Elon Musk will get a billion shares of SpaceX if he can settle a million humans on Mars

When SpaceX published its S-1 on May 20, investors got what they expected: a landmark filing for a company planning the largest IPO in history. What they may not have been ready for was the compensation structure buried inside it, which reads less like a corporate pay package and more like science fiction.

The SpaceX board will grant CEO and founder Elon Musk 1 billion restricted shares of Class B common stock on one condition: He has to hit 15 market capitalization milestones up to $7.5 trillion and establish a “permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.”

This is on top of his existing stake of roughly 5 billion shares, worth approximately $825 billion now. The new shares, potentially worth several hundred billion dollars more, come with conditions that have no precedent in the history of executive compensation. And the sci-fi quality of these conditions appears constant throughout the filing.

The word “Mars” appears 63 times in the document, including under the “executive compensation” section. The prospectus is structured, in...