Space vacation and old age on Mars: SpaceX's plans for the future of the company!
While SpaceX founder Elon Musk may be dead, set to one day live on another planet, the firm's chief operating officer says he plans to keep things earthly, for now.
"I think Elon wants to retire to Mars. I'm not interested in Mars,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and COO, told Baron Capital founder Ron Baron at his firm's annual investment conference last week. "I don't like camping and I think it will be a long time before Mars is nice enough, maybe not in my lifetime."
Still, like her boss, Shotwell's visions for SpaceX remain stratospheric: accessible space travel for all, global rollout for satellite Internet, and yes, eventually, interplanetary travel and life.
The company's trajectory has investors seeing stars, too. SpaceX, unlike Tesla, is not traded as a public stock and therefore is not required to post financial results. But Baroni assured his investors who can own SpaceX exposure through some of the firm's mutual funds that it has been a profitable play.
"We've made, since we started investing in 2017, seven times our money," Baron said, adding that he expected their stock to triple over the next half decade. That doesn't mean the company has a perfect track record. SpaceX's financial results have reportedly been up and down over the years, and this week, a highly publicized test run didn't quite go according to plan. 3 future visions of the company:
1. Affordable space travel
SpaceX's latest innovation is the company's ability to "capture" and restart its rockets, a paradigm shift that Shotwell said could drastically lower the cost of getting into space. "What we hope to do with the work we're doing is to allow ordinary people to go into space," she said. And while Shotwell isn't eyeing any Martian real estate, she said getting people to Mars and beyond is part of the company's long-term game plan.
2. A chance for growth... and competition
Meanwhile, SpaceX has a lot of work to do on Earth. The company launched its reusable Falcon rockets more than 100 times this year with the next closest competitor reaching orbit about a dozen times. SpaceX's Starlink internet network has about 7,000 satellites in orbit and currently serves about 5 million customers.
Those numbers illustrate great potential for growth, Shotwell said. "There are close to 8 billion people on the planet and we're serving not even 5 million," she said. "The market is huge." When Baron pointed out that about 30% of those 8 billion don't have access to broadband, Shotwell said that while she would like SpaceX to serve everyone, she expected stiff competition and that this was not a bad. . “I hope others get it, don't you? Competition is good for industries...It keeps us tight; it keeps us very focused," she said.
3. Regulation reinvented
The only thing keeping SpaceX and other tech companies from expanding at the pace they want, Shotwell said: is regulation. "Technology is easy. Physics is easy. People are difficult," she said. "And the regulatory people are the hardest." Shotwell acknowledged, of course, that government regulations are meant to protect workers and consumers and keep industries fair, but still expressed frustration with the pace and complexity of government oversight.
“I think everybody is starting to realize in all industries that regulation really needs to be reinvented… I probably spend more than half my time working on regulatory issues, and I'd like to spend that time meeting with the welders of mi and meeting people building Starlinks and Starships,” she said.
As one audience member pointed out, Shotwell's boss has been tapped to head a new agency aimed at increasing government efficiency. She did not say whether she thought changes to the current regulatory framework would be forthcoming, but expressed hope that a new administration could cut some of the red tape she sees holding back her industry. "It's certainly the hope that we can figure out together how to make regulatory organizations more efficient, make regulation more efficient and, frankly, better. Not just faster, but better.”
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