SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says it’s tough to recruit tech talent to Texas in general, but especially difficult to get engineers to make the trip to Starbase. “It’s like a technology monastery thing,” he says, “remote and mostly dudes.”
Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle
California still has it over Texas in at least one key way, Elon Musk says: Hiring.
After moving the headquarters of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. to Texas in recent years because of politics, he said it’s still easier to recruit employees to work in California. With one exception.
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“Austin, it helps,” Musk said — while noting that Tesla still has most of its engineering capacity in California. “Getting engineers to move … I call it the significant other problem.”
That’s what makes engineering recruiting toughest at Starbase, the remote South Texas outpost where SpaceX is developing its Starship mega-rocket.
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“For Starbase that was particularly difficult, since the odds of finding a non-SpaceX job are pretty low,” Musk said. “It’s quite difficult. It’s like a technology monastery thing, remote and mostly dudes.”
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Spouses, he said, are often unwilling to relocate to the isolated area.
He disclosed the issues on the Cheeky Pint podcast during a chat in which he also accused tech giant Apple Inc. of trying to poach Tesla’s talent when that company was working on its own self-driving electric car, a project it later scrapped.
“They were carpet bombing Tesla with recruiting calls,” Musk said. He claimed their opening offer would be roughly double the compensation at Tesla, indicating what he referred to as a “Tesla pixie dust” factor, in which other companies assume if they could hire someone from Tesla, the employee would put them on track to success.
“When we had the pixie dust problem, we would get relentlessly recruited from,” Musk said. “Also, Tesla being engineering, especially being primarily in Silicon Valley, it’s easier for people to just… They don’t have to change their life very much. Their commute’s going to be the same.”
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John Collison, co-founder of Stripe and podcast host, asked Musk how he guards against poachers. Musk said there’s not much that can stop it.
Musk has long been trying to draw tech talent to Texas, with a renewed push after last week’s announcement that SpaceX acquired xAI. Days after giving notice of the plan, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering, said the SpaceX-owned satellite company is hiring for critical engineering roles to develop technologies for AI satellites in space at the company’s facilities in Austin and Seattle.
The space data centers are a key part of SpaceX’s new strategy, along with a focus on a lunar city rather than one on Mars. But SpaceX only recently filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission to launch 1 million solar-powered satellites. Even if the plan is approved, experts have doubts about the technical details, questioning how SpaceX would address possible hurdles such as overheating, collisions with space junk or replacing broken parts.
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But Musk is confident that SpaceX will accomplish its goal in the near future, providing one of his signature fast-approaching deadlines — which, if history is a guide, won’t be met.
“You can mark my words. In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space,” he said. “It will then get ridiculously better to be in space.”