I wonder how having shareholders will affect funding for Starship development? If the program doesn’t show promising results soon shareholders may not approve continuing to sink a billion a year into it.
Lotta tech IPOs are structured so the founders keep effective voting control even though the public owns most of the shares.
As a separate matter, shareholders have been real patient with Uber, Amazon, and in the early days, Google as they spent like mad not yet making profits for years. How profitable is Tesla (I genuinely don’t know) and how does the share price track with profits? My bet is not very closely.
A SpaceX IPO involves Musk being able to spend somebody else’s money to continue the project. At least for awhile.
A lot of those companies make the deliberate decision to sink all of what would be profits into further growth. Sure, if you bought Amazon stock back in the 90s, you wouldn’t have gotten any dividends from it, but it’d be worth many, many times your initial investment by now.
Probably the bigger issue for Musk is the transparency that public ownership would require. His businesses do so much business with each other that it’s difficult to see which parts, if any, are actually making money. Like, is Starlink subsidizing SpaceX, or the other way around?
That’s an interesting point. I’m a bit puzzled about why he is contemplating a spacex IPO anyway.
Do they NEED the money? And how much control is he willing to give up?
He seems to have spread himself rather thin. I wonder how much he really cares about starship nowadays anyway?