Beyond space
Across the deep well of companies founded by SpaceX alums, you’ll notice that many are tackling problems that to a nonexpert might seem to teeter along the edge of what’s currently imaginable. There’s Airhart Aeronautics, cofounded and led by Nikita Ermoshkin, a former SpaceX avionics systems and integration engineer, which is building personal airplanes designed with a simple control panel that (the hope is) anyone, basically, could fly. At SpaceX, Jaret Matthews was a mechanism group leader for the Dragon spacecraft. His company, Astrolab, is currently developing commercial planetary rovers that could soon land on the moon, and one day traverse the Martian surface.
Notably, most SpaceX alumni founders don’t stay in the space industry. Only about 17% of them are now pursuing opportunities there.
Still, lessons carry over. Tamir Blum, a SpaceX alum who designs vehicles for agriculture through his company Kisui, notes that, like space vehicles, farming rovers also have to navigate difficult and “unpredictable” environments.
Blum is an exemplar of how even more Earthbound founders tend to remain focused on challenges rooted in the physical world, devoting their efforts to remaking agriculture, construction and housing, energy, manufacturing, and transportation. Some also focus on defense applications and weapons development, and seek to follow in SpaceX’s footsteps of capitalizing, sometimes heavily, on U.S. government contracts.
Many of the companies have clustered around where these employees used to work. Until 2024, SpaceX headquarters was in Hawthorne, California, south of Los Angeles. (Its Falcon mission control is still located there.) In the process, they’re creating a new industrial sector for the United States. See our map above to explore where.
This focus on manufacturing is also notable because hard-tech startups tend to require far more startup capital than simpler software-based businesses. It’s far easier to spin up an enterprise software company than it is to, say, build a factory and produce real hardware that works (and passes safety certifications). Even many of the enterprise software companies founded by SpaceX alums remain in the orbit of fabrication and hardware engineering issues. These include startups working on AI-enabled chip design (Bronco AI) and workforce agents designed for engineering teams (Navier AI).
First principles, then scale
Want to solve a big problem? Start by breaking it down into smaller pieces, until you’re down to the core components. Sure, a rocket is made of engines and fuel tanks, but if you think more deeply, it’s actually made of raw materials.
This is the first principles approach that’s integral to SpaceX’s pedagogy. In the SpaceX mindset, fixing a problem begins with reducing it to its simplest constituent elements, not making piecemeal or marginal improvements to whatever solutions currently exist.
This approach has plenty of corollaries. One is the “idiot index,” a Musk idiom meant to explain how much an industry might be paying (in his view, overpaying) for turning core materials into a finished project. Another sequela: Question everything, including supervisors and requirements.
The motive, ex-SpaceX employees explain, is to disrupt the normal way of doing things so that you have a far more creative source for innovative answers to problems. As a result of this kind of approach, NASA says the cost of sending a kilogram of payload to low-Earth orbit has dropped from about $55,000—on the space agency’s Shuttle—to less than $3,000.
“Nobody’s really going to stop you if you want to try things,” says Karthik Gollapudi, who worked as a Dragon flight software lead before starting Sift, a company that develops software for vehicle telemetry. “Try a lot of different things and learn really quickly, as opposed to being very slow and methodical. Sometimes you iterate your way to success faster.”
Interns Welcome: 94 former SpaceX interns have gone on to found a startup. Of those, 15 did two internships, and one person (Haley Weinstein) is a three-time intern.
The relentless push to question requirements (and the expertise of longtime aerospace institutions) could come with downsides, says Scarlett Koller, who worked as a certification engineer on life control systems before eventually creating Mithril, a startup that designs antenna technology for space. “SpaceX always has a massive chip on their shoulder, about [how we] all don’t get caught up in requirements, and we’re not like traditional aerospace,” she tells me. “There was a lot of dismissing of expertise, especially if it came from a source that was perceived as slow or outdated.”
Still, many people have joined SpaceX after working at NASA or Boeing and Northrop Grumman, traditional space and defense firms. These include some of SpaceX’s best-known alumni, such as Laura Crabtree (cofounder and CEO of Epsilon3), Brogan BamBrogan and Jeff Overbeek (founders of Ethos Space), and Tom Mueller (SpaceX’s first employee and founder of Impulse Space).
Betting on young people
One way SpaceX avoids employees with preconceived notions is to “hire a lot of interns, a lot of young folks,” says Sift’s Gollapudi.
What’s so special about a SpaceX internship? First, to get one often requires undergoing the same interview process as those conducted for full-time positions. (Want a sense of what a SpaceX interview is like? Check out Snubber, founded by former SpaceX intern and employee Arpita Bhutani, a practice platform for getting highly technical jobs at SpaceX, Anduril, and other hard tech companies.)
Interns are also given real work to do. It is neither menial scut work nor a glorified summer camp like internships in some white-collar career tracks. Gollapudi’s cofounder, Austin Spiegel, worked on SpaceX’s proprietary enterprise resource planning system as an intern. Lewis Jones, cofounder of Cosmic Robotics, was an avionics mechanical design engineer during his internship. And so it goes.
The benefits are mutual: A SpaceX internship can prove transformational in changing the trajectory of a career.
Michelle Lee originally thought she would pursue a career in chemical engineering, but after interning at SpaceX in 2015, where she focused on vehicle engineering, she realized she wanted to build for the physical world—and take on a far more enterprising challenge. “If you have an incredibly ambitious mission, like, ‘We’re going to colonize Mars,’ and you get a group of very smart people together, you basically can bend reality,” she tells me.
Lee is now trying to bend reality in her own way as founder and CEO of Medra, which aims to scale the production of scientific research, and new discoveries, through artificial intelligence. Her idea: You can accelerate the pace of research by automating one of the fundamental inputs—lab work—with robotics.
Fast Company ultimately identified 94 former interns who have gone on to found companies, 33 of whom first worked at SpaceX full-time.
Vertical integration, horizontal organization, infinite expansion
The people who succeed at SpaceX, whether they started working there while still teenagers or after a career at Boeing, are experts at identifying chokepoints in a process, solving them, and therefore accelerating development. “We didn’t accept the status quo in manufacturing,” says Jordan Black, who worked at SpaceX from 2018 to 2023. During his final years there, he focused on vehicle components, where “one of the biggest blockers was how quickly we could design or manufacture wire harnesses, whether internally or with external partners. . . . It made me question who was solving this problem.”
When he realized that no one was, Black started Senra Systems with fellow alum Benjamin Shanahan to develop better wire harnessing, a component used in everything from cars to rocket ships, to enable hardware to be built more quickly. In January, Black, who’s CEO, announced that Senra is expanding significantly, opening an 80,000-square-foot factory in Cypress, California, a 5x increase in its production footprint.
Indeed, a significant subset of companies founded by former SpaceX employees are focusing on rebuilding components, including radars, antennae, and other satellite parts, that choke up manufacturing and aerospace supply chains. Consider Benassi’s Apex, which now has a factory in Southern California devoted to building satellite buses along a slick production line, similar to SpaceX’s own approach to rocket assembly.
“The more twists and turns you have to take, the harder it is, right?” says Benassi, who serves as CTO. “Imagine going through a maze versus if you were just walking a straight line. That’s about as simple as it gets, as fast as it gets.”
To manufacture and improve at scale, Apex places heavy emphasis on vertical integration, including making critical components like batteries and power systems in-house. A preference for vertical integration has long been linked to SpaceX, but also hastened by consolidation trends in the aerospace industry and declining demand for aerospace defense spending after the Cold War.
Converting doubt into fuel
Contravening convention inevitably attracts guffaws from rivals and the media and draws ire from regulators, which helps SpaceX employees build what they describe as, essentially, a high tolerance for haters. “It was just a constant stream of negativity from the rest of the U.S. space industry, the Russians [were] making fun of us constantly. . . . It just felt like the world was against us,” says Reliable Robotics’s Rose, who started at SpaceX in 2009.
So when the Falcon 9 became the first orbital-class rocket booster ever to land vertically in 2015, he recalls an “Oh my god kind of sensation, this weird, euphoric feeling that we can do anything.”
At Reliable Robotics, Rose has been emboldened to pursue the daring and futuristic goal of developing autonomous, remotely operated aircraft. “We have an entire aviation industry that thinks what we’re doing is either totally impossible, never going to get certified, [or that] nobody’s going to buy it,” he says. “Pilots aren’t going to allow it. Everybody’s going to fight against it.” Because of his experience, he says, he’s “able to quickly switch that off. Like, this isn’t helpful.”
Extreme SpaceX values
Tyler Habowski is working on the problem of mimicking human hands at his startup Kyber Labs, a sort of final frontier of manufacturing dexterity. He recalls, as a child, hearing his parents, who both worked at Boeing, complaining about how other divisions were creating problems for their respective teams. He juxtaposes this mentality to the attitude at SpaceX, where he worked for five years as a mechanical design engineer. “If you’re a responsible engineer, you’re not just responsible for your part, you’re responsible for the entire thing,” he explains.
While SpaceX believes in the principle of “extreme ownership” (a trait it shares with its fellow founder factory Palantir), it’s not to the exclusion of how one team’s work depends on, and integrates with, whatever other teams are working on. That means asking better questions of the teams working adjacent to you, being prepared for failure, and integrating conservatism into your expectations.
The five most notable SpaceX feeder colleges: California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, Colorado School of Mines, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Harvey Mudd College, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Another SpaceX value that alums say they bring to future organizations is to learn as much as possible from the experiments you conduct. This comes with an emphasis on understanding how systems might work in real-world conditions, as soon as possible. “The pace of execution—build, test, improve—and the willingness to take on extremely difficult engineering challenges had a lasting impact,” says Kisui’s Blum.
He says Kisui has worked on more than 10 different versions of its farming rover, Adam, over the course of three years in pursuit of strong off-road performance. In a similar vein, Apex’s Benassi says his company tests hardware performance on-site, particularly final mechanical vibration testing, to support vertical integration.
When Habowski pitches investors on Kyber, he says he’s distilled what his company has taken from SpaceX as part of his slide deck, including:
- “mission clarity”
- “scrappy innovation”
- “vertical integration”
Medra’s Lee has also delineated her company’s values, and she acknowledges that such principles as “why not faster” and “challenge all constraints (except physics)” come directly from what she learned at SpaceX.
The value of the SpaceX badge
Another way in which the SpaceX method of thinking and doing will ripple through the economy is via investors, some of whom are also SpaceX alums. After all, they’ve seen up close how transformative working there can be. Interlagos, founded by Achal Upadhyaya and Tom Ochinero, places a heavy emphasis on manufacturing and science-focused businesses. Among the alum-led companies Interlagos has invested in are Benassi’s Apex and Reed Ginsberg’s Shinkei, a novel robotics company that enables fishermen to kill their catch at sea and preserve peak freshness.
Innovation Endeavors, while not founded by SpaceX alums, hosts meetups with people who worked at the company and are now building their own. Cantos Ventures is another firm early to the potential in ex-SpaceX enterprises, backing not only Shinkei but also the nuclear reactor startup Radiant, founded by Doug Bernauer, and the hypersonic weapons manufacturer Castelion, started by three alums: Bryon Hargis, Sean Pitt, and Andrew Kreitz.
Recruiters are another vector by which the SpaceX ethos is spreading. Half a dozen former SpaceX employees, most of whom worked in technical recruiting while there, have set up shop to help companies find and vet high-caliber talent.
Yet having SpaceX on your résumé is not yet a surefire path to being funded for your next venture. Although one website tracking SpaceX-led ventures, Alumni Founders, calculates that SpaceX graduates have raised nearly $12 billion in total, founders are mixed as to its current value.
Sift’s Gollapudi, who has raised $67 million to date, per PitchBook, notes that the SpaceX mentality can sometimes be an acquired taste for investors. “A lot of venture capital tends to be very pattern-matching oriented,” he argues. “First principles thinking isn’t always pattern-matching . . . it’s more about how to get to the goal the fastest.”
Alums say that working at SpaceX means having the ego beaten out of you, because there’s always someone smarter than you, humbling you, in the room. They often describe the company culture as “logic first,” a principle that shapes how employees talk to each other: Ideas matter more than titles, and criticisms come before compliments.
Conversely, Kyber’s Habowski, who’s raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, says he’s been encouraged to emphasize his SpaceX credentials far earlier in his pitch deck.
With SpaceX’s public offering on the near horizon, there’s a strong likelihood that the wealth it creates will give many more SpaceX employees the ability to pursue their own startups (and invest in their fellow alumni’s ideas). It will also give the hundreds of companies currently run by former SpaceX employees the opportunity to prove that their fantastical efforts are, in fact, plausible.
“Time is like the great equalizer in that case,” Gollapudi notes. “All these X-basis companies, you see them compounding, and maybe they aren’t as hyped out of the gate, but they compound, and in the long term, they’re in a much better place.”
—Additional research by David Lidsky
