[hkmurakami]

>Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?

If SpaceX goes public (and my understanding is that it will soon enough), then government can buy a massive stake in the company to control it, if they so choose.

[rst]

Only if parties with majority control are willing to sell. (Which can be a lot less than majority ownership --- see Facebook for an example[].) And there have certainly been hints that when (if?) SpaceX actually does an IPO, Elon will try to have similar measures in place, to keep shareholder activists from putting the kibosh on his private Mars program...

[] Facebook has a dual-class share structure, in which class B shares have ten times the voting rights of publicly traded class A. Zuck owns a lot of class B personally, and has proxies on much of the rest, giving him personally majority control. (If the other class B owners sell, the proxies probably go away --- but so does the voting power of the shares, which convert to class A.) The upshot is that Zuck retains personal control pretty much regardless of what anyone else does with their stock.