Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s first employee and an aerospace engineer, shared an early connection with Elon Musk through a mutual interest in model rockets. Speaking with Jo Ling Kent of CBS News, Mueller recounted how Musk persuaded him to leave his previous career and embark on something new and exciting with SpaceX. He described this move as one of the best decisions he had ever made.
As SpaceX prepared for its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO), Mueller praised Musk’s skills as an entrepreneur and mentor. According to Mueller, Musk excelled in finding and energizing talented individuals. Mueller expressed confidence in SpaceX’s impact on space exploration history, stating, “We believed it and we did it. So it was really cool.”
Mueller is among the many former and current SpaceX employees who hold equity in the company, which is set for a significant IPO. He highlighted the potential positive outcomes for employees, noting, “All of us are going to do great in this IPO. I mean, we’ve done great. SpaceX has been extremely successful.”
Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest person with an estimated net worth of nearly $700 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, might see this stock offering propel him to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Mueller, who led propulsion research at SpaceX and played a key role in developing the engines for the Falcon 9 rocket, spoke about the IPO as another success marker. He mentioned Musk’s goal to create a low-cost way to access space, which materialized with the Falcon 9, affirming, “It worked.”
After his tenure at SpaceX, Mueller founded Impulse Space, a startup focused on various in-space services such as delivering payloads and moving satellites. He remains a fierce advocate for space exploration, citing benefits for Earth including GPS advancements and improved weather forecasting. Mueller noted, “Space is super important — more than people realize. And I think there’s a lot of things that need to be done in space that are starting to happen now, like orbital data centers using the resources of the moon and asteroids. So I think it’s just really going to take off from here.”