In the autumn of 2001 Elon Musk flew to Moscow to buy a rocket. He wanted to put a greenhouse on Mars, a stunt to remind Americans that space was possible. His Russian contacts were not interested. Michael Griffin went with him, and the Russians grew less friendly with each meeting.
On the flight home Musk came to a different conclusion. He could start a company and build the cheap rockets himself.
His plan was vertical integration, cheap commercial parts and modern software habits.
He was born in Pretoria in 1971 and left South Africa for Canada as a young man, later finishing degrees in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He had already made money. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 and his share was about $22 million. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock, he received about $175.8 million as the largest shareholder.
SpaceX was founded on 14 March 2002 in El Segundo. Musk put in about $100 million. His plan was vertical integration, cheap commercial parts and modern software habits. The early hires included Tom Mueller, Gwynne Shotwell and engineers from TRW and Boeing, and Musk interviewed employees himself.
Then the rockets failed. Falcon 1 failed its first three launches, from 2006 to 2008. That nearly bankrupted the company at the very moment Tesla and SolarCity were also short of cash. Musk has called 2008 the worst year of his life. He has said in a later post that he had run out of money and only one of four launches had gotten to orbit. Accounts of how much he had left differ, so the exact figure is not clear.
The fourth launch worked, on 28 September 2008. In December, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the space station. Musk has said it saved the company from a fourth failure's consequences.
The years afterward are a ladder of firsts: Falcon 9 and Dragon in 2010, a booster that landed upright in December 2015, a reflown rocket in 2017. In January 2015 SpaceX raised $1 billion at about a $12 billion valuation and announced Starlink.
In February 2026 it acquired xAI, and on 12 June 2026 it listed on Nasdaq under SPCX. It reported $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue with a net loss of $4.9 billion. The market value read on 6 November 2026 was about $1.68 trillion.
The founder lesson is uncomfortable. SpaceX survived not because the plan was safe, but because the fourth try came just before the money ended, and a customer then showed up.