Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…We’ll get to this in grading in minutes, so hold off that, but the question is how big is this market going to get. Yes, let’s hold off for grading. Lastly, the thing that I want to point out, I think as of May 2019, Elon owned 54% of SpaceX. They did just raise something like $550 million since then. Holy God did that guy hold on to equity in this company. Elon is a master of many things. He's the chief engineer, he's lots of things. He is a master of raising capital. Well, it's interesting the way he didn't raise that. He put his own capital in, but I think what's interesting is we didn’t talk about this in history and facts. After they got the NASA contract, and after the successful Falcon 9 and Dragon, after the successful Dragon rendezvousing with the ISS, I think there was a lot of pressure internally from employees for the company to go public because they were like, look, we just did this massive step of change in evaluation, and we've been killing ourselves here. We want some liquidity. Elon actually wrote a memo, an email to the company with the reasons why he thought going public isn't as good as you think. He needs to live through all these at Tesla, but in the wake of that, they started doing these regular fundraises. Some of the capital may be primary, but I believe most of it was secondary for employee liquidity. I think Elon was pretty outspoken about this. He said, I'm going to do this, this is going to be a much better solution for SpaceX. We won’t have to be a public company, we can get employee liquidity, we've got this massive long-term vision of getting to Mars. I actually don't think that the money was raised for the company mostly.…

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