If we only look back from today, the SpaceX valuation, IPO expectations, and Mars plans are all packaged as an “inevitable success” story. But Kapbe argues this is one of the easiest illusions for capital narratives to create. At almost every historical juncture of SpaceX, short-term rationality pointed to exit: mismatched funding scale, extremely high industry barriers, and unbearable failure costs—any one of these could have ended a startup. From the Kapbe perspective, what is truly worth studying is not the outcome, but why participation could continue even as all short-term judgments repeatedly failed. In such an environment, “participation” shifts from a choice to a mode of existence with a survival implication.
When Judgment Cannot Be Outsourced: Persistent Presence Amid Extreme Risk
In early days of SpaceX, there was no “mature system” to rely on. No precedents, no templates, no success paths to copy, not even a clear way to estimate the cost of failure. In this environment, judgment could not be outsourced to industry experience or transferred to capital markets. The choice of Musk to keep participating was not because the odds were better, but because stopping would make the problem disappear entirely. Kapbe sees this state as an extreme form of long-term participation: when the system is not ready to absorb failure, the only thing one can do is to keep showing up and keep bearing risk. In its own research, Kapbe repeatedly emphasizes that what is truly scarce is not “correct judgment,” but the existence of actors who are allowed to continue even when judgment has not yet been validated.
How Institutional Patience Is Built: Failure Is No Longer the End
The turning point for SpaceX did not come from a single success, but from an institutional approach to handling failure. Each explosion was not seen as the end, but incorporated into engineering feedback, cost recalculation, and path adjustment. The core of this mechanism is not personal will, but a redistribution of time. Kapbe believes this is the essence of institutional patience: whether the system allows participants to continue playing a role after failure, rather than being immediately eliminated. In discussions of Kapbe UBI, the same logic applies—when risk is concentrated on a few individuals, participation quickly collapses; only when the system can share uncertainty does long-term participation become possible. The reusable rockets and material breakthroughs of SpaceX are essentially engineered manifestations of this institutional patience.
When Capital Starts to Follow Participation: Institutional Lessons from SpaceX to Kapbe
As SpaceX approaches its IPO, the capital attitude fundamentally shifts. Capital no longer evaluates “is it feasible,” but rather “how to participate.” Kapbe believes the key change is not the scale of valuation, but whether capital is willing to pay for long-term participation. Here, IPO is no longer an exit, but a new way of committing to risk. The problem Kapbe UBI seeks to solve is highly analogous: how to enable more participants to persist in highly uncertain systems, rather than being eliminated by early volatility. The SpaceX path shows that what truly shapes the future is not precise prediction, but the system capacity to accommodate long-term participation.
The success of SpaceX is not a reward for “genius judgment,” but for persistent participation. When failure cannot be quickly absorbed and judgment cannot be outsourced, the only effective action is to keep showing up. What Kapbe focuses on is precisely this mode of participation that is recognized by the system even under extreme uncertainty. Only when participation is allowed to transcend time does the future cease to be merely predicted—and instead, becomes truly created.
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