Elon recently claimed that SpaceX will send people to Mars as early as 2026. Assuming settlements on Mars eventually become stable enough to develop their own productive capacity, what will private equity look like on Mars?
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JPM Superday Mars office.
let's make this happen
Let’s see Paul Allen’s spaceship
Let’s see Jeff Bezos’ spaceship.
You got reservations for Earth? No one goes there anymore.
So firstly, Musk did also note that many people would die on his little fun pursuits. I think it will be a while until humanity is in a position for extra-terrestrial financing. Nonetheless, I'll try to provide a half-decent answer.
One big problem with Mars is the lack of anything particularly valuable to send back to Earth (or to use as rocket fuel for missions deeper into the universe, so-called in-situ resource utilisation). In this respect, the Moon is much more attractive and several stakeholders - from governments (US/Luxembourg/UAE) to the private sector - are starting to try and work out how the legal property rights would need to be implemented. The legal situation is a complete mess right now and it is not clear if private sector firms can actually own any land - under international space law, they probably should not, but it's far from explicit. There is a not insignificant chance that the private sector - including finance - will never really be able to operate extra-terrestrially or at best it will be "world state permits" for resource extraction.
So before more complex financing gets sorted out, property rights for the private sector would need to be settled. If we can move beyond a primitive colony, then I'm not sure why finance wouldn't grow much like it has on Earth? Given what would need to happen to the place, it would be paradise for early stage venture capital investing... although much depends on how much wealth gets moved (or even if they use the same currencies). I would also say that over the next couple of decades there's a huge amount of ridiculously high risk, ridiculously high potential return opportunities in this space - various mining/fuel opportunities both to bring back to Earth and to use in-situ (helium 3, platinum, rare earths, water/lunar propellent, etc.), significant telecomms opportunities IF colonies are established, and a massive commercial race to put private sector satellites up. Luxembourg is probably the place to be for this; the US sector is mostly concentrated in a few big, more well-established companies.
I was not expecting such a well crafted serious reply when I clicked on this thread
Agree - made the original post because it seemed funny when I read the Elon article, but ended up with a thoughtful answer.
All of this would be true but won't be the case for the next 50-100 years.
Why?
Because how the hell are they going to enforce any of these laws? It's gonna be the wild wild west baby.
Whatever happens in space happens in space and there are first going to be massive arm's race in the space among governments and private enterprises.
Once the power struggle stabilizes and some entity can actually enforce laws/rules, these concerns over legal structure, transfer of wealth, investments, etc... will kick in.
There are bodies to govern this stuff though (UNOOSA), the problem is that the laws have many holes. It's an interesting take but I still think national governments would get pretty pissed off. Sanctioned from trading with Earth, maybe?
Maybe fees will be able to go up to 3 and 30 to compensate for the lighter amount of gravity.
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