Elon Musk’s proposed pay package in SpaceX’s IPO filing reveals what the company actually is: a $1 trillion monster built to colonize Mars

Elon Musk’s new pay package at Space X, the largest in corporate history, comes with one little catch: He doesn’t get the money until one million people live on Mars. The Space X board granted Musk one billion restricted shares of Class B common stock on top of his existing stake of roughly 5 billion shares, worth roughly $700 billion at the expected IPO valuation of $1.75 trillion. The new shares, potentially worth an additional $600 billion or more, only vest if Space X hits two conditions: its top market capitalization milestone of $7.5 trillion, and the creation of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants. The prospectus answers a question on Wall Street’s mind: why SpaceX is going public this way at all. Three months before filing, Musk merged his AI company xAI and his social media platform X into SpaceX, in a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the AI company at $250 billion. That merged company, set to rock public markets next month, seemed Frankenstein-ish, but the filing’s own mission statement shows that the seemingly mismatched parts have a single purpose.“For the entirety of its existence,” the filing reads, “human civilization has lived on a single celestial body: Earth. The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale.”A few sentences later, it adds: “We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.” SpaceX is a Mars company, and everything else is built as infrastructure for the trip. Mars colonization, the goal Musk has chased since he was a boy reading Asimov, requires much more than rockets. It requires robots—to build habitats, carry out agriculture, produce fuel, and build all the infrastructure needed to keep humans alive in an environment that’s trying to kill them. It requires the robots to run on AI that c