Venture Capital Returns to Moonshots: $150 Billion Bets on Deep Tech

Venture capitalists will pour $150 billion into deep tech companies from 2024 onward — more than the $133 billion invested across the entire previous decade, according to figures cited by Il Sole 24 Ore. The shift marks a decisive turn away from the lightweight software plays that generated venture capital's fortunes over the past ten years and toward capital-intensive gambles: space agriculture, nuclear fusion, and human-machine interfaces.

The Financial Times recently documented this return to moonshot ventures, as reported by Il Sole 24 Ore. The timing is not accidental. Artificial intelligence is eroding the margins of the software businesses that once offered venture investors fat returns with modest capital requirements. Chasing SpaceX-style outcomes, investors are rediscovering a rhetorical toolkit built on fear and extreme dreams — what Il Sole 24 Ore calls the fuel of the new capitalism.

The master of the genre is Elon Musk. During the most favourable launch window of the decade, SpaceX will attempt to send up to five unmanned Starships to Mars. Musk himself puts the probability of success at the same odds as flipping a coin and getting heads.

"The Sun," Musk says, "will sooner or later incinerate the Earth: that is why Mars is a life insurance policy for life as a whole."

The pitch works because it pairs an existential threat with a promise of salvation. Major artificial intelligence companies have adopted the identical structure, according to Il Sole 24 Ore: they raise the spectre of existential risks while promising to cure diseases and eradicate poverty. Fear of extinction, then redemption through technology — the same sales logic applied to rockets and algorithms alike.

Il Sole 24 Ore sees merit in the shift. The return to big bets and high-risk ventures brings to an end a financial period the paper describes as somewhat sluggish and exploitative. Capital flowing toward fusion reactors and Mars missions is capital not chasing incremental software arbitrage.

But the editorial identifies a serious problem lurking inside the trend. The problem becomes clear when the new venture rhetoric is set against its most famous historical precedent.

John F. Kennedy made the same rhetorical moves in 1962. In his famous speech calling on Congress to fund the race to the Moon, Kennedy combined fear, geopolitics, the Cold War and an extraordinary dream. "We have new knowledge to gain, new rights to win; we are going to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is difficult," he declared. Meanwhile, he evoked the Soviet threat and spoke of Gagarin.

The parallel is exact in language but not in substance — and that gap is where Il Sole 24 Ore locates the tension between what it labels the Kennedy model and the Musk model. Same rhetoric, different models. Kennedy's moonshot was a public program, funded by Congress, accountable to a government and framed as a national project. Musk's moonshots are private ventures, funded by venture capital and billionaire balance sheets, promising returns to shareholders while speaking the language of species survival.

For investors, the implications are concrete. Deep tech now absorbs sums — $150 billion in a single period versus $133 billion over ten prior years — that dwarf earlier cycles. The failure probabilities are candidly high, as Musk's coin-flip framing of the Mars missions concedes. And the sales pitches, whether for AI labs or Mars transports, deliberately blur the line between fiduciary prospectus and extinction insurance.

Whether the new moonshot economy delivers SpaceX-style returns or burns through capital at Kennedy-scale costs without the public accountability of the original program is the question the next decade of deep tech investing will answer.