Hacker News Reader

Comment by twistedpair | Hacker News Reader

Just makes me sad that they're not publicly traded, because I would have placed a big bet (investment) on the company last week. Then again, perhaps it's for the best so that Lockheed, Boeing and ULA friends don't just buy them and shut them down. I hope our 21st century Howard Hughes gets rich off this and starts even more disruptive companies with the spoils.

View on HN

If they were publicly traded, they'd probably get drawn into the Wall Street trend of short-term profit above all else. Why risk whether you can sell the long-term vision of cheap travel to and colonization of Mars to institutional investors and speculators? Odds are it'll never happen at SpaceX unless company ownership is limited to people who share the long-term vision, which is kind of the opposite of being publicly traded.

A couple fires and the stock drops 45% in three weeks like TSLA? I think they are not interested in that. It would be too volatile.

>Just makes me sad that they're not publicly traded

I used to think that too, but then I read about Elon's opinion on that and changed my mind. Being privately owned allows them to take huge risks and whether the inevitable catastrophic failure. You can't really do that when you have to be accountable to millions of shareholders and market pressures.

Musk has said that SpaceX won't consider going public at least until the MCT is flying regularly.

If SpaceX went public, became a wildly successful earth-orbit rocket company and made Musk very rich, I believe he would consider that a failure.

It's good SpaceX is not traded, not at this point. Think about time the ceo will have to spend talking to the money heads. shuddering...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com