Scott Morton grew up in Wisconsin. He wasn’t tracking Wall Street.
“My family was not super financially literate,” he said. “I didn’t hear about the stock market growing up.”
Now, the money managers have found him.
Morton, the founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based software company Revel, said he has been getting the hard pitch from wealth managers eager to court him ahead of SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. In the past couple of months, a prominent firm sent a handwritten letter to his home asking to represent him, while another sent swag and a backpack. More have slid into his LinkedIn DMs.
The wooing attempts are all because he worked at SpaceX for nearly a decade.
Morton — who started as a SpaceX intern before rising to a software engineering manager on its Starship spacecraft project — is part of a class of current and former workers at Elon Musk’s rocket company who were paid partly in equity.
That equity is now a hot commodity. SpaceX went public Friday in the largest IPO in history, with its valuation surging above $2 trillion in early trading.
“It’s a tremendous outcome, specifically for all of the engineers, technicians, and even the baristas,” he told Business Insider before the IPO. “Now all of the hard work is going to pay off for a lot of people.”
IPOs and their mafia-making influence
There is power in being early to a company.
Famously, David Choe, a graffiti artist commissioned in 2005 by Facebook to paint murals at its headquarters, asked to be paid in stock instead of the $60,000 he was offered for the job. When the company went public years later, those shares were valued at $200 million, CNBC reported.
PayPal created its own mythology. The company’s 2002 IPO and eventual $1.5 billion sale to eBay helped launch the careers of tech power players now known as the PayPal mafia, including Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks.
Morton said SpaceX is generating a similar movement among former staff, who are using their money, experience, and networks to build companies of their own.
“It’s already happening,” he said. “The mafia is already there.”
Fast cars, financial freedom, shooting stars
IPO
Morton said he still holds SpaceX stock. He said he previously sold some through SpaceX-organized secondary sales, but retained as much as he could. He declined to discuss the specific size of his potential payday.
Other former SpaceX employees have been joking about early plans for their newfound cash, Morton said, including “fast cars” and what the IPO could mean for the Los Angeles high-end housing market.
Morton said he hadn’t planned any large celebration for IPO day. He has been too focused on his own startup, he said.
Revel builds software for controlling and testing hardware — the kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure used in rocket engine test sites, nuclear reactors, industrial systems, and other places where tech and the physical world collide. The company said in February that it had raised $150 million in Series B funding.
Morton said the SpaceX IPO could also give companies like his a halo effect: more attention on hard tech, more investor interest, and more credibility for startups founded by SpaceX alums.
Still, he said he does not expect the IPO to trigger a mass exodus from SpaceX. Many employees he’s kept in touch with remain committed to the company’s mission — especially the goal of establishing a moon base, he said.
For former employees, the IPO is an opportunity to go on a bit of a spending spree.
“It generically sets people up to have financial freedom,” he said. “People will feel like they have the buffer they need to do something adventurous.”
For the ones like Morton, they’ll have a wealth-manager-branded backpack to take on that adventure.
