Good lord. The FTSE has gone and done it. They’ve let the rocket boys in. As of this morning, that glorified metal scrapheap known as SpaceX has officially pole-vaulted into the hallowed halls of British high finance. And who’ve they sent to reflect on this momentous occasion? Employee Number One. The very first victim of Elon Musk’s peculiar brand of managerial lithium, a man who can now look back on a career spent strapping rich dilettantes to explosions and calling it ‘disruptive innovation.’
I tracked him down in a Wetherspoon’s near Gatwick, nursing what he called a ‘parabolic’ gin and tonic. He was a haunted man, a spectre in a hoodie still bearing the original SpaceX logo: a rocket flying through a cheese grater. Or something. He wouldn’t stop muttering about ‘re-entry trajectories’ and ‘martian property prices.’
‘You have to understand,’ he rasped, shaking a fistful of peanuts at a pigeon, ‘back then, it was just a few of us in a warehouse. We had a dream. A dream of getting away. From you. From this.’ He gestured vaguely at the sticky carpet and the fruit machine playing the theme from The Great Escape. ‘We wanted to go to Mars. Honestly? I think we just wanted to go anywhere that didn’t have Elon on the tannoy.’
Now, the firm is a proper FTSE darling. Shareholders demand dividends. The early mission statement, ‘To Make Humans a Multi-Planetary Species,’ has been quietly revised to ‘To Make Our Venture Capitalists Very Rich Before the Solar Flare Kills Us All.’ Employee Number One, rumoured to be paid in what he described as ‘founder-level options and broken promises,’ now teaches mindfulness to interns terrified of being pressurised into a cockpit and launched into low-earth orbit without a parachute.
‘The culture changed, see?’ he explained, ordering another G&T with a £20 note he’d clearly found in a phone box. ‘We used to break stuff for science. Now they break stuff for quarterly earnings. We used to test the heat shield by firing it at a wall. Now they test the new HR policy by firing it at Christine from Payroll. It’s not the same.’
The FTSE listing, of course, is a masterstroke of absurdist theatre. A company that burns more money per second than the NHS spends on paperclips, now subject to the same rigorous financial scrutiny as a corner shop. The City boys are wetting their Savile Row trousers. They see it as a victory for private enterprise. I see it as the final proof that the entire concept of value has become unmoored, floating away somewhere between a cloud of rocket exhaust and a billionaire’s ego.
‘What would you say to the new investors?’ I asked, as he attempted to feed his gin to a pot plant.
He stared at me with the dead-eyed vacancy of a man who’s seen too many RUDs (Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies). ‘Tell them to buy a good pair of shoes. You’ll be walking a lot when the colony plan hits its first PR snag. Also, get your own loo roll. Elon’s idea of a ‘synergistic ablution solution’ is a bucket and a prayer.’
And with that, Employee Number One vanished into the low-hanging cloud of despair and vape smoke that permeates the South Terminal. He left behind a half-eaten panini and a profound sense that the future, like his rocket, had a 50% chance of exploding on the launchpad. The FTSE can have it. I’m off to find a proper drink.
