“It doesn’t matter if you disagree with me,” Musk began, “at the end of the day I’m rich and you’re not.”
Photo by Sharon Roth
Elon Musk announced Tuesday that he plans to sell and cede control of his private aerospace company, SpaceX. News broke early in the morning as Musk tweeted to his nearly forty million followers: “Yeah, so apparently Earth is flat. I’m going to sell @SpaceX soon so get those wallets ready.”
Musk had joined the “Flat Earth and Globe Discussion” Facebook group late last week when he “fell into a flat earth YouTube rabbit hole” after accidentally clicking on an ad. He now reportedly subscribes to the most popular flat earth theory and, as sources close to him disclose, “believes that the earth is a flat circle centered at the North Pole and surrounded by a wall of ice.” Many of SpaceX’s projects, which involve spaceships that orbit the planet, rely on the existence of a round earth.
Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, first learned of the news Monday night as she scrolled through the draft tweets on Musk’s unattended phone. “Honestly, the SpaceX thing was one of the least surprising things in there. You should ask Elon about his thoughts on lobster rolls,” Shotwell told reporters who caught up to her as she was hurriedly packing up her office. Musk declined to comment about lobster rolls.
“This is good for SpaceX,” George Fern, who claims to be a self-taught astrophysicist, declared, echoing a sentiment shared by many of Musk’s supporters. Fern is an unemployed college dropout who does his own “dabbling in the stock market.” Fern could not offer more details when pressed, but it seemed that the stock market agreed with him – share prices for Musk’s electric car company Tesla shot up after his announcement about SpaceX. George Abe, a professor of economics at Harvard University, offered an explanation for the two seemingly unrelated events, positing that “it doesn’t really matter what Elon Musk says. As long as he tweets anything, the share prices just go up.”
There have been rumors of a potential purchase of SpaceX by NASA, but the agency has neither confirmed nor denied the rumors. Acquisition of SpaceX could allow NASA to develop a cheaper and more reliable launch vehicle for American astronauts traveling to and from the International Space Station. However, questions surrounding a potential NASA takeover have also been raised. Chief among them are concerns regarding SpaceX’s treatment of their workforce and the fact that Jim Bridenstine, the current administrator of NASA, believes that the earth is flat himself.
