Will SpaceX Ever Go Public?
Elon Musk has a business lowering the cost of space travel. It’s called SpaceX, and it’s one of the hottest venture-backed start-ups trying to establish market-based competition out the airlock. It plans to send up satellites that give us better internet back home, and it has lumpy but lucrative contracts resupplying the International Space Station (ISS).
The idea is that if intergalactic capitalism spurs new innovations and efficiencies, that will reduce costs for NASA and allow it to focus on scientific research. There are tons of possible cosmic industries, like asteroid mining and space tourism, that will also benefit from considerable lowering of per-pound shipping cost into space.
Gwynne Shotwell, the chief operating officer at SpaceX, says the company’s Starlink business will spin-off into a separate company that investors can buy shares in, and that’s really exciting! The parent company won’t go public itself until it’s regularly running Mars missions, but Starlink has already sent up 240 satellites successfully.
If the stock behaves anything like Tesla, buyers are in for a wild ride. We still have no data on how many Starlink customers there may be, nor who they are, or what they’ll pay.
Elon Musk has also not set an official time and place for the initial public offering (IPO), but you can bet it will probably be on the Nasdaq, and it will probably not happen until coronavirus dies. There’s going to be plenty hype, though, so a perfect opportunity for risk-taking insiders to finally cash-in on their risky punt. Is it worth dipping into, or more trouble than it’s worth?
