Via Chris Lynch, this is a very interesting post:
You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 its founders took the money, scattered, and built the next generation of digital monopolies.
Peter Thiel founded Palantir and seeded Facebook. Reid Hoffman set up LinkedIn. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm.
Elon Musk—who had merged X.com into PayPal two years earlier—went a different direction. He took his payout and leased a small warehouse in the El Segundo area of LA.
He bolted a sign on the front that read “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.”
We all know where that's gone.
Most people still think SpaceX is “just” a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk “way” of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.
After meeting dozens of SpaceX graduates in warehouses across LA, I’m convinced:
The SpaceX Mafia will create more wealth than the PayPal Mafia—possibly more than all of Silicon Valley combined.
If you can track only one alumni group in business today, this is the one. SpaceX is the new Harvard.
A hedge fund buddy of mine told me: “I’d pay real money for a database of ex-SpaceX employees.”
The article then goes on to list four companies founded by SpaceX alums - the "SpaceX Mafia" who are already solving really hard (and expensive) problems. Only two are space companies.
Highly, highly recommended.
2 comments:
There's a really good book about the early days of SpaceX, called Liftoff by Eric Berger. He's the top space writer at Ars Technica. Good sources and follows them from Silicon Valley to Kwajalein atoll where they did a lot of development. There's a more recent book called Reentry, also by Berger that I haven't read yet. And more as they extend their lead over the rest of the industry and more writers get interested.
DOGE was Elon's war band and the Deep State mostly repelled them. If there is any industry more dysfunctional and dangerous than government, I am unaware of the. More work is needed.
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