- Tom Mueller met Elon Musk at an amateur rocket club before joining SpaceX in 2002
- Mueller led propulsion, creating engines like Merlin and Raptor for Falcon 9 and Starship
- He retired in 2020 and founded Impulse Space, now valued at $4.26 billion
He met Elon Musk at an amateur rocket club. Two decades later, Tom Mueller is a billionaire, and the man whose engines made SpaceX what it is today.
Mueller, an aerospace engineer, was hired as SpaceX employee number one in 2002 after Musk convinced him to leave a stable career for something far more uncertain.
"I met Elon through an amateur rocket club, and he convinced me to leave that career and come do something exciting, which was one of the best decisions I ever made," Mueller told CBS News.
As head of propulsion research, Mueller built the engines that defined SpaceX's commercial success, including the Merlin Engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket and the Raptor Engine that powers Starship. "Elon really wanted to make a low-cost way to get to space, which became Falcon 9... and it worked," he told the outlet.
Mueller spent 18 years at SpaceX before retiring in November 2020. He has since founded Impulse Space, a startup focused on delivering payloads in space and moving satellites between orbits, now valued at $4.26 billion.
His 0.06% stake in SpaceX, worth approximately $1.11 billion following the company's record Nasdaq debut at $150 a share, reflects both the rewards and the limits of being an early employee rather than a founder.
Musk initially funded SpaceX with approximately $100 million from the sale of PayPal and held nearly all the equity himself, with early hires receiving stock options that were progressively diluted through years of fundraising rounds and acquisitions.
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Mueller harbours no bitterness. "Elon always said that 'Your salary is one thing, but it's the equity that's gonna be worth something.' And we were all like, 'Yeah, okay someday'," he told Fox Business. "That day is here. It's great."
Ahead of the IPO, Mueller praised Musk's abilities as an entrepreneur, telling CBS that he "found good talent, and he energized good talent." He also reflected on the journey with quiet pride. "We believed it and we did it. So it was really cool," he said. "All of us are going to do great in this IPO. It's good for all the employees, and myself included."
Mueller remains a committed advocate for space exploration, telling CBS he believes orbital data centres, lunar resources, and asteroid mining represent the next frontier. "Space is super important — more than people realize... I think it's just really going to take off from here."
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