Tesla Inc chief executive Elon Musk said it is “impossible” to take the company private, even though he would have liked to spend more time on innovation.
“Tesla public company duties are a much bigger factor, but going private is impossible now,” Musk said in response to a tweet saying that he should optimize his time in areas such as innovation.
“Engineering, design & general company operations absorb vast majority of my mind & are the fundamental limitation on doing more,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
Tesla shares, which were included in the S&P 500 index this week, have surged eightfold this year ahead of the addition to the benchmark measure. The gain is twice the advance of the next best performer on the gauge.
The share price jump also created millionaires among its investors and propelled Musk’s net worth by US$132.2 billion to US$159.7 billion, making him the world’s second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Musk also said that Starlink Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp’s (SpaceX) budding space Internet business, would likely be a candidate in his group for an initial public offering (IPO) once its revenue growth becomes “reasonably predictable,” echoing similar comments by SpaceX to investors earlier this year.
The company has already launched more than 240 satellites to build out Starlink, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a private investors’ event in February.
A listing would give investors a chance to buy into one of the most promising operations within the closely held company.
“Right now, we are a private company, but Starlink is the right kind of business that we can go ahead and take public,” she said.
Investors have had limited ways to own a piece of SpaceX, which has become one of the most richly valued venture-backed companies in the US by dominating the commercial rocket industry.
In addition to a contract from NASA for a version of its next-generation Starship spacecraft that might be able to land astronauts on the moon in 2024, SpaceX also has an agreement with a Japanese entrepreneur for a private flight around the moon in 2023.
SpaceX would be ready to launch its first Starship flight to Mars in 2026, Musk said earlier this month.
CAUTIOUS RECOVERY: While the manufacturing sector returned to growth amid the US-China trade truce, firms remain wary as uncertainty clouds the outlook, the CIER said The local manufacturing sector returned to expansion last month, as the official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose 2.1 points to 51.0, driven by a temporary easing in US-China trade tensions, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The PMI gauges the health of the manufacturing industry, with readings above 50 indicating expansion and those below 50 signaling contraction. “Firms are not as pessimistic as they were in April, but they remain far from optimistic,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said at a news conference. The full impact of US tariff decisions is unlikely to become clear until later this month
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STILL LOADED: Last year’s richest person, Quanta Computer Inc chairman Barry Lam, dropped to second place despite an 8 percent increase in his wealth to US$12.6 billion Staff writer, with CNA Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠) and Richard Tsai (蔡明興), the brothers who run Fubon Group (富邦集團), topped the Forbes list of Taiwan’s 50 richest people this year, released on Wednesday in New York. The magazine said that a stronger New Taiwan dollar pushed the combined wealth of Taiwan’s 50 richest people up 13 percent, from US$174 billion to US$197 billion, with 36 of the people on the list seeing their wealth increase. That came as Taiwan’s economy grew 4.6 percent last year, its fastest pace in three years, driven by the strong performance of the semiconductor industry, the magazine said. The Tsai
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