Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026 275
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."
Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Rewriting.. (Score:1, Informative)
"I'm HOPEFUL that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly POSSIBLE for that to occur,"
Title for news article:
"I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026"
They are not the same thing. The news editors should be impartial about the facts.
Re:Déjà vu (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
This is part of the reason why every IPO files a prospectus with the SEC. SpaceX is what I would call "high risk" from an investment perspective. It could multiply my stock investment a thousand-fold, I could lose everything. This is not the sort of stock that most mutual and other funds would invest in. I believe the risk of going public is the stock market can be very fickle at times, especially with high risk, unproven technology: which describes SpaceX.
Staying private for now while the risk is higher means more stability for SpaceX. Elon Musk can still acquire capital and can still sell shares of the company, just not on a public market. Example: he could sell 25% of his company to a VC in return for a bucket of money, then pay it back in stock or cash after the IPO. But the company will not be subject to some of the market forces that govern publicly-traded corporations, which is a good thing in the short-term.
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Informative)
You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going to get pension funds and hedge funds and ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their
portfolios.
These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but
to make next years dividend larger.
It's not quite that bad. It is possible to retain control; it just requires doing two things:
1. Retain voting majority. This has been done for well over a century by media companies (newspapers, originally) going public, and is what Google and Facebook did. You issue two classes of shares, one of which has dramatically more voting power than the other. The insiders keep the high-voting shares, the public buys the weaker ones. Set the numbers to ensure that the insiders retain a voting majority. Google has recently taken a further step to split it's low-power shares into low-power and no-power shares (actually a dividend paid out in a class of new shares), so that it can continue issuing new shares of the non-voting sort without further diluting the founders' majority. This is well-traveled ground.
2. Specify non-financial corporate goals in the prospectus and IPO materials, to make clear that accomplishing things like going to Mars are a higher priority than increasing shareholder value. This is necessary because otherwise it's assumed that the board and C-level execs have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and can be sued for failing to do so. It's always hard to make such a suit work, because it requires proving that an alternative course of action was clearly and obviously better, but as long as the company is following the goals stated up front to prospective buyers of the stock they can have no case at all. They knew they were buying a space exploration company that might generate some profits, rather than a profit-generating company that might explore the solar system.
Non-profit corporate goals for a for-profit company is also well-traveled ground. Google's IPO made clear that search result integrity and nebulous forms of technological advancement in the area of information organization, as well as being a good corporate citizen, were as high a priority as profit. This allows the founders to exercise control without fear of lawsuits accusing them of not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities, since they can just say "Well, we told you money wasn't our only goal." There are lots of other examples. One very much on point is Tesla's prospectus, which made clear that advancing EV technology and helping to improve the environment are corporate goals, so Musk clearly knows exactly how this works.
However, going public does add all sorts of complications and overheads, even if you structure it to avoid giving away control. If SpaceX really needed the influx of capital they could get from an IPO, it would make sense to jump through the hoops. But they don't, so it doesn't.