It was belatedly reported that NXC, Nexon's holding company, invested $16 million (about 19 billion won) in SpaceX, a private space developer of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, last summer.
This is the first time that a domestic investment corporation has become a shareholder of SpaceX.
SpaceX is a private space developer established by Elon Musk with the dream of moving to Mars. It has self-developed rockets and spacecraft modules. Last year, it launched its first civilian manned spacecraft (Falcon 9) at NASA.
An NXC official said on Jan. 13, "We invested $16 million in new convertible preferred stocks that SpaceX recruited in August last year." This is a fund created by a Korean asset management company through a special purpose corporation (SPC).
$16 million is equivalent to about 60 percent of NXC's shares in the fund. It is heard that NXC was not allocated as much as it wanted due to fierce competition for investment at that time.
Nexon also took over Bitstamp, Europe's largest virtual currency exchange, in 2018, and invested in Tagomi, a U.S. virtual currency company. In addition, it acquired Stoke, a Norwegian baby goods company, and BrickLink, an online Lego block trading site.
Meanwhile, In 2016, CEO Musk even announced a plan that "We will start the Mars tourism business with a spacecraft carrying 100 passengers in 2024, and move 1 million people to Mars within 50 years."
