Pain, suffering, and survival 6 страница

Just as it did in the early days, SpaceX continues to experiment with these new vehicles during actual launches in ways that other companies would dare not do. SpaceX will often announce that it’s trying out a new engine or its landing legs and place the emphasis on that one upgrade in the marketing material leading up to a launch. It’s common, though, for SpaceX to test out a dozen other objectives in secret during a mission. Musk essentially asks employees to do the impossible on top of the impossible. One former SpaceX executive described the working atmosphere as a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope. “It’s like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas,” this executive said. “They will work on the car for a year and test all of its parts. Then, when they set off for New York after that year, all of the vice presidents think privately that the car will be lucky to get to Las Vegas. What ends up happening is that the car gets to New Mexico—twice as far as they ever expected—and Elon is still mad. He gets twice as much as anyone else out of people.”

There’s a degree to which it’s just never enough for Musk, no matter what it is. Case in point: the December 2010 launch in which SpaceX got the Dragon capsule to orbit Earth and return successfully. This had been one of the company’s great achievements, and people had worked tirelessly for months, if not years. The launch had taken place on December 8, and SpaceX had a Christmas party on December 16. About ninety minutes before the party started, Musk had called his top executives to SpaceX for a meeting. Six of them, including Mueller, were decked out in party attire and ready to celebrate the holidays and SpaceX’s historic achievement around Dragon. Musk laid into them for about an hour because the truss structure for a future rocket was running behind schedule. “Their wives were sitting three cubes over waiting for the berating to end,” Brogan said. Other examples of similar behavior have cropped up from time to time. Musk, for example, rewarded a group of thirty employees who had pulled off a tough project for NASA with bonuses that consisted of additional stock option grants. Many of the employees, seeking instant, more tangible gratification, demanded cash. “He chided us for not valuing the stock,” Drew Eldeen, a former engineer, said. “He said, ‘In the long run, this is worth a lot more than a thousand dollars in cash.’ He wasn’t screaming or anything like that, but he seemed disappointed in us. It was hard to hear that.”

The lingering question for many SpaceX employees is when exactly they will see a big reward for all their work. SpaceX’s staff is paid well but by no means exorbitantly. Many of them expect to make their money when SpaceX files for an initial public offering. The thing is that Musk does not want to go public anytime soon, and understandably so. It’s a bit hard to explain the whole Mars thing to investors, when it’s unclear what the business model around starting a colony on another planet will be. When the employees heard Musk say that an IPO was years away and would not occur until the Mars mission looked more secure, they started to grumble, and when Musk found out, he addressed all of SpaceX in an e-mail that is a fantastic window into his thinking and how it differs from almost every other CEO’s. (The full e-mail appears in Appendix 3.)

June 7, 2013

Going Public

Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure. This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission.

Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.

For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market.

Elon

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