Elon Musk’s space exploration company has filed preliminary paperwork to sell shares to the public, according to two sources familiar with the filing, a blockbuster offering that would likely rank as the biggest ever and could make its founder the world’s first trillionaire.
A SpaceX IPO promises to be one of the biggest Wall Street events of the year, with several investment banks lining up to help raise tens of billions to fund Musk’s ambitions to set up a base on the moon, put datacenters the size of several football fields in orbit and possibly one day send a man to Mars.
Yeah I’ll pass and buy more rocket lab stock. Theirs don’t fucking explode all the time
Look, I’m a huge hater of SpaceX (their people are arrogant, obnoxious assholes, even outside of Musk) and a huge hater of Musk, but there is a very big difference in the philosophies of each company to explain the difference in exploding rockets.
The rockets that explode for SpaceX are their experimental ones, where they are pushing the edge and trying new things each time. They can afford to explode because they are a private company funded by a dude with 500 billion dollars. Their philosophy is to build, test, fail, assess failure, build, test, fail, assess failure, build, test, succeed. Once they figure it out, they succeed a lot. The last time a production rocket of theirs failed was over 10 years ago.
Rocketlab is working on VC funding that is literally an order of magnitude smaller. They can’t afford to test and fail. Their philosophy is to design, analyze, bench test, redesign, re-analyze, full test, succeed. It’s a completely different way to do business that requires a lower up-front investment but longer time for return on investment.