Companies that have never turned a profit are considered more valuable than the basis of our entire food chain. Britain isn’t broken, the economic system is.
Down 2.37% on Tuesday’s price, shares in NVIDIA Corp — currently the world’s most valuable company — were yesterday trading at 207.41 US dollars each. Overall, the firm has a market capitalisation of $5.02 trillion.
Given the relentless march of artificial intelligence through and over almost every aspect of our daily lives, and the fact the US tech giant has a monopoly on production of vital GPU microchips needed to power this mass automation, the phenomenal price tag is almost understandable. Almost.
It’s certainly less jaw-dropping than SpaceX, which now holds the title of ‘biggest public listing in history’ after debuting on the US tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange last week and coming out with a valuation of $2.87 trillion. Amazon, formerly the fifth most valuable company, was shouldered into sixth place as a result.
Elon Musk’s rocket company is effectively worth more than 90 times its operating revenue, which is preposterous given it has yet to turn a profit, reported a net operating loss of $5 billion last year, has made little progress on its self-ascribed mission of putting humans on Mars, permanently, and recently bought out its money-losing sibling xAI. That’s the firm behind far right echo chamber X (formerly Twitter), a platform considered too toxic for many advertisers, and the accompanying Grok personal assistant. The same AI assistant responsible for ‘undressing’ unwilling female photographic subjects (including children) at the behest of morally bankrupt users — just the latest in a long line of controversies that also includes spouting pro-Nazi propaganda.
The only firm in the world’s top five most valuable corps that doesn’t make any mass consumer-facing products in the traditional sense, SpaceX is therefore an outlier. But it isn’t the only example of a new generation tech giant breaking with tradition and finding itself considered near-priceless by the markets, simply because it promises us a revolution tomorrow. OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, is another case in point. Although not currently trading on a stock exchange, Yahoo Finance reports an estimated valuation of $908.81 billion. This is despite projections of a $14 billion loss in 2026, significantly more than the $5 billion it burnt in 2024. And that’s before we mention widespread boycotts of the platform, underperforming products, the tangible shift in public opinion of AI in general. Concerns are mounting about the sustainability of a business model that requires rapidly upscaling energy and water hungry infrastructure on a finite planet which is fast running out of both.
Putting things into perspective, companies which are unsustainable from an environmental and economic perspective — at least in their current form — are considered to be worth more than the fields that feed us. Here in the UK, 69% of the total land area is used for farming. And these firms aren’t just valued slightly higher. The estimated combined value of Britain’s agricultural sites is around £360 billion, or $482.5 billion US. You could buy all that, four times over, and still spend less than it would cost to purchase SpaceX outright.
If productive land is essential for civilisation’s survival, then water is arguably even more important. Putting concerns about the state of associated infrastructure aside for a second, the total value of the UK’s water network is, according to regulator Ofwat, around £108 billion. A figure which is again dwarfed by the market capitalisation of a firm which can be seen as an admission of just how much we have failed to protect the Earth. The idea we should shift our interests to another planet altogether doesn’t exactly scream ‘custodians of the world’.
Natural capital is only just gaining real traction in the business sphere — spurred on by successive reports shining a light on how reliant the economy is on our environment. But the reality is that when a system considers speculative technology to be more valuable than all the food a country grows, there seems to be little hope of reconciling the gap between where investments go and where investments should be going at a time of ecological crisis. Failing to address climate collapse will, eventually, lead to the complete destruction of every industry that exists in a world no longer capable of supporting life in the same way it has for millions of years.
Image: Microsoft Copilot / Unsplash
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