SpaceX launches per year

It appears that as one billionaire figured out how to launch rockets with increasing frequency, another billionaire figured out how to launch videos with increasing frequency, and the universe, having nothing better to do, decided to synchronize them perfectly. We have discovered that MrBeast's subscriber count and SpaceX's launch cadence form a correlation so tight it makes you wonder whether Elon and Jimmy are secretly the same person experiencing a temporal split. They are not, which somehow makes this worse.

The real culprit is almost certainly the rise of high-speed internet and smartphone adoption across the 2016-2024 period—a tide that lifts both YouTube empires and aerospace ambitions. As global broadband access grew from 3.6 billion people to roughly 5.3 billion, you got more viewers available to watch MrBeast donate cars to strangers, and you also got more engineers, suppliers, and venture capitalists with the connectivity to participate in the SpaceX supply chain. Both phenomena feed on the same underlying explosion of technological accessibility and disposable income in developed markets; it's rather like noticing that pizza deliveries and drone sightings increased in lockstep without realizing they both track suburban sprawl.

We are pattern-recognition creatures living in an age of accelerating change, which means we will forever find correlations between things that have nothing to do with each other but everything to do with the same historical moment. SpaceX launches and MrBeast subscribers are both just different ways of asking what happens when capital, attention, and technology converge. Neither one is driving the other.