I'd like to point out that although this whole "building an actual flying saucer that breaks the laws of physics as we know them" kerfuffle is what gets all the publicity, on its website TTS provides a breakdown of how they plan to spend their money, starting at $50m, the most they were legally allowed to ask for, though apparently they hoped to raise even more. Here's the bottom end of the scale:
You will notice that if they raise $5m, and the way things are going they'll get about half of that, the only item on that list which could be interpreted as "actually building flying saucers" is the one second from bottom, which includes the words "research to benefit the public". It's true that $1.5m is earmarked for "acquisitions or strategic partnerships in the Aerospace and Science Divisions", but this seems to mean hiring people who know how to build spacecraft that use conventional technology and thus might actually work.
So he's only allocating a measly $75k, or 1.5% of the total sum raised (if he'd raised more starting capital, the proportion he planned to spend on these things would have been no more than 2% of the gross, no matter how large it was) to this harebrained scheme, and even that amount is shared among a ragbag of other worthy causes, such as "science and art education", whatever that may be, and donations to charities for war veterans. It looks as though he plans to spend more on comic books than he does on starships.
By the way, in case you're wondering, Our Two Dogs, Inc. is a company owned by Tom DeLonge and registered as a hot dog stand, at whose listed street address there is nothing resembling a fast food joint at all. Curiouser and curiouser!
Oh, one other thing. Since the absolute minimum TTS required to commence operations was $1m, if it hadn't raised even that much (and remember, $1m is only 2% of what they were hoping to get), those few unlucky investors would have been guaranteed a return of absolutely nothing. Bearing this in mind, a graph of how the number of investors and the amount invested rose over time would be interesting, if anybody has the figures and can be bothered to plot the graph.
Here's why. As soon as the fundraiser was launched, there was a flurry of investment from the faithful who were always going to buy shares at the first opportunity, but it very quickly tailed off, ands within a few days it had stuck at about $500k, and was rising so painfully slowly that it was obviously never going to get anywhere near that magic figure of $1m. Then, two weeks in, something odd happened. Literally overnight, although the number of investors hadn't risen dramatically, the cash total had trebled! It almost looked like
somebody added $1m to the pot just when Tom needed that to happen so he wouldn't lose face.
The fact that the company would now at least attempt to do something and return on investments was no longer automatically going to be zero led to another flurry of investing almost identical to the one right at the start, and tapered off in an identical way, with about twice the previous number of shareholders and about $2m, or about twice what they had before, not counting that mysterious million. Since when both figures have continued to climb ever so slowly, even after the release of those long-awaited and inevitably underwhelming videos.
So it looks very much as though TTS not only had to borrow $600k from its own CEO through a shell company with a silly name disguised as an invisible burger joint (which the investors are going to have to pay him back, in addition to the $100k he's contractually guaranteed every year for the use of his name and music, which everybody knows they need to make spaceships with), he also had to buy almost half the shares so far sold to prevent an embarrassing failure before he's even started. Does anyone have a list of who invested how much and when? Because given Tom's extremely juvenile sense of humour (the company is called TTS AAS for crying out loud!), I bet there's a cluster of people suddenly investing far more than anybody else all at the same time who have names like Hugh Janus and Ivor Woody.