Selling is the essence of life itself. From the day we are born, we are selling ourselves to the world to be fed, to find love, to obtain attention. You sell yourself to win friends, to get a job, to secure a bonus or claim applause.

There are other words which have a similar meaning to selling: persuasion, marketing, peddling, hustling. But perhaps my favourite is promoting. To me this verb has a rather more specific meaning: it encompasses the idea of someone selling the idea of a business project – raising money to finance a grand new venture.

Without question the world's best promoter is Elon Musk. He is in a league of his own. His unerring ability to convince investors to back his extraordinary schemes permitted him to reinvent the automotive industry with Tesla. Its valuation is more than twice the valuation of Toyota, Ford, General Motors, VW, Mercedes Benz and BMW combined. Despite the fact that their total revenues are more than 13 times Tesla's revenues. But the normal rules of business don't seem to apply to Elon. From electric cars to space rockets, his capacity to excite markets is unparalleled.

And his greatest promotion ever is about to launch. Indeed, it is certainly the boldest promotion of any kind in history – taking SpaceX public for a valuation of about $1.8tn (£1.33tn). That is fully 75 per cent of the entire market capitalisation of the entire FTSE 100 – the value of all Britain's top 100 public companies.