FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris swings between technical admiration and alarm at the excesses, true to its ambivalent relationship with the billionaire-visionary figure. The French press details the scale — $75 billion raised, more than 555 million shares at $135, a valuation near $1.8 trillion placing SpaceX ahead of Tesla, Meta and Walmart — and recounts the company's odyssey: from Falcon 1's first flight exploding on March 24, 2006, through the brush with bankruptcy after three failures, to today's conglomerate of rockets, Starlink satellites, telecoms, social media and AI since the xAI absorption. But the critical angle is explicit: several headlines speak of a stock-market debut 'of all records and all dangers.' The press points to the less flattering figures and Musk's 'sulfurous' persona — 'excesses of the X social network, racist, homophobic and transphobic controversies' — carefully 'edited out' of the prospectus. A telling detail Paris foregrounds: the Nasdaq 'relaxed its rules' to add SpaceX to its index in 15 days instead of the usual three months, a concrete illustration of Musk's power to bend institutions. This ambivalence — saluting the industrial feat of a space pioneer while worrying about a fortune equal to Switzerland's GDP concentrated in a man with sharp political stances — sums up the French reading of a capitalism whose safeguards seem to fall one by one.