Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

This is one of 16 teams competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize

My bet would actually be on SpaceIL or Astrobotics to win the prize. Astrobotics has been the consistent winner when it comes to demonstrating intermediate goals; they won the prizes for Landing, Mobility, and Imaging, and seem to have a solid engineering effort based out of CMU with partnerships with major U.S. corporations. SpaceIL has some interesting design choices that limit risk, eg. they're launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and they aren't building a rover, instead lifting off via rocket and flying to a second destination 500M away.

Moon Express has two major risk factors against it: they're launching on an Electron, which is a rocket that has never successfully flown before and won't be commercially available until 2017, and their founder has a reputation for making grandiose promises and then running away with the money. (He founded InfoSpace during the dot-com boom, sold all of his stock at the peak even while revenues were declining, then was ordered to pay $247M in insider-trading fines by the SEC.)

Out of interest: What is the correct way to sell your stock in your company? What made the way that the founder of InfoSpace did it illegal?

In principal, publicly traded stock has the attribute that all investors make buy and sell decisions on the same information. In order to enforce that, laws prohibit persons who know what is happening within the company before the general public investor knows from profiting specifically from that insider knowledge. There are a lot of restrictions, policies and processes for buying or selling stock "while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security." [1] There are literally 'black out days' where employees of companies that have stock traded on the public market are prohibited from buying or selling company shares. From my days at a public company, this period was generally 4-6 weeks per quarter, encompassing the quarterly reporting period.

In particular, officers, director and senior staff have to file a form with the SEC in order to trade shares at all. Those trades are subsequently reported to the public in SEC Form 4 [2]. From the SEC [3]:

"Examples of insider trading cases that have been brought by the SEC are cases against:

- Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments;

- Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

-Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;

- Government employees who learned of such information because of their employment by the government;

- and Other persons who misappropriated, and took advantage of, confidential information from their employers."

[1] https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm

[2] http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/insider-trades

[3] http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1494730-16-7&CIK=...

Adding on one thought, many insiders of publicly traded companies will sell shares through pre-established 10b5-1 plans. This can help to provide liquidity to insiders while limiting the potential for accusations of insider trading as insiders can set up defined trading plans for their stock that act independently of their knowledge or day-to-day intentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1

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