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SpaceX Set To Create 300 New US Jobs and Expand Facilities
littlesparkvt writes The SpaceX manufacturing plant in McGregor, TX is set to spend $46 million on an expansion that would create 300 full-time jobs. SpaceX is proposing to invest $46.3 million in the site during the next five years. They will spend $32.4 million in real property improvements and $13.9 million in personal property improvements.
It is actually part of the lease they signed - the land must be farmed, not allowed to "just rot unused". McGregor county required it to be farmed.
Funnily the farmer they are seeking is required to be very flexible, effectively doing all the farming at night... because rocket testing comes first and farming work on those fields SpaceX now leases can only be done when no rocket testing is ongoing :)
SpaceX even tried to hire the previous lease holders to farm that land. The problem was that the additional terms of the contract (like you said.... farming at night and working around test schedules) were something those farmers didn't agree to doing. They also needed to go through a criminal background check and verify that they haven't been involved with international arms trades due to requirements of the ITAR laws and the Department of Defense contracts that SpaceX is signing.
All told, bringing the position in-house sounds like a better way to get the job done.
Not too many. You have to be a U.S. Citizen to work for SpaceX due to ITAR restrictions, and pass a criminal background check too. It is possible to get hired if you aren't a U.S. Citizen, but that amounts to being something like a security clearance for classified work (which also must happen for much of what SpaceX does). It is a separate part of the Department of State that must issue the authorization for a non-citizen to work.
It seems like I heard a SpaceX employee say that they didn't know of any H1-B visa holders that worked for their company... but I could be mistaken. They certainly aren't milking the visa system to get cheap workers. It is one of the restrictions when you make something that can be used with thermonuclear weapons that gets a whole lot more attention in terms of immigration and work status rules.
Whenever someone with a whole lot of money spends a big chunk on a company, and it looks nonsensical to you, this is an indicator of class divide. They know something that you don't. Very large sums of money don't come about unless someone is good at identifying things that make money. Occasionally, you see a massive whiff from a company into a new space where they had no business trying to make a product (think the HP touchpad or blackberry playbook) but these are pretty desperate engineering efforts from failing/dysfunctional companies.
You've shown a western bias by naming whatsapp.. a company with a huge potential in the other 2/3'rds of the world's population. Paypal, in particular, has a thriving ecosystem that has turned out to be a wildly successful investment. Who will create the paypal "killer" anytime soon? It's doubtful to appear. The market for payments still has a lot of room for more players.
This isn't a reputation thing with these upstarts. The reputation thing only comes into play with the blackberry playbook, where they used their company name to get the bank loans needed to lay a turd into the market. As for instagram, facebook needed to buy it so it wasn't a threat. For the deal they got some great proprietary technology and an even larger user base, and continued relevance. Makes sense to me.