A former SpaceX and Starlink manager is revealing how his previous boss, Elon Musk, isn’t afraid to get into the trenches to learn everything about his companies top to bottom, while keeping his priority of being the ultimate problem-solver.
“Working at SpaceX was one of the most, I would say, eye-opening experiences that I’ve had in my professional career,” Vincent Peters – now the CEO of Inheritance AI – said on “The Bottom Line,” Monday.
“You have someone like Elon Musk who is this… industrialist for this generation,” Peters continued, “and he creates an environment where those folks who work for him, he has ultimate trust in them, and he trusts them until he loses trust in their ability to be able to do their jobs.”
Peters attended West Point before earning graduate certificates at Oxford University and MIT, and also held positions in banking and as a government contractor, according to his website. He joined SpaceX in 2018, where he worked for more than three years as an information compliance and assurance manager.
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Musk is “definitely not a micromanager,” according to his former employee, and believes in core business principles like understanding what his workers “need to do” and addressing conflicts from “a fundamental standpoint.”
This week, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) received some criticism after sending an email memo to all federal employees titled, “What did you do last week?” and calling on them to submit five bullet points detailing their accomplishments over the past week, or face possible termination.
“I think if you look at Elon’s track record at both Tesla, when they were having financial issues, and SpaceX… they went through a bit of restructuring and laid some people off as soon as I got there,” Peters pointed out. “I’ve not seen him back down at Tesla or SpaceX. And I don’t expect [him] to back down on this stage, especially when the future of a nation is on the line.”
Musk’s DOGE is in the midst of auditing various federal agencies in search of wasteful spending, corruption and mismanagement. As directed by President Donald Trump, the federal workforce was ordered to return to the office after five years of remote work stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, and has vowed to clean house of bad actors within the government and ax overspending.
“If you’re going to run it from a business perspective, you have some of the best people in the history of business there, helping to solve the country’s problems,” Peters said.
“SpaceX is a government contractor as well. We are fiduciaries of the American taxpayer’s dollars… No other companies are working in that way. So that type of innovation that was applied to SpaceX, that type of innovation that was applied to electric vehicles, is that same type of innovation that is going to help America, right the ship and right the path that we’re on right now.”
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Fox News’ Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
