WASHINGTON (Jan 7): Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook Inc executive and prominent investor known for his “blank-check” companies, is predicting that SpaceX’s internet-from-space initiative Starlink will go public in 2023, years earlier than planned.

Palihapitiya said on his podcast All-In that a Starlink initial public offering (IPO) could give chief executive Elon Musk more financial flexibility and would be “an obvious outcome in 2023”.

The comments came on the episode of the podcast where he and his two co-hosts, investors Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, predict trends and events across the technology industry in the year ahead. 

“[Musk] talked about this on our pod, about the difficulties and the dangers of margin loans and all of that stuff,” Palihapitiya said. “He’s going to create breathing room for himself. This is the simplest and most obvious way for him to do it. It’ll give him a ton of more dry powder.”

It wasn’t clear from his comments whether he had information about specific plans from Space Exploration Technologies Corp or was just speculating. While Palihapitiya is not known to be particularly close to Musk, both co-hosts Calacanis and Sacks are, and have been involved in the SpaceX and Tesla Inc CEO’s recent ownership of Twitter Inc.

Both Musk and SpaceX’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, have made various comments over the years about the Starlink initiative eventually breaking off from the rest of the company and going public. In February 2020, after SpaceX had launched a couple hundred Starlink satellites, Shotwell said that the unit was “the right kind of business that we can go ahead and take public.” However, shortly after her comments, Musk said that SpaceX was thinking “zero” about a Starlink IPO.

“We need to make the thing work,” he said during a fireside chat in Washington.

Musk said in spring 2022 during a SpaceX all-hands meeting that a Starlink IPO was at least three to four years away, CNBC reported.

A public offering this year might not be the best timing. Concerns about a slowing economy limited IPOs in 2022, and rising interest rates and a potential US recession continue to be drags on the market.

Palihapitiya has spent the past three years taking startups public through special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), blank-check firms that provide an alternate route to IPOs or direct listings. His promotion of these investments and so-called meme stocks led to him being unofficially crowned the “SPAC King”.

He is also an investor in Relativity Space Inc, another aerospace company. 

Like other SPACs and the tech market at large, many of Palihapitiya’s investments have lost significant value since he took them public. Online bank SoFi Technologies Inc has fallen 79% since June 2021. Space tourism company Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc has dropped 66%. Two of his blank-check companies shuttered in September after failing to find deals.

Palihapitiya and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

SpaceX’s Starlink programme entails launching thousands of satellites into low orbits above Earth in order to provide global low-latency broadband internet service to the ground below. So far, the company has more than 3,300 satellites in orbit, and SpaceX recently claimed to have one million subscribers. In December, SpaceX also received authorisation from the US Federal Communications Commission to launch an additional 7,500 satellites, part of a new shell called Gen 2.