MUNCIE, Ind. — A Muncie man who purchased a single share of SpaceX on Friday, the company’s first day as a publicly traded company, said by evening that he now owns approximately 0.0000000076 percent of the planet Mars and had begun preparing his portion of it for a patio.
Kevin Strebe, 46, a regional sales manager for a company that makes industrial casters, bought the share for $152.40 shortly after trading began on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 a share on Thursday in what was the largest IPO in history, valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion. The stock closed Friday at $160.95, up about 19 percent from the offering price, a gain of $8.55 on Strebe’s position, or 5.61 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.0 percent, since he only has the one.
“I’m not saying I run the company. I’m saying I’m in the room,” Strebe said from his deck, where he was wearing a polo shirt he had ordered Friday afternoon reading “SPCX SHAREHOLDER” across the back. “I have a stake in this. Rockets, satellites, the moon, Mars, whatever else comes up. I own a little bit of all of it, and I intend to take care of my part.”
Strebe calculated his ownership by dividing one share by the roughly 13.1 billion shares implied by the offering, then applying the result to Mars, which he said “is obviously where this is all going.” He has since staked out a plot in the northeast corner of his backyard measuring 0.4 square inches, which he said represents his share of the Martian surface at a scale of one backyard to one planet, and surrounded it with a fence made of toothpicks. By 4 p.m., he had removed a single blade of grass from the plot, laid three red pebbles from a fish tank, and installed a solar-powered path light the size of a pencil eraser so that his section of Mars “doesn’t look abandoned from Earth.” His wife, Denise, said he had also begun referring to the plot as “the colony” and had asked the family not to mow near it, out of respect.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said Strebe’s reasoning was sound. “If you own a piece of a company, you own a piece of where the company is going,” Brickhouse said by phone from a car wash. “I said that in March. We ran the numbers on Friday, and the numbers agreed with me. It’s just common sense. The man is a landowner.”
The Reporter surveyed all three adult members of the Strebe household Friday evening. Of the three, 1, or 33.3 percent, identified as a co-owner of a rocket company, 1, or 33.3 percent, identified as “the person who is going to have to mow around it,” and 1, or 33.3 percent, said she did not want to be in the newspaper. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 33.3 percentage points, which the Reporter regards as acceptable for a household of this size.
Strebe said he had no plans to sell. He said he was considering buying a second share next week, which would double his holdings on Mars to 0.8 square inches, and had already asked a neighbor whether he would be interested in leasing the difference.