When SpaceX went public this week, most of the conversation circled a single number: Elon Musk’s net worth, now past a trillion dollars on paper.
But the more important story wasn’t the billionaire at the top.
It was the people underneath him. According to the New York Times, roughly 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees (engineers, technicians, welders, operators, early hires) became millionaires through the listing. Around 400 of them now hold stock worth $100 million or more. One former welder who joined in 2015 with $10,000 in options watched his holdings jump by more than a million dollars on the first day of trading.
That is the part Europe should be paying attention to.
Because SpaceX didn’t just create wealth. It revived an idea that much of Europe, and Switzerland in particular, has quietly let slip: that work should offer more than a salary. It should offer participation, ownership, meaning, and a real share in the upside of what you help build.
And that matters more today than most leaders realize.
Survival mode
The old social contract is weakening. Pensions are under pressure, inflation erodes purchasing power, housing feels out of reach, and younger generations no longer trust that stability alone guarantees security.
Meanwhile, a quieter crisis is unfolding inside companies.
For more than two decades I have worked directly with professionals across Switzerland, executives, managers, entrepreneurs, employees. Every week I sit with people from large corporations, SMEs, public institutions, startups, and international organizations. And what I’ve seen over the past few years is alarming.
People are exhausted. Not only physically, psychologically, emotionally, existentially.
More burnout than ever. More disengagement. More frustration. It is especially visible inside large corporate and institutional structures, where people increasingly feel cut off from meaning, ownership, and impact. In French-speaking Switzerland in particular, the fatigue and resignation have become impossible to ignore.
People no longer talk about work with excitement. They talk about survival.
More and more of them tell me the same thing: “I’m fed up with my job, but I have to pay the bills.”
That single sentence says everything. Behind it lies a profound break between people and the meaning of what they do every day.
Work = transaction
Many employees no longer dream through work, they endure it. They no longer feel they are building something; they feel they are maintaining something. Trapped inside routines, restructurings, reporting lines, and constant pressure, they stop seeing any larger purpose.
Over time, that produces something genuinely dangerous for a society: resignation. People stop projecting themselves into the future. They stop believing things can improve. They stop engaging.
Not because they’re lazy, and not because they lack talent, but because they no longer see the link between effort, contribution, and reward. Work becomes purely transactional. You trade hours for money. You survive. You repeat. You keep going because responsibilities force you to: children, rent, insurance, mortgages, family. But inside, the flame slowly goes out.
This may be one of the biggest hidden crises of the modern workplace. Because human beings are not built to live on obligation alone. People need to feel useful. They need progression, ownership, contribution, the sense that they belong to something larger than themselves.
This is where SpaceX becomes more than an American story. It becomes a mirror for Europe
What people saw in the IPO wasn’t only money. They saw thousands of people participating in something ambitious, meaningful, and nearly impossible, and sharing financially in the value they created. Mission, contribution, ownership, progress, shared upside. Together, those reactivate something deeply human: hope.
Let me be honest about what that does and doesn’t prove. SpaceX is an extreme outlier, a once-in-a-generation, $1.77 trillion company. Most ventures never come close, and most employee equity ends up worth a modest sum, or nothing at all. So the case for ownership cannot rest on jackpots. Sold as a lottery ticket, it deserves to fail.
And ownership alone does not cure exhaustion. A burned-out team holding stock options is still a burned-out team; meaning, autonomy, workload, and decent management come first, and no cap table repairs a broken culture. But underneath all of that sits a relationship and ownership changes its terms. It turns “I exchange hours for money” into “I share in what I help build.” It aligns risk and reward, rather than asking employees to carry the risk while others keep the reward. That shift won’t fix a toxic workplace. But it can give a healthy one a powerful reason to stay.
And that is the real lesson worth our attention.
When will Europe create its own SpaceX moment?
When will Switzerland build a company where not just the founder, the board, and the investors, but hundreds or thousands of employees share meaningfully in the wealth they helped create?
Switzerland has done it before, in its own way.
Logitech was born in the village of Apples, in the canton of Vaud, founded by Daniel Borel, Pierluigi Zappacosta, and Giacomo Marini, one of the rare Swiss technology stories that fused Swiss engineering, entrepreneurial vision, and Silicon Valley ambition.
Nicolas Hayek did something comparable for another era. With Swatch, he didn’t just create a product; he restored confidence in an entire industry, bringing design, energy, and industrial courage to a sector that had nearly lost its battle against international competition.
More recently, ON has shown that Switzerland can still build global brands. Olivier Bernhard, David Allemann, and Caspar Coppetti created a company that went global, with Roger Federer adding not only visibility but symbolic legitimacy.
These examples matter, because they prove Switzerland is perfectly capable of producing entrepreneurial energy. But they also show how rare these moments have become.
Where are today’s Swiss founders with the same charisma, obsession, and capacity to mobilize people around a future bigger than themselves? Where are the entrepreneurs who make young people say, “I want to work there, because something important is being built”? Where are the companies in French-speaking Switzerland that make people feel they aren’t just taking a job, but joining a mission?
We are not starting from nothing. Switzerland has EPFL, ETH Zurich, world-class research, deep science, medtech, biotech, robotics, AI, life sciences, climate innovation, precision industry, finance, and cybersecurity. There is talent. There is capital. There is intelligence.
But too often, the paradigm stays conservative. We still build companies where equity is concentrated too narrowly. We still think in terms of salary packages rather than ownership culture. We still ask employees to take risks, accept uncertainty, and work with intensity, without giving them a meaningful share of the upside.
Wealth distribution
That has to change. Employee ownership shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be designed in from the start.
And yes, in Switzerland this is genuinely harder than in the United States. Equity can be taxed at vesting, and illiquid shares can attract wealth tax long before anyone is able to sell them. That friction is real. But it is an argument for designing ownership deliberately, early, and with proper advice, not for leaving it out.
Every ambitious Swiss and European startup should ask, from day one:
- How do we make employees true participants in the value they help create?
- How do we put an ESOP, or an equivalent structure in place early enough, clearly enough, and fairly enough?
- How do we ensure the first employees, not just the founders, accumulate real ownership over time?
- How do we reward loyalty, contribution, and long-term commitment?
- How do we make wealth creation part of the culture, rather than a privilege reserved for the top layer?
Because the future of work won’t simply be a war for talent, or salary versus salary. It will be mission, ownership, stability, and shared wealth creation versus a purely transactional relationship.
The missing equation
The companies that win tomorrow won’t be the ones that pay slightly more. They’ll be the ones that make people feel three things at once:
- I am secure enough to live.
- I am inspired enough to commit.
- I own enough to believe that if this succeeds, my life can change too.
That is the missing equation.
Europe doesn’t need to copy Silicon Valley blindly, the American model has its excesses, its inequalities, its brutality. But it should learn one thing: people need to believe again that the future can reward courage. That work can create more than fatigue. That companies can be vehicles of progress, not just machines for salaries, margins, and shareholder returns.
The next great Swiss or European company may come from climate tech, AI, health, education, robotics, energy, food systems, longevity, or the future of work itself. But if we want people to join these missions with real intensity, we have to offer more than purpose posters and nice values on a website.
We have to offer participation. Ownership. A fair share of the wealth they help create.
Because the real future-of-work challenge may not only be technological. It is human.
And the companies that understand this first will attract the people who still want to wake up in the morning to build something that matters.
