Own A Piece Of The Hole.
The largest privately held hole in North America, four kilometres deep, sixteen years in the digging, with 1,247 people in it and a product line that ranges from a shower curtain to a device the Legal Department will not let us call a door. No shares are for sale. None ever will be. Read on anyway; the President wrote it and he would like it read.
A prospectus is a document in which a company describes itself to people who might buy a piece of it. This company has never been for sale and is not for sale now, so what follows is a prospectus in the older sense: a view of the thing, from a height, for the pleasure of the looking.
The Business
Aperture Science Innovators of Upper Michigan makes the finest shower curtain in the Republic and supplies it to every branch of the United States military but one. With the proceeds it operates nine test shafts in a salt mine four kilometres deep, employs 1,247 people in them, and conducts applied research in quantum tunnelling, industrial emulsions, thinking machines, lunar substrate and applied biology, none of which the competition has managed to finish.
Receipts were forty-one million dollars in fiscal 1958. Expenditure was thirty-nine. The difference was spent by March on a shaft that opened four months early. That is the business, and I would put it up against any business in the State of Michigan, and I have, at the Chamber of Commerce, and they asked me to sit down.
Why There Is No Offering
An outside shareholder is a man who owns a piece of a decision. I have been asked fourteen times to sell such a piece, by banks, by two competitors, by a syndicate in Detroit and by a gentleman from New Mexico whose letter I have framed, and I have said no fourteen times, and I am going to say why once, here, so that the fifteenth man can save his stamp.
When I decide that this company is going to spend its first quarter on a machine that makes a hole in one wall come out of another, that is what happens, and nobody sends me a memo about it. A shareholder sends memos. A shareholder wants a board. A board wants a committee. A committee is three years and a federal grant to boil water, and I have seen what that produces and it is in a cabinet on the second floor and I have read all of it twice.
No shares. Not for money, not for the Navy, not for the moon. I bought the moon with my own.
“You are asking to buy a piece of the only building in America where a man can say yes without asking anybody. I am not selling that. I am not sure it can be sold.”
Risk Factors
Legal has asked that this section be written honestly. It has been written honestly. Legal has asked that it now be removed. It has not been removed.
Factors A Prudent Investor Would Consider, If There Were An Investor
- The company is wholly dependent on the health, judgement and temper of one man.
- That man handles unshielded lunar substrate without a mask on ninety-one recorded occasions.
- The company’s largest expenditure in its history has not been explained to the auditors.
- The company’s principal facility is a hole, and the depth of the hole is disputed.
- Two chambers, two levels and 2,500 feet of tunnel appear on no drawing before 1957.
- The company owns a vessel in a dry dock it cannot locate.
- The Materials Department has set fire to its own floor nine times.
- Eleven volunteers have not returned, and the inquiries into nine of them closed the day they opened.
- Something is writing on the walls of the service corridors, and it is writing dates.
- The company’s only competitor has a federal budget and publishes four times a year.
- The company’s succession plan is a proposal with a number, and the successor has not been told.
The President has read the above and has appended, in pencil: “All true. Still not selling.”
Subscription Form — Do Not Complete
I Wish To Subscribe For ______ Shares.
- Name
- ____________________
- Amount tendered
- $____________________
- Shares available
- None
- Amount to be returned
- All of it, with a letter, by hand, from the President
Fourteen men have completed this form. Fourteen letters have been written. The letters are, the recipients report, the most courteous refusals they have ever received, and none of them has asked again.
He framed the fourteenth. It is behind his desk. He tells visitors it is a commendation from the Army. — C.
Form ASI-602. Figures are those of the annual report, ASI-601, unaudited. The risk factors above are printed at the insistence of the Office of the President and against the advice of Legal, who wrote the eleventh and would like it back.