Cashing in on SpaceX: 'Every chance I get, I'll sell a little more'
Following SpaceX's massive IPO on the Nasdaq, thousands of employees have seen their stock options reach significant valuations. Some long-term staff are choosing to sell their shares to diversify their wealth, while the company's market cap briefly surpassed $2 trillion.
Why it matters
The SpaceX IPO represents a historic shift in the space industry, creating a new class of tech millionaires and highlighting the financial scale of private space exploration.
Image source, Andre Lavoie By Nathalie Jimenez and Samira Hussain , Business reporter & North America business correspondent Published 14 minutes ago Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 as an engineer, designing the pressure tanks that help power its rocket. He was paid partly in stock - a common trade-off at start-ups as a hiring incentive.
Some 17 years on, those 200,000 shares he was given are worth about $23m (£17m) - and the 63-year-old says he's ready to start cashing them as soon as he can.
"Every chance I get going forward, I'll sell a little bit more," he tells the BBC.
"The shares have been going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans - you really can't know the future, so it's better to sell early and in intervals."
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