SpaceX has named its first new board member since going public, and the word doing the heavy lifting in the announcement is “independent.”
In a filing on June 17, the company said its board had elected Roelof Botha, the former Sequoia Capital steward, as an independent director and a member of its audit committee. The appointment took effect on June 16, days after SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history.
On paper, it is a sensible, even dull, piece of corporate housekeeping. A freshly listed company needs audit-committee members who have done the job before, and Botha has sat on the boards and audit committees of numerous public companies.
What ‘independent’ means here
The complication is the company he is joining. Elon Musk holds more than 82 per cent of SpaceX’s voting power, controls every change to the board, and has left public shareholders with almost no ability to challenge him. SpaceX’s own IPO terms concentrated power in Musk’s hands, not the market’s.
