Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 as an engineer, designing the pressure tanks that help power its rocket. He was paid partly in stock, a common trade-off at start-ups as a hiring incentive, and some 17 years on, those 200,000 shares are worth about $23m (£17m). The 63-year-old says he is ready to start cashing them in as soon as he can.
“Every chance I get going forward, I'll sell a little bit more,”he tells the BBC.
“The shares have been going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans - you really can't know the future, so it's better to sell early and in intervals.”
Lavoie is far from the only SpaceX worker to have seen the value of a stake rise over the years. The company's founder, Elon Musk, said on Fox News that SpaceX's listing on the stock market in June had likely made “several thousand” employees millionaires, including staff “who were working on the production line”. According to reports, an estimated 4,400 new millionaires were created by the listing.
Unlike most newly listed firms, SpaceX shares are being released in stages: the first 20% on 6 August, with more due in batches through the rest of the year. Whether shareholders choose to sell at the first opportunity is an individual decision. Unlike Lavoie, some may hold on to their shares in the hope of larger gains later.
What happened when SpaceX listed?
SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June in the biggest initial public offering in history, valuing the rocket and satellite firm at more than $2 trillion. It briefly made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, before the stock cooled and his fortune slipped back below the milestone within weeks.
In its first results as a public company this week, the firm's quarterly revenue was shown to have nearly doubled to $7.8bn (£5.8bn) from a year earlier, while its spending ballooned to $18.3bn, more than six times what it was a year ago. Overall, SpaceX made a net loss of $143m in the three months to June, and a loss of $2bn during the first six months of the year.
Musk pushed back against sceptics on an earnings call:
“I think people are really underestimating Starlink”.
He predicted the satellite internet service, the one part of the company that is currently making a profit, could one day deliver a majority of the world's internet.
Shares in the company tumbled after the earnings report, with investors generally spooked by the huge amounts of money being spent on AI.
What will Lavoie do with the money?
Lavoie plans to use money from selling some of his shares to fund a hotel he is renovating in Pontebba, in Italy's northeastern Friuli region, plus a small brewery. He says his priority for the future is raising awareness of air pollution in the area, in partnership with a local environmental group.
Before he was hired, Lavoie was interviewed by Musk himself.
“He's a very charming person when he wants something,”Lavoie says.
He would not be drawn on Musk's politics -
“that's his business”- but is unreserved about the company:
“I've always been happily supportive and impressed, and would work hard with those incredible people again.”
Why are some analysts warning about SpaceX?
Some analysts value SpaceX at less than half its current stock market price, warning that its ties to xAI carry real financial risk. That is part of a broader worry on Wall Street that sky-high valuations for AI-linked firms, including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, could prove overdone.
Sinead O'Sullivan, an economist who has previously worked for Nasa, told the BBC in June she thinks SpaceX is an
“Elon Musk ego project”.
“You're buying a share of the Elon Musk brand more than any kind of space industry,”she said.
Ron Epstein, an aerospace analyst at Bank of America Securities, says the recent share price swings say more about the market than the company.
“A lot of it has to do with macro trends,”he says.
“None of it really has anything to do with what's going on fundamentally at the company.”
He says investors judging SpaceX purely as an AI bet are missing the point:
“They're not just a compute provider. They're not just an AI company. It's a far more complicated picture than that.”
SpaceX, he adds, has cut the cost of reaching orbit from around $10,000-$20,000 a kilogram to about $2,000 with its Falcon 9 rocket -
“they have built a railroad to space.”
Lavoie, for his part, is not rattled. He says:
“The solid business model of SpaceX will prove itself to be worth the investment,”
even as he takes some of his own winnings off the table.
Key Facts
- Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 and received 200,000 shares as part of his pay.
- Those shares are now worth about $23m (£17m), according to the article.
- SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June in the biggest IPO in history, valuing it at more than $2 trillion.
- The company reported quarterly revenue of $7.8bn and a net loss of $143m in the three months to June.
- Shares are being released in stages, starting with 20% on 6 August.
