Elon Musk’s win on appeal in the litigation over his compensation package is satisfying for any number of reasons. One of them can be found in a passage in the original judgement in which Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that Musk should get nothing.
As I wrote at the time (February 2024):
To McCormick, “the incredible size of the biggest compensation plan ever . . . seems to have been calibrated to help Musk achieve what he believed would make “a good future for humanity.” Of course, she — imagine a discreetly hidden smirk — conceded, a “good future for humanity is a really good thing,” although (here comes the dagger), “some might question whether colonizing Mars is the logical next step.” Twenty years ago, she would probably have questioned what Musk was doing fooling around with a rocket company. Well, SpaceX was recently valued at around $180 billion, and has become an important strategic asset for the U.S.
How Musk might choose to spend his extra billions ought to be irrelevant. Would the judge agree that she should be denied a pay raise on the grounds that she might use it in ways that her employer thought foolish? When it came to the (potential) cost of the compensation package, all that should matter is whether the board had agreed to pay (potentially) more than was needed to keep Musk on the premises and incentivized.
Since that distant era (2024), SpaceX has continued to prove itself an ever more essential element in the American effort to ensure that it is not outplayed in space by China and/or Russia.
Stock valuations are what they are (evanescent), but SpaceX appears to be arranging a secondary share sale at a price that would reportedly value the company at $800 billion, rather more than the $140 billion (chump change!) to which I referred in February 2024. After that, an IPO seems to be in the cards for next year. The talk is that the offering price would put a value on SpaceX of $1.5 trillion. Let’s see.
As for Mars, there’s a comment on SpaceX’s website that the company:
Is planning to launch the first Starships to Mars in 2026. These first vehicles will gather critical data on entry and landing, serving as the forerunners to future crew and cargo deliveries to the Martian surface.
2026 is optimistic. I suspect that a more realistic timetable was set out in a post by Musk on X in August:
Slight chance of Starship flight to Mars crewed by Optimus in Nov/Dec next year. A lot needs to go right for that. More likely, first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans. Mars city self-sustaining in 20 to 30 years.
That target date for a Mars city also looks optimistic, but I, perhaps even more optimistically, shall do my best (fingers crossed!) to hang on long enough to see it on whatever it is we watch things in a few decades’ time. A visit might be a stretch, however.