Opinion: What does Elon Musk want? SpaceX CEO may pose a risk to national security.

SpaceX’s impressive launch capabilities – demonstrated most recently by its Falcon 9 rocket, Europa Clipper and recovery of the Starship rocket booster ‒ have become integral to supporting key objectives of the U.S. military.

The Pentagon hopes that Starshield satellites launched by SpaceX could drastically improve connectivity in remote environments. Networked satellites from Starlink ‒ a SpaceX subsidiary ‒ could help the military spot targets anywhere in the world. Falcon rockets have launched multiple U.S. Space Force missions.

But SpaceX’s growing ambitions and successes supplying both the U.S. military and intelligence agencies raise a vital question about SpaceX and its CEO: Does mercurial leadership in a company so integral to America's interests present a national security risk?

What Elon Musk wants: From the Pentagon to the 2024 election

Under Elon Musk, SpaceX has taken unpredictable actions that could impact geopolitical events, raising national security concerns that a key defense contractor could be manipulated by the impulses of its leadership.

For example, SpaceX initially made its Starlink communications available to Ukrainian forces fighting Russia but later sought to deny them access ‒ with Musk first demanding the Pentagon foot the bill and later claiming that restoring functionality might escalate the conflict into a world war.

Musk himself has sought to influence U.S. politics with a voter payment scheme that Republican former government officials are urging the Justice Department to investigate.  

Such unpredictability runs counter to how the government and key allies typically like their contractors: boring and reliable.

An unreliable vendor threatens agencies’ ability to deploy technology to deliver critical services like distributing benefits, responding to disasters or supplying military forces.

Trying to keep their vendors reliable, the U.S. government must continually assess how to quickly adopt emerging technologies while also ensuring predictability, consistency and sustainability among those contractors.

The Space Force, for example, has sought a “clean sheet” approach that weighs the speed of fielding new technologies against evolving threats ‒ against the need to ensure that those technologies are reliable and secure. 

It’s not as simple as focusing on the top of an organization, either. National security concerns about unreliable tech vendors involve not only external impact, like whether leaders’ actions destabilize allies, but should also look internally ‒ at how leadership can negatively affect an organization’s workforce. 

Former SpaceX employees' lawsuit against 'Elon's behavior'

In June, eight former SpaceX employees sued the company and its CEO, alleging that Musk personally ordered them fired after they raised concerns about sexual harassment in the workplace. Their lawsuit specifically pointed to “Elon's behavior in the public sphere (as) a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment.”

Federal regulator data suggests that SpaceX’s workplace injury rates outpace the industry average, which employees have attributed to Musk’s insistence in prioritizing speed over safety.

His other ventures tell a similar story.

Shortly after Musk bought Twitter, in 2022, his demand for staff with “extremely hardcore” work ethic tanked workforce morale. This month, just ahead of Tesla’s widely anticipated robotaxi announcement, multiple senior leaders departed, continuing what appears to be a pattern of executive churn directly under Musk.

To be sure, his companies have achieved plenty of dazzling technical feats.

Just last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang marveled that another Musk startup, xAI, set up a data center using 100,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs, the chips that power today’s artificial intelligence, in only 19 days ‒ a process that Huang estimated would typically take four years.

And SpaceX has established launch capabilities like Falcon and Falcon Heavy that thus far have not suffered any apparent drops in reliability.

In the long run, however, unhappy and unstable workforces do eventually matter. If a tech vendor can’t retain talent, it likely can’t deliver the stability that governments need. Departing employees carry with them hard-won knowledge that makes it difficult for organizations to maintain safety and reliability of technical systems ‒ and could jeopardize their continuing capacity to innovate. 

The good news is that plenty can still be done to ensure productive partnerships between government and the industries that deliver innovative, reliable technologies:

• Leaders in both government and industry should acknowledge that what’s good for workers is also good for organizations, and act accordingly ‒ ensuring a productive, safe environment that encourages commitment and helps workers produce their best work.
• Avoid overreliance on any single vendor. The federal government could incentivize productivity and reliability by continuing to invest in innovation engines such as the Defense Innovation Unit or AFWERX, both of which accelerate development of innovative technologies. Encouraging competition among existing vendors and new ones like Blue Origin and Anduril would allow the government to select among those that could reliably deliver, not be saddled to a single vendor.
• Employers ‒ both public or private ‒ should continue to explore how psychological safety and other aspects of well-being drive job satisfaction, retention and team performance. Being good to workers improves organizational performance, and it makes employers more attractive to talented applicants.
• Organizations would do well to better advertise the ways they invest in productive and secure workforces, too. This, after all, is good advertising for folks who might want to work there.

Having shown they can build ingenious technologies, SpaceX and other companies have become critical government partners. If those partnerships are to remain sustainable, both industry and government need to better understand what makes partners reliable. For any organization, that means prioritizing the health, skills and needs of its workforce.

After all, devaluing or even ignoring people’s basic needs comes at a cost ‒ not just to employees of tech companies, but to all of society.

Douglas Yeung is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.