LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyBrian 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.
Crabtree, who is CEO of manufacturing software developer Epsilon3, says she regularly talks to recent university graduates who are interviewing or starting at SpaceX. “They are given big responsibilities and shoes to fill, and that’s why people want to flock to a place like SpaceX,” she says. “You don’t have to gain trust. You’re given trust and a chance to prove it.”
Current SpaceX job postings call for engineering hires to “demonstrate extreme ownership … from concept to delivery.” The company also incorporates the idea through the informal title of “responsible engineer,” which is mentioned in job ads. “Responsible engineers own their failures and work with the people they need to work with to find solutions,” says Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s first employee and CEO of the spacecraft developer Impulse.
At SpaceX, ultimately, Musk makes the big decisions and course corrects when necessary, and everyone else falls in line to carry out his directives, Crabtree says. “That’s always how the company’s been run,” she adds. “And he wants to keep it that way after going public.”
SpaceX has big challenges ahead. Its purchase of Musk’s money-losing AI research lab xAI has made the overall company unprofitable. Its dreams of reaching Mars require a more powerful rocket, which SpaceX has yet to reliably operate. And the potential for greater competition and thornier government regulation will always be on the horizon.
If anything trips up SpaceX, extreme ownership means Musk will likely only have himself to blame. The country’s biggest public pension funds urged Musk to surrender some of his control ahead of the IPO; it didn’t happen.
“If you believe in free and fair markets, the will of the people should matter,” says Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University and author of The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power. “The concentration of power is saying they know better than public markets.”
More companies that mimic SpaceX values and culture are beginning to emerge. Dozens of former SpaceX employees have founded startups. Manning, the ex-engineer, is now the CEO of satellite company Xona Space Systems. “Extreme ownership” isn’t written on the walls or in training materials, but it’s captured by company values such as responsibility and ambition, he says. “We’re hiring smart people so they can tell us how it should be done and have accountability.” In the coming years, Musk, SpaceX, and its diaspora will show how far that mindset can stretch.
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