SpaceX to give out bonus when 1m humans settle on Mars

NEW YORK: SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO filing included some out of this world details, including a provision that founder Elon Musk’s massive bonus only kicks in if one million humans settle on Mars.

The bonus structure, laid out in SpaceX’s prospectus filed with US regulators on Wednesday, reads less like a compensation agreement and more like a science fiction plot.

Musk’s bonus is contingent on SpaceX’s stock market value hitting targets ranging from $400 billion to $6 trillion — along with the company moving a million people to a planet 140 million miles (225 million kilometres) away.

Musk describes that ambition as essential to the long-term survival of the human race, though most experts see it as being at least decades away. Still, Musk will do just fine if the IPO goes ahead in the coming weeks as planned.

At the company’s reported target valuation of $1.75 trillion, Musk’s existing stake would be worth an estimated $735 billion — before a single person sets foot on the Red Planet.

A second, smaller bonus ties an additional 60 million shares to a different moonshot: building data centers in orbit capable of delivering 100 terawatts of computing power per year — a figure that dwarfs anything that exists on Earth today. SpaceX filed for its long-awaited IPO Wednesday, targeting a listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker “SPCX” in what could be the largest public offering in Wall Street history.

The company’s Starship rocket — whose latest iteration could launch on Thursday — is explicitly designed with Mars colonization in mind.

The filing confirmed a dual-class share structure that will leave Musk firmly in control of the company after the listing, sidestepping the kind of governance fights that have dogged him at Tesla, where shareholders have repeatedly taken aim at his compensation and the board’s independence.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2026