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

Brian Manning encountered SpaceX’s culture of extreme ownership from day one as an engineer at the rocket maker. After a one-hour onboarding session a decade ago, he got his first assignment: Design a small part by the next day. “The way I looked at it is having very clear responsibility, autonomy, and accountability,” says Manning, who aced the task and spent about two years at the company. “Rather than hiring people and telling them how to do it, they give people full ownership to make things happen.”

The principle has served SpaceX and its cofounder and CEO Elon Musk well. No company has delivered more to space. It’s also become the leading satellite internet provider while achieving once unthinkable aeronautical 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 nearly three times more than any company has brought in from an IPO.

The record IPO haul reflects investor excitement for SpaceX’s near-term goals such as building data centers in space and its long-term mission of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars. But it also suggests a big bet on Musk and the company’s longstanding ethos of extreme ownership.

Musk holds 85.1 percent of the voting power of SpaceX, and most of the company’s board members are his long-time allies. The only way he can be removed as CEO is if he votes to fire himself. Some skeptical investors have slammed these provisions as “novel and extreme” because they strip shareholders of oversight and make it nearly impossible to hold Musk accountable.

But taken another way, the governance structure is the ultimate expression of the extreme ownership mantra that has taken SpaceX from a handful of engineers in a Los Angeles–area warehouse in 2002 to over 22,000 employees staffing the world’s most dominant rocket company today. Many companies such as Apple and Google imbue their workers with significant responsibility, but several people who have worked at other tech and aerospace ventures in addition to SpaceX say the company’s approach is something more.

“At SpaceX, you really own a product cradle to grave,” says a former employee who started at the company in 2009 and spent about six years overseeing some of its software. “I knew if software didn’t work, it was my own damn fault. It’s letting experts make expert decisions for good or for worse, and it worked out most of the time.”

The engineer, who requested anonymity to recount sensitive discussions, says they saw Musk demonstrate the principle on many occasions, including a meeting during which the CEO teared up for having allowed a key project to run significantly behind schedule. “We’re never going to get to Mars if this is what we accept,” they recall Musk saying about the delay. They believe the team leaders in the room took it as not just a rallying cry to get back on track, but also an instillment of trust and authority instead of going “full-on micromanagement.”

Laura Crabtree, who joined SpaceX in 2009 as one of its first 600 employees and spent a decade there, believes the extreme ownership concept emerged because hires received equity in the company—which hadn’t happened at the traditional aerospace firms they’d come from. Being part owner made employees more invested, and that feeling kept proliferating over time.