Public versus private | What does it all mean?

A private sector enterprise is meant to distinguish from organizations that serve the public good, i.e. government enterprises such as the police, the fire station, the construction of roads and bridges.

The list is getting shorter every year. For example, government used to include space exploration. Is space exploration an initiative for the public good or a private enterprise?

NASA used to be exclusively responsible for sending rockets into space for scientific research and exploration. That was partly because no private enterprise could afford such a huge expense. Furthermore, the investment was assumed to be for the public good because new science benefits us all, right?

When the government sends a vessel into space, the goal is to study the universe and add to our scientific knowledge about the universe.

Well, no longer. Now we have SpaceX launching flights into space. The motivation is unclear. It doesn't seem to be driven by science. Perhaps the goal is space tourism?

Is space tourism for the public good? Certainly not. 

Furthermore, SpaceX is not "public" in the sense of being publicly traded. So, even moreso, it does not (and is not meant to) benefit the public.

Which is what motivated me to write this post. 

A publicly traded company allows the public to weigh in on whether the companies stock price should go up or down. It's a bit like a democracy. 

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, which is publicly traded. But SpaceX is not. You might wonder why. And therein lies the rub.

What does "public" mean in these different contexts? 

It used to be that public companies had to manage their public image very carefully. One wrong move and your stock price could go plummeting down, wiping out years of hard won growth. 

A notable example is the case of United Airlines, where a viral video of a passenger being forcibly removed from a flight led to a substantial decline in their stock price due to widespread public backlash

Private companies are protected from this sort of public backlash. But they also don't get to raise money by selling their stock to the public.

However, one has to keep in mind that a public companies exposure is not quite the same as that of (say) the postal service (aka the USPS). Pretty much every adult citizen has dealt with the postal service at one point or another. Not so in the case of a publicly traded company. Only a privileged few can buy stock in a company. And it is those privileged few who control the stock price, even though we refer to the stock as being publicly traded. 

The meaning of public, then, can vary a lot depending on the context.

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