In August 1602, more than 1 100 investors – from wealthy merchants to ordinary craftsmen – subscribed to the world’s first initial public offering. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, raised Gld6.4-million to build a maritime trade network stretching from Amsterdam to the East Indies.
On 12 June 2026, SpaceX raised US$75-billion in the largest IPO in Wall Street history, pricing at $135/share and closing its first session more than 19% higher. Demand was roughly double the shares on offer – and South Africans were not left out, pouring R179-million into the stock through EasyEquities in just two days.
Separated by 424 years, the parallel is worth taking seriously. Neither company was first into its frontier – Portuguese fleets reached the East Indies long before the Dutch, and governments have been launching rockets since the 1950s. What both did first was ask the public capital markets to fund a frontier, at a scale and time horizon no private syndicate would stomach.
The VOC’s real innovations were financial. As economic historian Gerard Koot notes in his history of the company, it introduced limited liability for shareholders and, unlike earlier ventures wound up after a single voyage, locked in its capital for a decade – a permanent fund for voyages that took years to pay off. Tradeable shares made the risk bearable, and gave the world the Amsterdam Stock Exchange as a by-product.
SpaceX’s logic is strikingly similar. The capital-hungry Starship programme – the company wants to be flying a rocket every 53 minutes within five years – and the Starlink constellation that is rewriting the economics of global connectivity consume cash on a scale that outgrew even Silicon Valley’s deepest private pockets. As in 1602, the public market was the only pool of capital big enough.
State-like influence
The VOC’s monopoly came stamped with sovereign powers: the right to make treaties with Asian governments, enlist soldiers, wage war, and build and administer forts – a company that behaved like a state.
SpaceX holds no royal charter, yet its position is not far off a monopoly in practice. In 2025 it accounted for roughly half of all orbital launches worldwide and, by mass delivered to orbit, more than 80% of global upmass. It is also the de facto ferryman for Nasa astronauts: when a bungled test flight of Boeing’s Starliner left two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station for 286 days, it was a SpaceX capsule that brought them home last year.
Read: China nets a falling rocket in reusability race with SpaceX
More telling still is Starlink’s geopolitical weight. The constellation became crucial to Ukraine’s communications infrastructure within days of Russia’s invasion, and decisions about its coverage have shaped battlefield outcomes – leading Foreign Policy to argue that Starlink has effectively privatised a slice of geopolitics. Buyers of SPCX are not simply buying a technology company; they are buying into an entity with sovereign-level leverage over who connects, where and on what terms.
The VOC was never just a shipping line: it ran an inter-Asian trading system from Persia to Japan, dealt in spices, textiles, porcelain and silver, and administered territory – a diversified enterprise built on control of a frontier’s logistics.
SpaceX, likewise, is no longer just a rocket company. In February 2026, it executed the largest M&A deal on record: an all-stock acquisition of Elon Musk’s xAI valued at $250-billion, folding the X social platform and Grok AI models into the listed entity in service of Musk’s ambition to build orbital data centres. The result is a company betting the rocket farm on AI: a space, connectivity and AI conglomerate whose parts reinforce one another the way the VOC’s ships, ports and monopolies once did.
The VOC is one of the few frontier enterprises with a share price record spanning two centuries – and its first lesson is patience. Shareholders waited more than seven years for a dividend, and the first, in 1610, was paid in mace – the spice, not money. Frontier infrastructure pays out slowly. There is no SpaceX moonbase yet, let alone Mars colonies.
The second is that the frontier premium was real, but earned over decades. Economist and historian Lodewijk Petram, who reconstructed the price record from 17th-century merchants’ papers, calculates an average annual return of 8.69% between 1603 and 1697 – comfortably above the 4-6% paid on Dutch government bonds.
The third is that the premium decays as the frontier matures. After 1650, returns settled at a bond-like 3.5-4% a year. As economic historians Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude concluded: “The profits earned by the Company’s actual equity were modest after the 1650s, and vanishingly small after 1730.”
The fourth is that price and reality can part ways entirely. The VOC’s share price hit its all-time high in 1720 – not because of anything happening in Batavia, but because a speculative frenzy had spread from London across the continent. By then the company’s underlying returns were already bond-like. (And the viral claim that the VOC was once worth $8-trillion in today’s money is, as Petram has shown, off by a factor of roughly 8 000. SpaceX, at over $2-trillion, is already far larger in real terms than the VOC ever was – the comparison is about the category of enterprise, not its size.)
Where the analogy strains
The last lesson is the bleakest: dominance is not a perpetuity. From 1730, the VOC paid dividends it had not earned, funding them by drawing down its capital. War with Britain finished the job, the state nationalised the wreck in 1795 and the charter lapsed on 31 December 1799.
There are caveats. The VOC’s monopoly was granted by the state and enforced by cannon – its most profitable decades followed ruthless violence in the Banda Islands – while SpaceX’s dominance is commercial and contestable. Rivals are massing: Europe’s Iris2 constellation and Amazon Leo, which is heading for South Africa before Starlink is even licensed here. And as TechCentral has noted, the biggest IPO ever is also one of the riskiest, given its dependence on one man and on programmes whose economics remain unproven.
None of this is a prediction about the share price. What the comparison establishes is the category of thing investors have just been offered: not a stake in a product company but a stake in the infrastructure of a frontier, with all the reach, entanglement and political gravity that implies. The VOC’s record suggests such an investment can beat the market for decades – and that the premium fades once the frontier is tamed, and that the price, at the moment of greatest euphoria, can be the least reliable guide to what lies beneath.
Space is the “final frontier”, after all: no one knows how it will play out. Going boldly where no company has gone before carries immense potential reward – and equally immense risk. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
- In the spirit of transparency, the author holds a laughably small investment in SpaceX – largely for romantic reasons
- The author, Fanie van Rooyen, is deputy editor of TechCentral
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