Elon Musk’s new pay package for SpaceX is the largest in the company’s history, but there’s a slight problem: He won’t get the money until 1 million people live on Mars.
The SpaceX board of directors granted Musk 1 billion Class B ordinary shares of restricted stock on the basis of his existing approximately 5 billion shares, which is worth approximately US$700 billion based on the expected IPO valuation of US$1.75 trillion.
The new shares, which could add $600 billion or more to their value, would vest only if SpaceX meets two conditions: reaching a milestone of $7.5 trillion in its peak market capitalization and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million residents.
The prospectus answers a question on Wall Street’s mind: Why would SpaceX go public this way? The filing comes three months after Musk merged his artificial intelligence company xAI and social media platform X into SpaceX, a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the artificial intelligence company at $250 billion. The combined company set to shock public markets next month looks Frankenstein-like, but the mission statement in the document itself suggests that the seemingly mismatched parts have only one purpose.
“Since its existence, human civilization has lived on one celestial body: Earth. The current paradigm confines human civilization to one planet, which exposes humanity to unpredictable and uncontrollable existential threats on a global scale,” the document reads.
A few sentences later, it added: “We don’t want humans to have the same fate as the dinosaurs.”
SpaceX is a Mars company, everything else is infrastructure built for the trip.
Mars colonization is a goal that Musk has been pursuing since he was a child reading Asimov’s works. It requires more than just rockets. It requires robots to build habitats, carry out agriculture, produce fuel and build all the necessary infrastructure to allow humans to survive in an environment that seeks to kill humans. It requires the robots to run on artificial intelligence that can run on Mars because of the communication lag with Earth. And it requires a lot of money because the technology doesn’t exist yet.
The merger allows Musk to bring all three parts under one roof. xAI itself was heavily in debt and unable to raise the funds to build the AI infrastructure needed for such a colony. SpaceX does not have an artificial intelligence business itself. As the document shows, the idea is that the new company can use Starlink’s revenue plus SpaceX’s launch business to subsidize the construction of artificial intelligence, and use xAI’s technology to truly achieve large-scale governance on Mars.