Elonmusk and spacex: A case study of entrepreneuring as emancipation

Abstract

Elon Musk and SpaceX are central to the profound change underway in the space industry, opening up the sector to entrepreneurship and innovation by non-traditional new entrants. We employ the emancipation perspective on entrepreneuring as a theoretical lens to describe, explain, and interpret the entrepreneuring activities of Musk to launch and grow SpaceX. Applying an event study approach that combines case methods and process theory methods on publicly-available sources, we develop six examples of seeking autonomy, seven examples of authoring, and four examples of making declarations-the three core elements of the emancipation perspective on entrepreneuring. Our work contributes to the theory and practice of innovation by adding to the corpus of descriptive case studies that examine entrepreneuring as an emancipatory process. Our results and our method will also also be of interest to space industry entrepreneurs, investors, analysts, managers, policy-makers, and officers at governmental space agencies.