Case Study - The SpaceX Story

To understand the power of—and sometimes the sacrifice required by—truly adopting an MTP for your company, consider the story of one of the most celebrated companies of our time: SpaceX. 

In founding SpaceX, Elon Musk’s MTP was to take humanity to Mars—and in the process, to make humanity a multi-planetary species. 

According to co-author Peter, who was friends with Elon during the early days of SpaceX, when Elon and his team finally got Falcon-1 operating (after three sequential failures), rather than continuing to sell that smaller launch vehicle, Elon decided to “burn the ship,” so to speak. He no longer pursued the sale of Falcon-1 rockets to potential customers, instead focusing 100% on the new, unproven Falcon-9 production line. Why? Because the move was more aligned with SpaceX’s MTP of making humanity multiplanetary.

Fast forward a couple of years. As Peter remembers: 

“I was in Musk’s office one day. It was a casual meeting, and Elon looked agitated, even depressed. 

“‘What’s up?’ I asked.

“He replied, ‘Well, I just figured out that I’ve got to completely reorganize SpaceX because there’s no way that the Falcon-9 is going to get us to Mars.’”

Recalls Peter: “What he meant was that the Falcon-9, even with its extraordinary success record and the reusable first stage, wasn’t sufficient to meet SpaceX’s MTP of making humanity a multiplanetary species. Soon after he realized that, Elon announced that he would shift the company’s future from the Falcon-9 to Starship. In other words, once again he was going to “burn the ship” and kill the Falcon-9 production line, the most successful rocket in human history, and instead focus all the company’s resources on Starship.

“And that is what he is doing. Burning the boats once again, he made the precipitous decision to kill the Falcon-9, sacrificing it at the altar of the Starship rocket. The lesson is: If you’re not going to constantly reinvent yourself, then someone is going to disrupt you.”

When you see something that’s not serving the MTP, kill it because you’re spending a lot of time and energy supporting something that’s not directly aligned with your broader purpose. Otherwise, you’ll waste energy, and you will never achieve your MTP.