SpaceX IPO Puts Elon Musk’s ‘Superior’ Ownership to the Test

Brian Manning met SpaceX’s culture of being very proprietary from day one as an engineer at a rocket manufacturer. After a one-hour session ten years ago, he received his first assignment: To produce a small session by the next day. Manning, who took the job and spent about two years at the company, said: “I felt like I had a clear, independent, responsible role. “Instead of hiring people and telling them how to do things, they give people full ownership to make things happen.”

This principle has served SpaceX and its cofounder and CEO Elon Musk well. No company has sent more into space. It has also become a leader in satellite communications while achieving unprecedented feats, including reusing large parts of its rockets. This week, SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling shares to investors first public offering. That’s about three times more than any company has brought in since an IPO.

The IPO filing reflects investors’ excitement about SpaceX’s near-term goals such as building a data center in space and its long-term goal of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars. But it also represents a big bet on Musk and the company’s long-standing ownership stake.

Musk owns 85.1 percent of SpaceX’s voting power, and most of the company’s board members are his longtime allies. The only way he can be removed as CEO is if he votes to remove him from office. Some investors are skeptical he has criticized this as “unusual and extreme” because it takes away the control of the shareholders and makes it impossible for Musk to answer.

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“At SpaceX, you have a graveyard,” says a former employee who started at the company in 2009 and spent six years overseeing its programs. I knew if the software programs didn’t work, then it was my fault. I let the experts make good or bad decisions, and it usually worked out well.

The source, who asked not to be named to discuss the difficult discussions, said he saw Musk make the point several times, including at a meeting where the CEO criticized him for allowing a major project to be delayed. “We’re not going to get to Mars if we accept it,” Musk recalls saying about the delay. It is believed that the group leaders in the room did not take it as a rallying cry to return, but to promote trust and authority rather than going for “total control.”

Laura Crabtree, who joined SpaceX in 2009 as one of its first 600 employees and stayed there for ten years, believes that the concept of ownership appeared because the employees received equity in the company – something that did not happen in the companies they were from. Being part of the owners made the workers more profitable, and this feeling grew over time.