# "To be honest, I thought the odds of SpaceX succeeding early on were less than 10%. But if no new corporations take on the space industry, humanity will never evolve into a true spacefaring civilization." On June 12 (local time), Elon Musk, chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of SpaceX, which listed on the U.S. Nasdaq after raising a record $75 billion (about 114 trillion won) in initial public offering (IPO) funds, said at a ceremony words that show Musk's leadership, represented more by a messianic mission than revenue chasing.
# When Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, existing aerospace corporations dismissed it as an impossible business because of the enormous rocket manufacturing expense. But he executed first-principles thinking that reexamines everything except the laws of physics. After personally calculating the raw material cost structure for rocket-grade carbon fiber, titanium, and more, he confirmed that manufacturing costs were only about 2% of prevailing market prices, and he immediately pushed in-house component production and vertical integration. He began to walk a path differentiated from traditional aerospace corporations. In 2008, when the first launch vehicle Falcon 1 failed three times in a row and SpaceX was on the brink of bankruptcy, Musk poured everything into a fourth launch by gathering his personal asset of $100 million (about 150 billion won) accumulated from the sale of PayPal and even money borrowed from acquaintances. With that attempt's success, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion (about 2.46 trillion won) contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), opening the era of full-fledged private spaceflight. It is Musk's rule-breaking, disruptive leadership.
With SpaceX's listing, Musk's leadership, which made him the first trillionaire in human history, is in the spotlight. SpaceX's corporate value, which was about $137 billion (about 211 trillion won) in early 2023, soared to $1.25 trillion (about 1,927 trillion won) through continued tender offers and a merger with AI startup xAI in Feb. 2026, and conquered the $2 trillion (about 3,000 trillion won) mark upon listing. With the listing, Musk's personal asset exceeded $1.1 trillion, ranking No. 1 in the world with more than the combined assets of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, and Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway chairman. In the electric vehicle market, Tesla showed its mettle by recapturing the No. 1 spot with a 12.9% share in the first quarter of 2026, ahead of China's BYD (10.9%).
In front of the unprecedented milestone of simultaneously controlling two trillion-dollar listed corporations—Tesla, the No. 1 electric vehicle corporation, and SpaceX, the king of the space industry—the global management academy is debating Musk's distinctive leadership. On one hand, Musk is called a genius symbolizing leadership armed with a bold vision, a rejection of convention, a culture that tolerates failure, and on-the-ground execution. On the other hand, he faces opposing evaluations as a dangerous figure who imposes a high-pressure workplace culture, is dogmatic, and even shakes other countries' sovereignty on social media (SNS). Economy Chosun dissected the essence and paradox of the innovative manager Musk—who monopolizes the modifiers best, biggest, and first—across four dimensions: M, U, S, and K.
M Messianic mission
At SpaceX's 2026 listing, Musk said, "If anyone wants, we will open an era when people can go to the moon, Mars, and beyond," revealing without filter the look of a pace-setting leader with lofty ideals. Claude-Hélène Mayer, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, said of his leadership, "Musk's personal sense of mission transcends traditional economic value." The grand cause of making "humanity a multi-planetary species" through SpaceX and the pursuit of "symbiosis between humans and AI" gives employees a heroic sense of mission and becomes a powerful intrinsic motivation engine. Compared with other companies competing for the same pool of technical talent, this works as a superior driver that draws in top talent and investor trust. It is also the background for Jensen Huang, the CEO, to say he is "like the ultimate GPU (graphics processing unit)."
But an excess of self-conviction appears as dogmatism. Overconfident in being humanity's savior, he tends to dismiss legitimate legal regulations or public criticism as mere "noise." He seeks to personally control public-good-level infrastructure such as SNS X and the Starlink satellite network, and even shows a cold-bloodedness that completely shuts out others' emotions and social consensus to achieve goals. Alp Cenk Arslan, an assistant professor at the Turkish National Police Academy, warned that "a person's existential sense of mission has begun to arbitrarily structure public infrastructure, regulatory debates, and even the boundaries of acceptable risk," pointing to Musk's tendency to interpret external constraints or his own failures as "existential threats to humanity's future."
U Unconventional drive
The cognitive foundation of Musk's leadership stems from first-principles thinking that rejects conventional analogies. The only "real law" is the laws of physics. Everything else—whether rules or guidelines—is merely a "recommendation."
To lower the access expense of going to space, he boldly dismantles the existing pricing formula. SpaceX's unconventional move to recalculate from raw material costs and cut launch expense to one-tenth produced an overwhelming result: monopolizing 50.8% (165 launches) of the global orbital launch market ahead of traditional launch companies like Boeing and Arianespace.
However, such unconventional moves often turn into arbitrary antics that seriously undermine corporate value. Melissa Schilling, a chaired professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, diagnosed the core of Musk's leadership as a combination of "social detachment" and "extreme self-efficacy." An insensitivity to others' well-being or social values eventually led to political risks such as a 2024 statement supporting Germany's far-right AfD, which translated directly into a 45% plunge in Tesla orders in Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump also directly hit his dogmatism in a Sept. 2025 interview, saying, "Musk is 80% super-genius, but 20% a problem." The multiple voting rights structure that breaks the usual "one share, one vote" principle by giving the CEO 10 votes per share has also drawn criticism for threatening governance stability as a listed corporation.
S Safe-to-fail culture
Musk built an agile environment on the factory floor, rapidly iterating and improving hardware like software. Even when SpaceX failed three times in a row launching the Falcon 1 rocket from 2006 to 2008 and was on the verge of bankruptcy, Musk sublimated this into a process of accumulating data for technological advancement, not a setback. He ultimately succeeded on the fourth launch and won a $1.6 billion (about 2.45 trillion won) Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), laying the groundwork for a turnaround. Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, said, "When Starship exploded midair, Musk and the engineers cheered because the leader clearly recognized and preapproved the risks," highly evaluating the systematic culture that turns failure into a driver of innovation. Musk's adage, "If failure isn't happening, you're not innovating enough," was born here. However, a culture that tolerates failure functions properly only when a corporation with capital strength, talent density, and strong technical control exists in a society that recognizes failure as a learning asset. Otherwise, failure becomes a risk that translates into organizational fatigue, quality anxiety, safety controversies, and dependence on a single leader, rather than fuel for innovation.
K Kinetic execution
Right after acquiring the social network Twitter (now X) in 2022, Musk emailed all employees to decide within 24 hours whether to work "extremely hardcore" or voluntarily resign. The ultimatum sent 1,200 people out of the company. A former Tesla executive also claimed, "Everyone at Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Musk." Such a culture is backed by a hands-on "founder mode" that eschews reliance on board reports in favor of sleeping on the factory floor and directly orchestrating bottleneck processes through nanomanagement.
In 2018, when the mass-market electric car Model 3 suffered severe production disruptions and fell into what was called "production hell," he unfolded a camp bed on the Fremont factory floor to sleep and personally oversaw even minute process details. With on-site proven sharpness, Musk excels at piercing the core of problems and taking the lead in proposing solutions. The five-step process—starting from skepticism about every requirement, then deleting parts and procedures, simplifying design, accelerating development and process speed, and moving to automation—embodies his keen engineering intuition.
The field-centered culture based on this led to rapid execution but also drew criticism for forcing a brutal workload of 80 to 100 hours a week. Although the unilateral 80% headcount cut after the Twitter acquisition may have achieved short-term expense reductions, it drew criticism for collapsing the trust and safety defenses and destroying the platform's sustainability. As Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban noted, "One-sided organizational operation that prioritizes only efficiency and speed evaporates healthy bonds among members," and a lack of empathy is cited as a fatal Achilles' heel in Musk's organizational management.