As a millionaire, you might try to impress your friends by taking them for a ride in your Ferrari or reasonably sized yacht in Palm Beach.
As a billionaire, however, the best way to impress your peers is by taking them for a ride in your spaceship.
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Increasingly, more and more heavy hitters in the tech and industrial space are getting involved in the great space race of the 21st century.
Jeff Bezos famously launches interested celebrities in his Blue Origin space exploration crafts. Elon Musk launches crewed SpaceX rockets into space seemingly every other month. And Richard Branson was actually the first billionaire to fly in his own Virgin Galactic Unity 22 spacecraft.
The list of billionaires in space goes on, and each mission has its own advantages and challenges, as any boundary-breaking push into a previously unexplored frontier might.
Space exploration is also incredibly cash-intensive. Musk’s SpaceX made headlines earlier in 2023 when it reported to have brought in a small net profit margin of just 3.7% ($55 million) in Q1 2023. On the whole, though, these companies are mostly very expensive to run, fraught with red tape and bureaucracy, and still supremely dangerous regardless of crew or mission expertise.
Which might be why Richard Branson is prepared to hit pause, at least for now.
Richard Branson issues surprising remark about Virgin Galactic
British billionaire Richard Branson, who founded Virgin Group and Virgin Galactic, which specializes in space travel and tourism, has seen his latter company through ups and downs.
Virgin Galactic IPO-ed in 2019 with a $2.3 billion valuation. At its height in mid 2021, its stock hit approximately $55 per share. But it’s since come crashing back down to earth; the stock has hovered around $3 for most of 2023 and now has a market cap of just $843 million.
Sir Richard Branson speaks after he flew into space aboard a Virgin Galactic vessel, a voyage he described as the “experience of a lifetime” on July 11, 2021. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
Which is why Branson is turning off the hose, at least for now.
“We don’t have the deepest pockets after Covid,” he explained in a Financial Times interview in early December. “And Virgin Galactic has got $1 billion — or nearly. It should, I believe, have sufficient funds to do its job on its own.”
In Virgin’s most recent November filing, it reported it had about $1.1 billion in cash and securities. It laid off about 7% of its staff in the same month.
Virgin Galactic also announced it would change its monthly space tourism schedule to quarterly. Its next mission, the Galactic 06, is slotted to take off in January 2024.
But just because Branson is done funding Galactic for now doesn’t mean the company is closing up shop. It’s working on its cushier new Delta line, which will present high-paying celebrities and notables to plunge deeper into space by 2026.
Branson struck a notably optimistic tone when discussing the future of Galactic — with or without his funding. He claimed the company has “really proved itself and the technology.”
Galactic’s stock is down over 5% since his comments.
