EDITOR’S PREFACE

Five stories converge in this edition of The Economist to form a single, urgent question for families of multigenerational wealth: in a world of wilful disruption — technological, geopolitical, and moral — what does it mean to steward well? The pages that follow offer not a summary, but a meditation on each crisis and each opportunity, rendered for those whose horizon is measured not in quarters, but in generations.

CAPITAL MARKETS · TECHNOLOGY

A Starship Enterprise: The Largest IPO in History Redefines the Boundaries of Capital

SpaceX’s $75 billion public offering is capitalism distilled to its most audacious form — and a test of whether public markets can hold a man whose ambitions exceed the atmosphere.

On the twentieth of May, after America’s financial markets had closed their ledgers for the day, Elon Musk ignited what may prove the most consequential public offering in the history of modern finance. SpaceX filed its prospectus with American regulators, initiating a listing on the NASDAQ exchange that the firm hopes will raise approximately seventy-five billion dollars — shattering the record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 and catapulting a private rocketry firm, founded in 2002 with little more than what Musk himself described as “carpet and a Mariachi band,” into the ranks of the world’s most valuable enterprises. Its target valuation: a staggering $1.75 trillion.

The cover story of this week’s Economist treats the SpaceX listing as a philosophical proposition as much as a financial event. The leader essay frames it plainly: SpaceX is “capitalism on rocket fuel.” And yet the publication’s analysis is neither hagiographic nor dismissive. It holds two truths in tension — that the company represents an extraordinary triumph of human ambition over institutional inertia, and that the financial architecture surrounding its IPO demands serious scrutiny from any responsible investor.

The briefing section of the issue reads like a taxonomy of audacity. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-broadband service already claims nearly ten thousand satellites — over two-thirds of all satellites in orbit — and more than ten million customers. Its pioneering re-usable Falcon 9 rockets carry close to ninety percent of all mass sent into orbit globally. The firm conducted one hundred and sixty-five Falcon 9 launches in 2025 alone. These are not projections; they are operational realities that undergird any serious investment thesis. More than that, they represent the kind of durable infrastructure dominance that multigenerational wealth advisors study with care.

Yet the prospectus also discloses that SpaceX is losing more than one billion dollars per month, driven substantially by its AI business, xAI — absorbed into SpaceX through a merger earlier this year — which burned through eight billion dollars in the first quarter. The plan declares that over ninety percent of SpaceX’s claimed total addressable market of $28.5 trillion will come from artificial intelligence, including an aspiration to place one hundred terawatts of computing power in orbit. The near-term arithmetic invites caution; the long-term thesis invites wonder.

For family office principals, the governance dimension is as significant as the financial one. A separate “By Invitation” essay in this issue, authored by Gill Whitehead of the Oxford Internet Institute, dissects the corporate architecture of the AI IPO wave with forensic clarity. SpaceX, she observes, deploys dual-class share structures granting Musk and insiders ten times the voting power of ordinary shares, combined with SEC-permitted “controlled company” exemptions that eliminate requirements for an independent board or compensation committee. The company has also relocated from Delaware to Texas’s director-friendly Business Court. The structure, she concludes, makes Musk effectively unsackable. Investors who enter this offering do so knowing that they are placing capital not merely in a company, but in a man — his judgment, his whims, his political entanglements, and his galactic appetite for risk.

The question for the steward is not whether SpaceX will transform the world — it arguably already has — but whether the terms on which it offers itself to the public are consistent with the fiduciary principles that responsible multigenerational wealth demands. That is a question each principal must answer for themselves, with counsel, in the light of their own values and their own time horizon. What this edition of The Economist makes clear is that the world’s most valuable frontier is now, unambiguously, for sale.

MACROECONOMICS · GEOPOLITICAL RISK

The MAGA Tax: Quantifying the Cost of Erratic Governance on the World’s Largest Economy

America’s economy outperforms every peer nation — yet The Economist’s analysis reveals that presidential policymaking has shaved nearly a full percentage point from GDP growth. The lesson for global stewards is not pessimism, but precision.

America’s economy, in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, has remained the envy of the developed world. While Britain, France, Germany, and Japan recorded growth ranging from near-zero to approximately one percent, American output expanded by 2.1 percent. Stockmarkets in the United States have broken record after record. The latest IMF forecasts project American growth besting every other major economy through 2030 and beyond. By any conventional measure, the republic prospers.

And yet, this week’s Economist poses the question that demands the attention of any serious wealth advisor: what might America’s economy look like in the absence of its self-inflicted constraints? The publication’s analysts have constructed what they term the “MAGA tax” — their estimate of the cumulative drag on growth attributable to the Trump administration’s economic policy choices: erratic tariffs, zero net migration, and the pervasive uncertainty that these policies generate for businesses seeking to allocate capital.

The analysis identifies three tailwinds that should have propelled America toward three percent growth in 2025: the artificial intelligence investment boom, which contributed approximately 0.2 percentage points to GDP through additional domestic production; the wealth effect of a stockmarket that rose fifteen percent in real terms following Trump’s election, adding perhaps 0.3 percentage points to consumption; and the fiscal stimulus of the tax-cutting legislation passed during his first year, contributing an estimated 0.2 percentage points. Combined with a strong pre-Trump baseline, the conditions were set for a genuinely extraordinary year.

Instead, they were met by headwinds of roughly equal combined force. The Peterson Institute attributes roughly 0.2 percentage points of growth suppression to tariff-induced compression of household purchasing power and corporate margins. The Brookings Institution estimates that deportations and the border shutdown turned net migration negative for the first time in at least half a century, reducing both labour supply and consumer demand by a further 0.2 points. And perhaps most consequentially, an index of economic-policy uncertainty rose more than one hundred points between Trump’s election and the end of 2025. Swings of that magnitude, the research suggests, are typically followed by business investment contracting by five to ten percentage points. Outside AI-related sectors, non-residential fixed investment has indeed contracted at an annualised rate of roughly three percent — worse than the investment drought Britain experienced in the wake of its Brexit referendum.

For the UHNW principal managing assets across jurisdictions, the MAGA tax analysis carries implications beyond the United States. The Economist warns with unusual directness that the misreading of Trumponomics abroad is perhaps the greater danger. Populists from Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico to Nigel Farage in Britain read America’s continued outperformance as evidence that protectionism and industrial policy are less harmful than orthodox economists supposed. The data contradict that reading. America prospers despite its policies, not because of them. A less resilient economy applying the same medicine would face a far more severe affliction.

The forward guidance from the publication is equally sobering. The war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz now inject an energy shock into an economy already burdened by policy drag. Higher oil prices compound the compression of real incomes and corporate margins. The path to the 4 to 5 percent growth that America’s underlying fundamentals might otherwise support grows narrower still.

GEOPOLITICAL SECURITY · DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE

NATO Without America: Europe’s Secret Plan and the Fracture Lines of the Atlantic Alliance

European military commanders are quietly preparing for a world in which Washington withdraws from the alliance. The implications for asset preservation, sovereign risk, and the long arc of European integration are profound.

Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian general whose writings remain required study at every serious war college, identified obstinacy — “resistance against our better judgment” — as the fatal flaw of commanders. This week’s Economist invokes him in its opening sentence of the NATO leader essay, and the target is unmistakable: Mark Rutte, Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, who has for months refused to acknowledge that the alliance which has anchored European security for more than seven decades now stands upon uncertain ground.

Rutte’s position has been diplomatic to a fault. Determined to keep America within the alliance, he has cultivated Donald Trump with notable patience — flattering him, enduring his tirades, and calling him, by press accounts, “daddy.” He has maintained publicly that he has “no doubt” America remains “completely committed to NATO, completely committed to Article 5.” He has, more remarkably still, banned discussion of any contingency plan within NATO headquarters itself, on the grounds that such talk might accelerate the very divorce he seeks to prevent.

The reporting in this issue, drawn from interviews with senior military officers and defence officials across multiple NATO member states — none of whom would speak on the record — presents a starkly different picture. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on Article 5. He threatened in January to seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO member. He has cancelled or reduced troop deployments to Europe multiple times in recent weeks. America was expected, as this issue went to press, to formally reduce the forces it pledges to send to Europe in the event of armed conflict. European allies cannot guarantee receipt of the American-manufactured weapons for which they have already paid, as the United States prioritises restocking its own depleted inventories following the Iran campaign.

Some European armed forces have begun quietly preparing to fight not merely without American assistance, but without the NATO command-and-control infrastructure that the United States has historically anchored. The most often-cited alternative framework is the Joint Expeditionary Force — a ten-member coalition led by Britain, founded in 2014, with its own secure communications networks, headquarters with intelligence and logistics capabilities, and a decision-making architecture that does not require consensus. Its most significant attribute, observers note, is the one that makes NATO itself so difficult to invoke: the JEF “can react to situations on a non-consensus basis.”

The Economist is candid about the JEF’s limitations. It lacks France, Germany, and Poland — three of Europe’s most significant military powers. Britain’s own defence preparedness has been weakened by decades of underfunding. One official offered a memorable assessment of Britain’s defence posture: “England is everyone’s favourite uncle. But it is suffering from Downton Abbey syndrome. It keeps up the pretence, but it doesn’t have the funds.” And yet, the publication’s conclusion is measured and clear: the risks of openly planning for the breakdown of the alliance are real, but they are smaller than the risks of planning for nothing at all.

For family offices with exposure to European sovereign debt, real assets across the continent, and philanthropic or operational commitments to European institutions, the geopolitical implication is material. A Europe that must rearm comprehensively and rapidly will demand vast fiscal resources. Defence budgets across the continent are already rising at their fastest pace since the Cold War ended. The question is not whether this reshaping of European security will be costly — it will be — but whether family offices positioned to understand and navigate the transition will find within it opportunities as well as risks.

GLOBAL HEALTH · PHILANTHROPY INTELLIGENCE

Ebola Returns: A Pandemic Warning in the Age of Aid Withdrawal

A rare strain for which no licensed vaccine exists has spread across eastern Congo and into Uganda. The structural failures enabling it — aid cuts, war, and the absence of a rapid test — speak directly to the philanthropic responsibilities of those who hold generational wealth.

On the seventeenth of May, the World Health Organisation declared the Ebola outbreak spreading through the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern” — only the ninth such declaration in the organisation’s history. By the twentieth, nearly six hundred suspected cases and one hundred and thirty-nine confirmed deaths had been recorded. Epidemiological modelling suggests these numbers substantially undercount the true toll. The virus has been detected in Kampala, Uganda. It has appeared in Goma, capital of North Kivu province. Rwanda has begun closing border crossings. Public health experts are watching Burundi and South Sudan with growing concern.

What makes this outbreak particularly alarming — and what distinguishes it from the crises for which the global health community has, over the past decade, built meaningful response capacity — is its biology. The pathogen responsible is the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, rarer than the Zaire strain that caused the catastrophic west African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which killed eleven thousand people. There is no licensed vaccine against Bundibugyo. There is no rapid diagnostic test. Samples from Ituri must be flown more than two thousand kilometres to Kinshasa for analysis; results take days. “This feels like we’re back to square one,” said a representative of the International Rescue Committee, comparing the situation to the earliest days of the 2014 crisis, before any vaccines existed for any strain.

The Economist devotes both a leaders essay and a full Middle East & Africa section article to the outbreak, and its analysis is unflinching. The crisis is, in part, a consequence of choices. Aid cuts under the Trump administration reduced American surveillance and preparedness funding across eastern Congo. IRC, as one example, moved from operations in five areas of Ituri to just two after March of last year. Humanitarian NGOs cut Ebola-prevention work in the very province where the outbreak has now emerged. The State Department’s promise of thirteen million dollars in emergency response funding is, as the publication notes, a fraction of what America spent combating the 2014 to 2016 epidemic.

The structural environment amplifies every vulnerability. Eastern Congo is home to more than one hundred armed militias. The M23 armed group, backed by Rwanda, controls much of North and South Kivu — the provinces where Ebola has already been detected. M23 has declined to reopen the airport in Goma, forcing aid workers to take circuitous routes through neighbouring countries. Militia forces have historically burned clinics and attacked health workers. “We are taking safeguarding very seriously,” a Médecins Sans Frontières representative told this publication. The state in Ituri, where it exists at all, is often predatory rather than protective.

The Economist concludes its leader on the Ebola crisis with a statement that carries particular resonance for those engaged in philanthropic strategy: “Vaccine research, the genomic sequencing of viruses and disease surveillance are the world’s immune system, protecting it against wider, deadlier outbreaks. When that immunity is weakened, disaster beckons.” For family offices and charitable foundations reviewing their global health commitments in the current fiscal environment, this sentence is not rhetoric. It is an operational framework. The costs of prevention, as both this epidemic and its predecessors demonstrate with painful consistency, are measured in fractions of the costs of crisis.

POLITICAL ECONOMY · INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP

What the Premier League Teaches: Openness, Competition, and the Architecture of Renaissance

The world’s most-watched sports competition is not merely an entertainment product. It is a working model of how a declining institution can reverse its trajectory through radical openness, foreign capital, and the discipline of ruthless competition.

If Britain were a football club, writes The Economist, it would be flirting with relegation. Its economy is underperforming. Its people are demoralised. Its political class is in the midst of yet another succession crisis, with Sir Keir Starmer widely expected to be replaced as prime minister before the year is out. And yet, the publication observes, one British institution continues to dominate the global stage with an authority that no other nation or industry can claim: the English Premier League.

The statistics are, by any measure, extraordinary. The Premier League is broadcast to one hundred and ninety-one of the one hundred and ninety-three member states of the United Nations. More than seven hundred million people may watch a single match between the top clubs. Google’s global search data reveal that in the past year, searches for Manchester United exceeded those for Taylor Swift and the Harry Potter book series combined — and outpaced Donald Trump even in the year of an American presidential election and an assassination attempt. The league contributes ten billion pounds in gross value added to the British economy annually. This year, English clubs have reached the finals of all three major pan-European competitions simultaneously.

The Economist is explicit that none of this was inevitable. Forty years ago, English football was a scandal and a danger. Its clubs were banned from European competition for five years after Liverpool supporters caused a crush that killed thirty-nine people at Heysel stadium. Continental leagues — Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s La Liga — attracted the world’s greatest players and commanded the greatest prestige. English football cleaned up its act through the 1990s. It banned drinking in stands, cracked down on racism, rebuilt or renovated its stadiums, and — crucially — restructured itself as a globally open marketplace for capital, coaching talent, and players.

The Premier League’s recovery rests on three pillars that the publication examines with care. First, it built its global broadcast footprint before its competitors recognised that international rights had value; the first eight years of overseas rights were licensed at a loss, investing in fanbases that would later make those rights extraordinarily valuable. Second, it welcomed foreign capital and foreign talent without reservation: fourteen of the twenty clubs now have foreign coaches, seventy-five percent of playing time this season was logged by players born outside England, and one hundred and twenty-eight countries have been represented in the top flight. Third, it redistributed its revenue with unusual equity: every club received more than one hundred million pounds in television money last season, meaning even recently promoted sides can compete meaningfully.

The leader essay draws the political lesson with admirable directness. Sir Keir Starmer — an Arsenal supporter, whose club claimed the league title this very week — has nonetheless pursued economic policies that are the antithesis of the Premier League model: tighter work visas, higher taxes on non-domiciled residents, and a suspicion of foreign capital that amounts, in footballing terms, to selecting the wrong formation. The league’s success, the publication argues, demonstrates that openness is not a luxury afforded only by confident nations. It is the mechanism by which deflated nations recover their confidence in the first place.

For the principal of a family office whose wealth was built, in part, through the same principles — openness to talent, tolerance of disruption, the willingness to invite capable foreign minds into the governance of one’s enterprise — the Premier League story is more than an analogy. It is a case study in the architecture of institutional renewal, directly applicable to the question of what it takes for any great institution — a nation, a family, a family office — to maintain its relevance across the generations.