June 15, 2026

Photo credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

Last week, SpaceX went public at a valuation of nearly $2 trillion. And it’s no wonder.

Its reusable rockets lower the cost of reaching orbit by routinely flying, landing, and flying again. Starlink offers satellite internet to more than 12 million customers. And the company could be hugely instrumental in one day putting data centers in space and relocating manufacturing processes to low-Earth orbit.

Though the IPO will certainly create a massive amount of wealth for shareholders, it could also unleash an entirely new wave of space startups. “Engineers who spent years building rockets, satellites, communications systems, and other advanced technologies will suddenly have the resources to pursue their own ideas,” Shawn Regan writes. “Investors enriched by SpaceX’s success will begin looking for the next generation of companies. Entrepreneurs who have been sitting on promising concepts may now have the capital to pursue them.”

Read more about the IPO.

Since 2019, the NYPD’s headcount has fallen 11 percent, while New York City has 20 percent fewer traffic-enforcement agents and 46 percent fewer special officers assigned to homelessness. Meantime, last year, just 34 percent of New Yorkers rated the city’s quality of life as good or excellent.

Officials should consider using more technology to help stretch limited resources, Adam Lehodey argues. “Automating data collection could provide agencies with more timely, comprehensive information, allowing them to deploy personnel where they are needed most while reducing costs,” he writes.

Read more about some of the technologies that could help the city better collect real-time data.

In Gerontocracy in America, Samuel Moyn examines the economic and political power that Baby Boomers hold in the U.S. He hopes “to dismantle the system and create something new.” 

To accomplish this, he suggests policy changes like committing even more resources to seniors to encourage them to retire earlier. He specifically recommends Senator Bernie Sanders’s Social Security Expansion Act, which would “remove the current wage cap of $176,000, beyond which income is not taxed, to fund the benefits.” But the bill would dramatically raise payroll taxes, including on younger workers, just to benefit the older generation. “Somehow, this is supposed to dismantle gerontocracy,” Russ Greene writes.

Read more about Moyn’s argument and the problems Greene sees with it.