you can get the internet beamed down from space no matter where you live on the planet pretty much. That's why they are their own customer for most of their launches, because most of the launches put Starlink satellites up. The constellation's enormous. It's closing in on 10,000 satellites. They have about 10 million customers. It's the fastest growing part of the business and according to the IPO documents, it made a profit of about four point four billion dollars in twenty twenty five. The newest part of the business is XAI, which is Musk's AI lab, which SpaceX merged with last year. That is losing money hand over fist. To compete in AI, you have to have these enormous data centers. You have to splurge huge amounts of cash on warehouses and chips to put in them. So that lost $6.4 billion in 2025, which is more than Starlink brings in, but it's XAI and the AI business in general that they hope is going to be this mega business that will boost their valuation into the stratosphere. So these are very big bets, Tim. How do you rate the overall future vision for SpaceX? The entire history of SpaceX is a series of increasingly big bets, most of which paid off. There are three things here that have to work for this sort of vision to happen. One is Starship itself, and this is why there's so much attention paid to it. We talked a bit about the Falcon 9 earlier and how the first stage is reusable. SpaceX C the reusability revolution is only half finished. If you can A make a much bigger rocket and Starship is the biggest rocket that anyone's ever tried to fly, and you can make both bits of it reusable, then you can really, really slash the cost of getting things to orbit. So they talk internally about two hundred dollars a kilo, one hundred dollars a kilo. And just to give you a sense of scale, the Falcon 9, they charge external customers about $4,000 a kilo. We think intern ally it maybe cost them about a thousand. And before the Falcon nine came along, you were talking mid to high five figures. So there's already been a huge drop. But it has to go even lower. Ultimately because it's necessary for their goal of getting to Mars. But in the short term it has to go lower because their current cash cow is Starlink. Starlink is signing up customers at a very, very rapid rate to the point where bits of the network are now starting to get congested. What they want to do is fly more capable satellites because that means more capacity. But the satellites they've developed are too big. They don't fit in the Falcon 9. You need Starship to fly them. Without Starship, you can't grow Starlink as fast as you'd like to. And at the moment, Starlink is really the only part of the company that's bringing in money. If you can get both of those things firing, that clears the way for the really big bet, which is this idea that the future of AI is not building sheds in the middle of nowhere and filling them with chips. It's putting these things in space instead. That may sound a bit mad. I think it's less mad when you start looking at it closely because you get a huge amount of free sunlight. The cooling in some ways becomes easier. And maybe most importantly of all, you don't have to deal with protests and permitting and this wave of data center bans that we're seeing in the US. These are extraordinary ambitions, Tim. Will investors be convinced? I'm not sure. I think some of the people that backed SpaceX early might see now as a very good time to bank some of the massive profits they've made. On the other hand, I do think there's probably quite a large number of investors out there who just like Musk's vision and will be very willing to buy into it. On that subject, you mentioned ambition, but really we haven't seen the half of it. If you look at the IPO documents and SpaceX's own statements, their ambitions are enormous. They don't just want to build a few starships. They want to build fleets of these things. So they're building factories that are supposed to be able to churn out a thousand a year, and they want to fly them every day. And you can do a bit of back-of-the-envelope maths. One year of that will be something on the order of a twenty thousand times boost to the world's capacity to take stuff into space. If you look at Musk's incentive structure in the IPO, they talk about valuations up to two, three, four, five, six trillion dollars. He has a target to fly about a thousand times more computing power as currently exists in the entire world into orbit, and another one to put a self-sustaining city of a million people on Mars. So I think when it comes to ambition, we're just waiting in the shallows at the moment. I'll be honest. Nothing tests my patience quite like sitting on hold, listening to the same four bars of music on repeat. Turns out all that time adds up. The average person spends over 40 days listening to that dreaded hold music. This episode is sponsored by Parlowa, the AI platform built to make that a thing of the past. Parlowa's AI agents are available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Fluent in any language, and smart enough to remember every customer across every interaction, because no one should have to explain themselves twice. From payment processing to roadside assistance, flight rebookings to appointment scheduling. Parlowa delivers for kind of customer experience that turns a one-time buyer into a customer for life. See Parlowa's AI agents in action at parlowa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-L The intelligence podcast is sponsored by London Business School. With a deeply rooted belief that diversity drives progress, London Business School is committed to bringing people together from all over the world , encouraging individuals to share ideas, experiences, and embrace their differences, so that they can approach business issues in the real world with empathy and understanding. With alumni in over 160 When it comes to making a show of Robert Guest is a deputy editor of The Economist. One day he's swaggering into a cage fighting stadium to the tune of Kid Rock's American Badass . Making his way into the building. One of the bigger mixed martial arts fans, I know President Donald Trump. Another day he's shrugging off a third attempt on his life. That they go after. Voters have long thought of Republicans as the daddy party, tough on defense, tough on security. And the Democrats as more maternal, looking after poor people, fussing about nasty words , that kind of thing. Asked which party is more the party of men, Americans tell pollsters that they're almost seven times likier to say that it's Republicans than Democrats. And Trump supercharged that with his appeals to the masculine id. In fact, there was one incredible poll that said that a large proportion of men actually felt more masculine after voting for him. But his allure seems to be fading Vote and always won overall when his opponent was a woman. In the most recent election in twenty twenty four, the surge of young men voting for him was considered one of the reasons why he won, according to a Harvard IOP poll, nearly half of men in the But now his support is really sagging among this group. Only about thirty percent of young men now approve of him. And why is that? What's changing among those young men? Well, it turns out that virile vibes are are not enough. They may like some of the way he projects himself, but there are more important things. Young men have practical concerns like everyone else. And actually the young have probably more practical concerns than people in the middle of their careers because they're still trying to establish themselves. They want to find a job. They want to maybe buy a home, maybe attract a partner, raise a family someday. This is especially true for young men who voted for Trump. In an NBC poll, they ranked having children as their top life goal. The thing is, having homes and families it costs money. Trump said that he would make America affordable again. He even promised that he'd make prices fall from the level they were at. But not only has he not done that, but he's done the opposite in ways that are really obvious. His tariffs have raised the prices of lots of things, and his war of choice in Iran has pushed up the price of fuel Miguel Martinez is a twenty one year old restaurant worker in Flowery Branch, Georgia. You can't even go inside the grocery store right now and not spend eighty dollars, you know what I mean? So Miguel lives with his parents. He would like to be able to afford to move out and start a family, but he's saying that just seems impossible. And this is a complaint that pretty much every young man that I and my colleague spoke to for this story mentioned. And if they are pinning that inability to advance Souring on Trump doesn't imply necessarily loving Democrats. A lot of young men feel spurned by them. Democrats seem much more eager to talk about the problems men cause rather than the ones that they face . There was an economist UGO poll that found that more than half of Americans think there's an anti male bias problem in the Democratic Party. Another poll found that Democrats are five times likier than Republicans to admit to having an unfavorable view of men in general. Now that's a very large group to have an unfavorable view of in gener Aaron Powell And so what does this mean for the coming November midterms then? How young men will vote when it comes time for that? Aaron Ross Powell , Jr. said they'd back a Democrat, twenty-five percent said they'd back a Republican, and a whopping thirty-eight percent said they didn't know or they wouldn't vote. So there really is everything to play for for the parties here. politics because they're all they're all liars. Jeremiah James Kay Jr. is a twenty three year old general manager at a car wash and he's pretty disenchanted with both parties. And they don't do it. And I feel like a lot of people feel that way right now. Neither party's striking the right note. Republicans talk as if there's only one legitimate life path. You get a job, get married, have kids. The Democrats sometimes sound as if any young man who aspires to that wants a trad wife, wants to go back to the nineteen fifties. Richard Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, point out there really isn't any evidence that lots of young men want trad wives. They just want a family because that's likely to give them a purpose in life. They're not reactionaries the way a lot of the Democrats seem to think they are. But there is a real difficulty getting those life markers. They're finding it harder than the previous generation did. And a lot of that's because both parties have been getting the policies wrong. So then what should both parties, either party, politicians in general be doing to capture the men who have fallen by the wayside? For the Democrats, the first step is to acknowledge that young men have problems, and some of them are doing that. Gavin Newsome in California, Wesmore in Maryland ? But the next step is to try to do something about it, and this is much harder. But there are certain levers that they can pull, and one of the really big ones is housing. There's strong academic literature showing that when housing is very expensive, and in America it's much too expensive because it's so difficult to build anywhere near where the jobs are, young men are much more likely to remain living in their parents' basements, angrily playing video games , not finding a good job, not progressing, not getting to the stage where they can get married and have kids. And this is both bad for the country and it's very bad for the young men. It makes them very frustrated. So if you could remove some of the obstacles to building houses, now this is a policy that's not going to show any results before the midterms, but that would make a huge contribution to making young men feel that they have a future. Robert, thank you very much for your time, as ever. Thank you. Talking about Donald Trump, what are his policies doing to America's economy. Yes, it's growing faster than other G7 countries, and yes, its stock markets are riding high. But we've calculated that Americans are paying a MAGA tax , a price for Trump's tariffs, mass deportations, and chaotic policy making. That's what we're talking about on this week's Economist Insider , our video series where you can see how our journalism comes to you every week. The dynamic, sometimes heated debates over what's happening in the world and what that means. This week, our editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddows, Deputy Editor Edward Carr, and an array of the brightest minds at The Economist will be unpicking this MAGA tax. If you're a digital subscriber, you can watch without signing up for anything extra. If you're listening free, I've put a link in the show notes so you too can watch extended clips from Insider . Fifty years ago, on May twenty-fourth, the unthinkable happened in the wine world . Alexandra Suitbass is the economist culture editor. An English wine merchant named Steven Spurrier gathered the great names and noses of French wine for a blind tasting in Paris. Among celebrated wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy, he included reds and whites from California's Napa Valley. Everyone expected the French to win. But two wines from young unknown producers won the contest over their French counterparts. This event would be marked in history as the Judgement of Paris . The Judgment of Paris was the shock heard round the wine world. One French official later described the tasting as our Waterloo. The French blamed the judges. One was accused of setting back Burgundian vineyards by a hundred years. circles and was even kicked out of a winery years later. Nap a's victory had two Balthazar sized effects. First, it sparked demand for Californian wines at home and abroad, exports of American wine more than quintupled between nineteen seventy-five and nineteen eighty . Second, it stokes the ambition and confidence of new world producers in places like Australia and Argentina, that they could one day rival France's great bottles in terms of quality . Following the judgment of Paris, both American and French wines boomed as they enjoyed new markets and newly minted middle-class wine drinkers. But 50 years on, the scene is less convivial. Wine consumption has been declining, with Gen Z and baby boomers alike preferring to drink less but better. Of all the wine regions in the world, Burgundy has been doing the best. It's smaller than Bordeaux and highly coveted by wine aficionados. In Napa and Bordeaux, the mood is tensor . I toured Chateau Angel us, a revered winery in Saint Emilion in the Bordeaux region. Stephanie de Bois-Rivois is the president and CEO. She told me that wine is on the heart and mind of health officials who say no amount of alcohol is safe. She strongly disagrees with wine being so villainized. Um when I hear sometimes wine is put in the same category as uh prostitution, drugs, I'm like it's so important. The education, the learning as well, uh you know, teach ing these uh youngster uh what wine is about, that wine cannot be just limited to alcohol . Today Bordeaux and Napa are both experiencing economic cr ises and are at a turning point. But their suffering has different causes . Bordeaux produced a bubble of too much wine that was sold for the wrong reasons to the wrong clients. Chinese buyers had great thirst for Bordeaux's prestige labels until Xi Jinping cracked down on corruption and lavish gifts and sales sputtered. That left winemakers who had been raising prices vulnerable to a collapse in demand . Nap a's winemakers are feeling pinched for different reasons. In recent decades, they doubled down on the American market, selling to baby boomers at high prices rather than prioritizing a global footprint. But they are buying and drinking less . And now Nap a's most important international market, Canada, has dried up after most of its provinces banned American alcohol in retaliation for tariffs. Sales of American wine there fell nearly 80% in 202