It will take more than being immensely smart to land a coveted job at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX).
The insight: “The most important characteristic to be a successful employee at SpaceX is you have to have raw innate intelligence. You don’t have to necessarily be skilled in an area because smart people will learn. And there’s a lot of people that already have skills at SpaceX that they can learn from as well,” SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a March 2024 interview with Goldman Sachs executive Susie Scher.
But those characteristics alone aren’t enough for the ideal SpaceX employee, the engineer-turned-top exec explained.
“We want every employee to act like a CEO of the company and find issues and go solve them, even if it’s not within their swim lane,” Shotwell said.
“If you’ve had success somewhere else, you will likely have success at SpaceX,” she added. “So that’s something we ask during the interviews, to tell us about a project you were really successful with.”
The public debut of Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company is expected to make history.
Quick overview: SpaceX is poised to be the largest initial public offering on record when it debuts on the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) on June 12. Current expectations are for the company to raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation.
According to the prospectus, revenue last year skyrocketed 33% year over year to $18.7 billion, fueled by a 32% surge in Starlink satellite internet sales. Starlink is a proven business that’s likely to stay strong well into the future.
But SpaceX did post a massive $4.94 billion GAAP net loss for full-year 2025 and a brutal $4.28 billion net loss in the first quarter of this year.
The primary culprit for the losses is Musk’s capital-intensive pivot into artificial intelligence infrastructure, with SpaceX throwing $40 billion annually into AI capital expenditures.
It’s unlikely the business will turn a profit for the foreseeable future.
“It’s going to be a wild one — buckle up,” Melissa Otto said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid about the SpaceX IPO.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email [email protected].
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