"Space exploration is a fusion of infinite payoff and irresistible adventure for those willing to embrace its risks."
With many entrepreneurs, the best way to follow their success is to check the numbers — the rows on a spreadsheet, or the split of a dividend. Mark Morabito’s entrepreneurial success is colored heavily by longitude and latitude on a global map.
From his home in Vancouver, Canada, Mark Morabito specializes in identifying, funding, developing and managing business opportunities within and beyond the mining sector. And yet, even as he continues to make exciting discoveries of resource-rich deposits around the world, he has set his sights even higher: The intrepid mining explorer has a standing reservation to ride Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket into space.
Here on the surface, he has also achieved success as founder and CEO of King & Bay West, a Canadian merchant bank and technical services company. Over the course of his career, he has raised more than a billion dollars through King & Bay for an array of companies he has helmed over the years, including two that achieved listings on the NYSE.
Not surprisingly, his approach to business is bold. He is well-known for his fearless philosophy that, “It’s not about the risk — it’s about the opportunity.” Mark Morabito believes in placing savvy bets, and doubling down. And it’s worked well, at every altitude.
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Table of Contents
You’re a lawyer by training, and a mining and merchant banking entrepreneur by reputation. So how did you become fascinated by space travel?
Mark Morabito: There’s not as much of a disconnect as many would believe. Space has always fired the imaginations of risk-takers. Obviously, I don’t place myself in this same boat, but it’s really no coincidence that three of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson — also lead their own space companies. They know the risks are great, but the payoff is infinite and the adventure too tantalizing to ignore.
I’ve been fascinated by space exploration from my earliest years. I was too young to follow the race to the moon when it happened, but I’m a voracious consumer of books and documentaries about the U.S. space program, from Mercury through Apollo. I remember watching my first launch when I was six years old.
That was Apollo 17, the last flight to the moon and it was a rare night launch; I was hooked after that. Space exploration is a story of science and technology, but also risk-taking. From our 21st-century perspective, we tend to forget how dangerous those early flights were, and even forget the astronauts who did not survive.
There were so many moving parts, so many things that could go wrong; but more often than not, there was a team of cool-headed problem-solverswho stood in the breach; they represented the difference between success and failure.
Think about Neil Armstrong guiding the LEM to the surface of the moon, with a blaring fuel alarm reminding him that he had only seconds before his craft would crash into the surface. Think about the spacecraft-ground control collaboration that rescued the Apollo 13 mission. Every mission featured risk-takers and heroes, people who made history, and deserve to be remembered.
And so you became a Virgin Galactic early adopter?
Mark Morabito: Yes, I met Richard Branson at a fund raising event in 2012 and immediately jumped at the chance the very next day. I’m number 444 on a list right now, but initially there were hundreds more ahead of me.
Virgin Galactic has started opening up flights to their confirmed astronauts in waiting, just this year. The flights could happen as often as monthly after the Galactic 02 mission in the late summer.
A six person crew travels aboard a rocket propelled suborbital spaceplane that is launched from the belly of a specially designed mother ship that carries the spaceplane up to about 50,000 feet altitude before launch.
At the end of the climbing arc, we reach 80 kilometers above the surface, with a magnificent view of the Earth below and about 6 minutes of zero g experience. Space travelers say this first look at our fragile planet from such a perspective is transformative, on many levels.
Until then, you’ll be spending a lot of time focused on what’s below the surface. What is new with your global resource development enterprises?
Mark Morabito: The Intrepid Metals Corp. team is on the ground in Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, near a town that has a familiar place in history and popular culture: Tombstone.
There, we have been coordinating the assembly of a large land package for exploration and development in an area that has yielded over 8 billion pounds of copper over the decades. We’ve secured land and mineral rights to nearly 9,000 prime acres, including 1,725 acres of patented mining claims and surface rights ownership. We have named this the Corral Copper Project.
Over the years the area comprising the Corral Copper Project has yielded very promising drill results, which confirmed the existence of both carbonate replacement deposits and porphyry copper targets, but the area has never been pushed through to the development stage.
A key reason is that for a very long time, a major barrier to resource development has been the diversity of property ownership and a variety of commercial land disputes.
Traditionally, many large resource companies, like Anglo American or BHP, that have demonstrated keen interest in the area, haven’t wanted to deal with all the associated drama, because the issues between land owners were complex and the financial rewards aren’t going to show up on a balance sheet in the next quarter, or even next year.
But we’ve taken the time to understand the history of these commercial conflicts and the interests of the various land owners. We’ve also put together a team with deep local roots, which has built trust among stakeholders.
It’s paying off, with the most recent success being the acquisition of tracts from two of the largest property holders in the area, and we expect to be announcing more key acquisitions soon.
So it seems a successful mining operation is more than a numbers-crunching venture — you’ve got to know the history, the people, the major players and have a feel for the extent of the opportunity. Is that a fair statement?
Mark Morabito: Yes, and for me the historical perspective is so fascinating. You know, back in the late 1800s, ore was transported out of the copper mines on the backs of mules and burros, to feed what at the time was an emerging market — the electrification of North America.
Now things have truly come full circle: Copper is in great demand for a new type of electrification, one involving solar panels, electric vehicles and other green economy sectors. From mules to Mach-E Mustangs, we’ve come a long way.
Is this business for you, or adventure?
Mark Morabito: It’s both business and adventure, and I would even say that you need both elements to be successful in mining, and really any business.
You’ve got to know the numbers, master the data, pore over every geological chart and diagram, but there has to be something more to the experience.
Part of that is intuition — the ability to recognize that difficult situations like the one we found in southern Arizona are in fact where the opportunities lie; our efforts to remove conflict and consolidate the area under one flag will pay off. And while we do that we’re enjoying the thrill of discovery every step of the way.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Mark Morabito for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Mark Morabito or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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