Justin Lopas has seen Elon Musk’s management style up close, and he’s embracing some of the things he’s learned.
Lopas, a 30-year-old cofounder, worked in manufacturing and mechanical engineering at SpaceX and Anduril before launching his company Base Power, a Texas-based home battery company, in 2023.
He talked to BI about how his time at both companies, and experience working directly with Musk, has helped guide his own work at Base Power, from the culture to the interview process.
Representatives for SpaceX and Anduril did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Landing the jobs and getting the right people
Lopas was just a sophomore at the University of Michigan when he landed an internship at Musk’s rocket company in 2013. He later returned to SpaceX full time in 2016 and moved to Anduril in 2020. At SpaceX, he split his time between working on the Falcon rocket and building out manufacturing capabilities in Boca Chica Village, Texas (before it became the city of Starbase).
In his interviews at both SpaceX and Anduril, Lopas said he noticed that interviewers tended to focus on practical skills and addressing actual questions the company is facing.
He uses the same strategy when talking to applicants for Base Power.
“It’s like, ‘Here’s a problem that we’re working on now, how would you solve it?'” Lopas said. “I found that to be a far more effective way to judge somebody’s technical talent than, ‘Can you solve this sort of Mechanical Engineering homework problem?'”
Culture is everything
Lopas’ biggest takeaway from his years at SpaceX wasn’t limited to engineering expertise.
“Culture is the most important thing, I pretty firmly believe that,” he said. “I learned a lot of that specifically at SpaceX.”
When he was there, Musk’s company emphasized a few basic concepts that Lopas is now trying to instill at Base Power: high ownership, first principles, and a good work ethic.
High ownership is the idea that an employee should own any problem that’s related to their work, even if it doesn’t explicitly fall into their job description.
“Are you going to go solve the problem, or are you going to look for ways to define the problem so that it’s not your problem? The answer has to be ‘yes’ to the former,” Lopas said.
He also learned to approach every problem from the concept of “first principles”: disregard assumptions about how things should be done.
“For almost everything we’re doing, there’s a ‘traditional’ way to do it,” he said. “But if you think about the problem from first principles, oftentimes the way it is normally done is not the way it should be done.”
His team applies the concept to seemingly small decisions, like mounting batteries on the floor instead of the more conventional location on a wall.
Speed matters
Lopas said that “speed is basically everything” at SpaceX and Anduril. A focus on reducing bureaucracy was another key lesson, though he said that some degree of internal management is necessary.
“The thing that SpaceX taught me, and that we’re trying to embody here is, ‘Does that person or process add any value to the company or the organization?'” he told BI. “And if the answer is no, you should get rid of it.”
After acquiring Twitter, for example, Musk cut almost 90% of the staff, and many have criticized his similar chainsaw approach to paring back the federal government through the White House DOGE Office.
Before President Donald Trump took office for a second time, Musk wrote in an op-ed that DOGE aimed to drastically reduce headcount and costs and combat an “ever-growing bureaucracy.”
Musk as a boss
Lopas worked directly with Musk while in Boca Chica Village and “really enjoyed” it. He said the billionaire could quickly get to the root of a problem and simplify it.
“I was fascinated by how quickly he was able to learn things or understand things that he did not necessarily have a background in,” Lopas said.
Base Power is still in its early days, but Lopas is thinking about how to build a company that borrows principles from the ones he came from. In doing so, he said he thinks he’s got a good shot at building a business that can “stand the test of time,” he said.
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