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+--- Thread: Article Elon Musk will earn a company bonus if he drops a million colonists on Mars (travel) (/thread-20339.html)
Elon Musk will earn a company bonus if he drops a million colonists on Mars (travel) - C C - May 1, 2026
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-will-earn-a-company-bonus-if-he-drops-a-million-colonists-on-mars-2000752661
EXCERPTS: Elon Musk now has another reason to colonize Mars besides appealing to his massive ego. Board members of SpaceX are dangling a lucrative pay package in front of the billionaire to keep him focused on his ambitious goal of setting up a human habitat on the Red Planet.
The board approved a compensation plan for the company founder that’s contingent on a few key goals ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering, Reuters reported. According to SpaceX’s confidential registration statement recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, reviewed by Reuters, the pay package will award Musk 200 million in super-voting restricted shares if the company hits a market value of $7.5 trillion and succeeds in establishing a colony on Mars with at least 1 million people.
The pay package also has additional incentives of 60.4 million in restricted shares if SpaceX meets separate valuation goals and operates space-based data centers with at least 100 terawatts of processing power.
[...] SpaceX’s Starship is at the heart of Musk’s vision for Mars, but the rocket is still in development. Musk had previously argued that using the Moon as a stepping stone for Mars would be a distraction, but the SpaceX founder recently switched up on the company’s priorities. Earlier this year, Musk said SpaceX has “shifted focus toward building a self-growing city on the Moon.” Achieving this new goal, he said, will potentially take less than a decade, whereas colonizing Mars would take more than 20 years.
Musk’s overly ambitious timeline may have caught up with him as Starship continues to lag behind. Now, the billionaire’s talk of a one-million-people-strong Mars colony is spelled out in his compensation package... (MORE - details)
RE: Elon Musk will earn a company bonus if he drops a million colonists on Mars (travel) - stryder - May 4, 2026
Some maths for the feasibility:
Currently it suggests that a person requires around 4.66 metric tonnes of supplies to live for one year in space. Lets say for a colony you'd be looking at least 5 years per person with the intension of making itself self sufficient after that point.
Thats 23.3 metric tonnes for the first five years. For 1,000,000 colonists that would be 23,300,000 metric tonnes.
Currently SpaceX's Starship can cover 250 metric tonnes if expanded. Thats 93,200 Starship launches required just to get that amount of material into space.
Considering this is suppose to be over a 20 year period (365.25 days x 20 years = 7,305 days), thats 12.76 launches a day for the next 20 years.
It is possible they could reduce the amount needed, but even 1 launch a day would be pushing it at the current rate at thats without taking into consideration things like launch failure rates or other problems that can pop up over the next 20 years.
I'm pretty sure the colony clause is going to be the undoing of the gain Musk is aiming for.