A couple who won a fortune from SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO have quit their jobs and budgeted $25,000 a month for an all-out year of travel, from paragliding in the French Alps to attending the Italian Grand Prix.
Brian Aggrey, 35, who worked at SpaceX for 14 years, and his wife, Phoebe Novack, have so far traveled to Milan and the French countryside in July; Chamonix in the French Alps and Paris in September; and are planning to fly to Mexico City this fall, according to the Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX shattered records and briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire after it opened at $150 a share in the largest-ever IPO in June – and it also created a new class of millionaires from the SpaceX workers who acquired company stock over time.
Over his decade-plus tenure at SpaceX, working on electronics, software and the mechanics of the Falcon 9 rocket, Aggrey built up a hefty SpaceX stake from his initial signing allocation and annual performance bonuses, according to the report.
“We’re in this position because of how well SpaceX stock did. We had no idea, while we were going through it, accumulating stock, whether it was ever going to be worth anything,” Aggrey said. “It’s a risk we decided to take, and thankfully it paid off.”
The couple sold some of their SpaceX shares, leaving the majority in the market, and planned what they’re calling a “Year of Freak” – a $25,000 monthly budget for exactly one year until July 31, 2027, on worldwide travel, artistic passions and superfluous hobbies.
Aggrey and Novack, who also quit her job as a senior manager at Impossible Foods, said it’s been a long path to their year of wild financial freedom.
The couple met in college at Washington University in St. Louis, and at one point lived with roommates in Los Angeles so Aggrey could put as much money as possible into SpaceX stock.
Aggrey said in 2015, a roommate fronted him $200 because he couldn’t afford his taxes on both his options and rent.
But by this August, the couple were living a luxurious life in Fontainebleau, a town southeast of Paris. Novack attended the prestigious Fontainebleau School of Acting, known as Fonact, for 35 hours a week. Aggrey spent his days biking into nearby towns to visit museums and cafes and read French novels.
At one point, when Aggrey found out that a total solar eclipse would be visible in Valencia, Spain, he took a last-minute trip from France to snap photos of the sky.
Later this fall, Aggrey plans to spend time in Mexico City working with sculptor Brian Thoreen on a project to help the city’s water crisis. Then he plans to take classes in landscape design, visual arts and film production.
The couple intend to return to California in the winter for skiing and surfing.
After the fun ends next summer, Aggrey and Novack said they might return to work in similar fields to the ones they abandoned or try out something new, as Aggrey is interested in improving the US public transit systems in line with Europe’s.
An analysis by Hill.com earlier this year anticipated the SpaceX IPO would transform more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees into overnight millionaires, with about 400 workers earning $100 million or more.
Aggrey dreamed of working on rockets since he was in middle school. He started at SpaceX as an intern when he was 21, and was one of the few hundred employees who had been with the company the longest before he quit.