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Elon Musk struggled massively with the pressure of Tesla being a public company. Many see the company as an obvious, insane success — especially as it trades at a P/E ratio of 357.29 — but the stress of getting Tesla to profitability and the difficulty dealing with quarterly financial analyst calls (two of which I was given the opportunity to ask live questions on) wore Musk down tremendously and may have led to severe psychological issues and even drug use (based on things Musk has said publicly at various times).
Due to all of that, Musk said he never wanted to take another company public again. When he bought Twitter, he took it private, and after losing a ton of money, he got it merged into xAI to save the day. As those two together got into financial crisis, he got them rolled into SpaceX to save them. Now, however, after years of saying he didn’t want to take SpaceX public, he’s doing so.
“At SpaceX, we never think about the quarter. We never think about it, and we don’t think about the stock price,” Musk said in 2023.
“I don’t think it’s worth going public until you have maybe an extremely stable and predictable revenue stream. At that point, going public is less of an issue because you’re just not going to have these big gyrations,” he also said.
