He met Brian Manning SpaceX’s culture of extreme ownership from his first day as an engineer at the rocket manufacturer. Ten years ago, after an hour-long introductory session, he was given his first assignment: to design a miniature part for the next day. “I look at it from a very clear point of view: responsibility, autonomy and accountability,” says Manning, who rose to the challenge and spent about two years at the company. “Instead of hiring people and telling them how to do it, they give them full responsibility for what happens.”
This rule has served SpaceX and its co-founder and CEO Elon Musk well. No company has delivered more to space. It also became a leading provider of satellite Internet, 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 almost three times more than any company earned on IPO.
The record number of IPOs reflects investor excitement about SpaceX’s short-term goals, such as building data centers in space and its long-term mission to establish a eternal human settlement on Mars. But it also suggests a hefty bet on Musk and the company’s long-standing ethos of extreme ownership.
Musk holds 85.1 percent of the voting power in SpaceX, 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 fire himself. Some skeptical investors blasted the regulations as “novel and extreme” because they strip shareholders of oversight and make it nearly impossible to hold Musk accountable.
But viewed another way, the management 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 the more than 22,000 employees now employed by the world’s most dominant rocket company. Many companies, such as Apple and Google, give their employees significant responsibility, but several people who have worked at other technology and aerospace ventures in addition to SpaceX say the company’s approach is about more than that.
“At SpaceX, you really have the product from cradle to grave,” says a former employee who started at the company in 2009 and spent about six years overseeing some of the software. “I knew that if the software didn’t work, it was my damn fault. It allowed experts to make expert decisions for better or for worse, and most of the time it worked.”
The engineer, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions, says he has seen Musk demonstrate this principle on numerous occasions, including during meetings in which the CEO cried because he allowed a key project to proceed significantly behind schedule. “We will never get to Mars if we accept this,” they recall Musk saying about the delay. They believe that the team leaders in the room took it not only as a call to get back on track, but also as instilling trust and authority instead of a shift to “full micromanagement.”
Laura Crabtree, who joined SpaceX in 2009 as one of the first 600 employees and spent a decade there, believes the concept of extreme ownership emerged because employees were given equity in the company – which was not the case at the customary aerospace companies from which they came. Being a co-owner made employees more invested, and this feeling grew over time.