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.<\/p>\n
The board approved a compensation plan for the company founder that\u2019s contingent on a few key goals ahead of SpaceX\u2019s initial public offering, Reuters reported<\/a>. According to SpaceX\u2019s confidential registration statement recently \u200cfiled 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Occupy Mars <\/p>\n Musk has long dreamed of a Mars colony, building SpaceX with a vision of an interplanetary human species as the end goal. The founder and CEO has reiterated his plan to send one million people to Mars by 2050<\/a> for years, preaching that the fate of humanity is at stake if not for the prospect of a permanent habitat on the Red Planet.<\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s Starship is at the heart of Musk\u2019s 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\u2019s priorities<\/a>. Earlier this year, Musk said SpaceX has \u201cshifted focus toward building a self-growing city on the Moon.\u201d Achieving this new goal, he said, will potentially take less than a decade, whereas colonizing Mars would take more than 20 years.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s overly ambitious timeline may have caught up with him as Starship continues to lag behind. Now, the billionaire\u2019s talk of a one-million-people-strong Mars colony is spelled out in his compensation package.<\/p>\n No reward without risk <\/p>\n