I wish SpaceX was traded on the stock exchange so I could buy stock in it. I had to settle for buying some TSLA.
By staying private, Elon can choose whom to allows to invest in so that the missions stays what he wants it to be. It’d rather not make money from SpaceX then have them going on the wrong path and become yet another government competing space company that does little innovation and just sucks up government money.
Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it.
A thousand million-dollar startups can probably do more innovation between them than one billion-dollar startup. Maybe we would've ended up with a different structure - maybe one company would make a better engine and sell it to Boeing or whoever, and another would make better structural components, and another would come up with the landing systems by licensing control systems from yet another... but I think without billionaires (and remember Musk is one billionaire of many, he's by no means the median example) we'd get more value for society overall.
The character of future society on Mars will in large part depend on the policies of the large corporations that provide the technology and infrastructure to make it possible, and I would rather that Mars society looks like a diverse, free, liberal democracy with reasonable opportunities for homesteading and an efficient economy with multiple competing vendors for various resources and not like a forced labor camp where you work your 80 hours a week in exchange for the CO2 filters you need to survive, or like a tourist destination where one company owns the whole Mars Experience.
In the short term it's probably inevitable that one company will have a transportation-to-Mars monopoly, but if that company has some good founding principles and a vision that doesn't involve milking every last dime out of their monopoly status, then I can at least feel a little better that Mars has a chance of not becoming a dystopia.
"I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company." - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/elon-musk-inve...
The stock market news cycle is a constant barrage of criticism every quarter: commentary on whether they made some random analyst's projections, investors asking the same inane questions over and over... How many times has he given the "there's no point in giving you delivery estimates for specific months because the ramp will be exponential and small factors can change individual months by an order of magnitude" speech? I've heard him say that at least 10 times, and yet investors keep asking the same dumb questions every earnings call.
Which isn't really that huge of a time sink, but then people go and make a big deal out of that stuff in the press, "Model 3 production was supposed to be 5,000 by year end, and it's looking more like 500... Tesla suffers 90% crash in production rate! It's all over folks!" Even though Musk described this scenario two years ago, and said it was accounted for in their planning.
Now imagine he's trying to get to Mars and every 3 months he has to go in front of investors who are asking, "So, your orbital launch rate for this quarter seems to be 50% lower than projections, would you say that's more due to your incompetence or is it more that your business model is fundamentally flawed?"
He's not optimizing for quarterly revenue. He's not optimizing for revenue at all, he's optimizing to make something fundamentally new and valuable happen, and he's calculating that the value will come, although it's never clear what year. But a segment of public investors seem unable to accept that story.
Incompetence is blind trust. A good investor actually cares about the performance of the companies in which they invest - and that includes its ability to realistically project and meet those projections. A CEO who promises the moon on a stick and delivers little is not doing his job well. I am a fan of Elon, but you can't take a whole heap of money and then complain that people are interested.
As people have said, you can avoid this obligation to your shareholders by not having any.
But Elon is not promising the moon. He is very clear when he states his goals, that these goals are very ambitious goals and that the probability of meeting them is fairly low.
there is a lot of additional reporting for publicly traded companies and that is a good thing.
And that right there is the reason that SpaceX will not be public. SpaceX is an investment in humanity, not a financial investment.
http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2015/03/25/see-which-fidelity-...
If SpaceX is valued at about $20 billion, Google owns 9%, and Google's market cap is $720 billion, buying Google gets you 0.25% of that investment into SpaceX. Almost nothing, but better than Fidelity's exposure.