Andre Lavoie has spent seventeen years at SpaceX building rockets. Now he is building something far more ambitious: a financial strategy that treats stock liquidation like a countdown to personal spaceflight.
The engineer joined SpaceX in 2009, back when the company was still proving it could land a rocket instead of just exploding one. Today, with equity compensation that has appreciated considerably, Lavoie has discovered what might be the world’s most literal interpretation of “cashing in on your dreams.” His plan is straightforward: sell shares whenever possible, pocket the proceeds, and somehow transmute engineering compensation into a ticket to orbit.
“Every chance I get, I’ll sell a little more,” he explains, with the confidence of someone who has apparently confused diversification with a boarding pass. The logic is almost admirable in its purity. Why wait for compound growth or boring index funds when you can convert your employer’s equity directly into a personal space program?
What makes this truly remarkable is the meta-layer of irony: Lavoie helped build the very rockets that might someday carry him to space. But instead of trusting the company he engineered for, he is betting against it—one share at a time—in pursuit of a dream that SpaceX itself is actively working to make cheaper and more accessible to regular people. By the time his liquidation strategy pays off, commercial spaceflight might cost less than a Tesla.
The real question is not whether Lavoie will reach orbit. It is whether he will still own enough SpaceX stock to care when he does.