Brian Manning met SpaceX’s culture of extreme ownership dates back to day one as an engineer at the rocket maker. After a one-hour riding session ten years ago, he got his first assignment: Designing a small part the next day. “The way I look at it is to have clear responsibility, independence, and accountability,” said Manning, who oversaw the project and spent nearly two years at the company. “Instead of hiring people and telling them how to do it, they give people full ownership to make things happen.
The mission has served SpaceX and its founder and CEO Elon Musk well. No company has brought more to the space. It is also a leading satellite internet provider while achieving amazing aerospace feats, including reusing key parts of its rockets. This week, SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling shares to investors in an initial public offering. That’s about three times more than any company has brought in from an IPO.
The record IPO filing reflects investors’ excitement about SpaceX’s near-term goals such as building data centers in space and its long-term mission to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. But it also suggests a big bet on Musk and the company’s long-standing trend of extreme ownership.
Musk holds 85.1 percent of SpaceX’s voting power, and most of the company’s board members are longtime allies. The only way he can be removed as CEO is if he votes to fire himself. Some skeptical investors have criticized the provisions as “novel and extreme” because they strip shareholders of oversight and make it nearly impossible to hold Musk accountable.
But looked at another way, the management structure is the ultimate expression of the extreme ownership that took SpaceX from a few engineers in a Los Angeles warehouse in 2002 to more than 22,000 employees working at the world’s leading rocket company today. Most companies like Apple and Google hold their employees accountable, but a few people who have worked in other tech and aerospace fields besides SpaceX say the company’s approach is different.
“At SpaceX, you own a product that you’re going to bury,” said a former employee who started at the company in 2009 and spent nearly six years overseeing some of its software. “I knew if the software didn’t work, it was my biggest mistake. It allows experts to make good or bad expert decisions, and it worked most of the time.”
The developer, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive discussions, says they’ve seen Musk demonstrate this goal multiple times, including a meeting where the CEO complained about allowing an important project to run late. “We’re not going to get to Mars if this is what we’re accepting,” they recalled Musk saying belatedly. They believe that the party leaders in the room took it as not only a call to get back on track, but also to instill trust and authority instead of continuing “full micromanagement.”
Laura Crabtree, who joined SpaceX in 2009 as one of its first 600 employees and spent a decade there, believes the extreme sense of ownership came about because employees gained equity in the company—something that didn’t happen in the traditional spacesuits they came from. Being part owners made employees more invested, and that feeling continued to grow over time.
