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I am glad that they are not. While I would like to invest in them, them being public would mean that Elon has to spend a lot of time doing what investors want (

I am glad that they are not. While I would like to invest in them, them being public would mean that Elon has to spend a lot of time doing what investors want (making the most money) instead of doing what he envisions the company to do (going to mars). There is a reason Elon regret ps that Tesla is public but it was the only way it could have survived. By staying private, Elon can choose whom to allows to invest in so that the missions stays what he wants it to be. It’d rather not make money from SpaceX then have them going on the wrong path and become yet another government competing space company that does little innovation and just sucks up government money.

WalterBright 9y ago
Unfortunately, the amount I'm capable of investing in SpaceX is not worth Elon's time, so appealing to him is not going to work. I just want a piece of the action in one of the greatest ventures of our time! Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it. A thousand million-dollar startups can probably do more innovation between them than one billion-dollar startup. Maybe we would've ended up with a different structure - maybe one company would make a better engine and sell it to Boeing or whoever, and another would make better structural components, and another would come up with the landing systems by licensing control systems from yet another... but I think without billionaires (and remember Musk is one billionaire of many, he's by no means the median example) we'd get more value for society overall.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    We already have tens of thousands of million-dollar startups. None of them started a space program.
    - lmm 9y ago
      SpaceX hasn't started a space program. They've launched satellites for customers and fulfilled a NASA contract for resupply to the ISS.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  There's a distinction though. Billionaires are people, identities, faces you can love or hate depending on what they do, but investments like these are done by faceless corporations. I don't mind corporations to have billions, spacex, tesla, apple, etc all have that and they can use that money for investing in Stuff.
elihu 9y ago
I think there's a bigger danger to becoming a profit-centered publicly traded company than just them not innovating. The character of future society on Mars will in large part depend on the policies of the large corporations that provide the technology and infrastructure to make it possible, and I would rather that Mars society looks like a diverse, free, liberal democracy with reasonable opportunities for homesteading and an efficient economy with multiple competing vendors for various resources and not like a forced labor camp where you work your 80 hours a week in exchange for the CO2 filters you need to survive, or like a tourist destination where one company owns the whole Mars Experience. In the short term it's probably inevitable that one company will have a transportation-to-Mars monopoly, but if that company has some good founding principles and a vision that doesn't involve milking every last dime out of their monopoly status, then I can at least feel a little better that Mars has a chance of not becoming a dystopia.

WalterBright 9y ago

Unfortunately, the amount I'm capable of investing in SpaceX is not worth Elon's time, so appealing to him is not going to work. I just want a piece of the action in one of the greatest ventures of our time! Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it.

lmm 9y ago
> Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it. A thousand million-dollar startups can probably do more innovation between them than one billion-dollar startup. Maybe we would've ended up with a different structure - maybe one company would make a better engine and sell it to Boeing or whoever, and another would make better structural components, and another would come up with the landing systems by licensing control systems from yet another... but I think without billionaires (and remember Musk is one billionaire of many, he's by no means the median example) we'd get more value for society overall.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  We already have tens of thousands of million-dollar startups. None of them started a space program.
  - lmm 9y ago
    SpaceX hasn't started a space program. They've launched satellites for customers and fulfilled a NASA contract for resupply to the ISS.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
There's a distinction though. Billionaires are people, identities, faces you can love or hate depending on what they do, but investments like these are done by faceless corporations. I don't mind corporations to have billions, spacex, tesla, apple, etc all have that and they can use that money for investing in Stuff.

elihu 9y ago

I think there's a bigger danger to becoming a profit-centered publicly traded company than just them not innovating. The character of future society on Mars will in large part depend on the policies of the large corporations that provide the technology and infrastructure to make it possible, and I would rather that Mars society looks like a diverse, free, liberal democracy with reasonable opportunities for homesteading and an efficient economy with multiple competing vendors for various resources and not like a forced labor camp where you work your 80 hours a week in exchange for the CO2 filters you need to survive, or like a tourist destination where one company owns the whole Mars Experience. In the short term it's probably inevitable that one company will have a transportation-to-Mars monopoly, but if that company has some good founding principles and a vision that doesn't involve milking every last dime out of their monopoly status, then I can at least feel a little better that Mars has a chance of not becoming a dystopia.