I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.
/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings
> get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes
Investors have been doing this since SpaceX first raised outside funding. American capital markets are not that risk averse.
tbf those investments weren't traded on a liquid market, and I suspect Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund or mug punter.
But of course we also know that Musk-run public companies are immune to normal dynamics of worrying about next quarter's returns (or even worrying about the CEO publicly torching his brand equity) so the very last thing I'd imagine happening is SpaceX becoming risk averse and profitability focused
Those funds have more capital to allocate to profitable publicly traded companies than they did to speculative bets on unicorns, and more importantly now have an easy offramp if their investment thesis isn't as aligned with the Kardashev scale as the true believers.
The risks they care about will be more "Starlink growth slows" or "orbital datacentre has horrible operating economics" than "Starship launch anomaly" though, and I agree it'll make zero difference to how SpaceX operates both because Elon isn't afraid to tank valuations and because retail loves him unconditionally. And the bull case for SpaceX is still stronger than the bull case for Tesla which happily trades at valuations north of $1b.
I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.
A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.
Nothing all that exciting, just pleasure from finding a photo in a local newspaper of my great-great-grandfather’s (approximately, I don’t remember the specifics at the moment) car being pulled by horses out of a local river, or researching a family name I found in a cemetery and finding interesting tidbits about their history.
Probably the most impressive effort I stumbled upon was a woman from rural Indiana who collected (and typed up) thousands of pages of local history & genealogy in the mid-20th century. Was interesting reading personal accounts of Morgan’s Raid, for example.
I found this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFhXFuRblg "NBC Nightly News, June 24, 1975" I strongly urge people to watch this, it's 30 minutes but there are many very illuminating insights within. One word for you: Exxon.
While I was young in 1975, I did watch ABC's version of the news with my grandparents, and continued up through high school. Then in the late 1980s I got on the Internet and well you know the rest.
"Back Then", a high percentage of everybody I or my grandparents or my friends came into contact with watched one of ABC, NBC, or CBS news most nights. These three networks were a bit different, but they generally they all told the same basic stories as each other.
This was effectively our shared reality. Later in high school as I became more politically focused, I could still talk to anybody, even people who had completely opposite political views as myself. That's because we had a shared view of reality.
Today, tens of millions of people see the exact same footage of an officer involved shooting...many angles, and draw entirely different 'factual' conclusions.
So yes, 50 years ago, we in the United States generally had a share view of reality. That was good in a lot of ways, but it did essentially allow a small set of people in power to decide that convincing a non-trivial percentage of the US population that Exxon was a friendly, family oriented company that was really on your side.
Worth the trade off? Hard to say, but at least 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side', and that's pretty valuable.
> 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side'
As long as that common ground falls within acceptable parameters; couldn't talk too much about anything remotely socialist or being anti-war.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
They don't need a lot of tools to do such a deep 'search' of your car, they're not under any requirement or mandate to make it easy or even possible to repair.
In my 40+ years of driving, I've seen such disassembled cars along the road a hand full of times.
I also lived not too far from that location, and unfortunately got a glimpse of the aircraft as it was spiraling down. The scene on the ground was pretty hellish.
I get and appreciate that sentiment. Musk currently has a controlling interest in SpaceX. Do you expect that to change after the IPO? Thanks!
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