$28 Million Later, a Retired SpaceX Engineer Is Rewiring an Italian Village

J. André Lavoie left SpaceX more than ten years ago and retired to a quiet town in the Italian Alps. His old stock just turned into a fortune, and he is spending it on a historic hotel and a plan to pull his adopted village off wood smoke.

A quiet retirement, interrupted

J. André Lavoie thought the big decisions were behind him. The former senior propulsion engineer left SpaceX more than a decade ago and settled in Pontebba, a small town in the mountains of northern Italy, a long way from the launch pads where he once worked.

Then his old company went public, and the quiet got complicated. At 63, Lavoie holds more than 200,000 SpaceX shares on a split-adjusted basis. At the $135 price the company set for its June 12 debut, that stake is worth roughly $28 million.

A stock that will not sit still

For Lavoie, the windfall has been less a single moment than a moving target. He has said the shares climbed so fast that they kept upending his retirement planning, describing stock that was “going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans.”

It is an unusual complaint, and it captures something real about early SpaceX equity. Employees who joined when the company was still a gamble, then simply held on, watched modest option grants compound into life-changing sums over many years. Lavoie left the company long before the payday and still ended up among its biggest individual winners.

The hotel and the village

He has not let the money sit idle. Lavoie bought a historic hotel in northern Italy and used the early portions of his liquidity to fund extensive renovations.

His more ambitious project is the village itself. Lavoie has begun planning community-scale philanthropy aimed at moving Pontebba away from wood-burning heating toward cleaner geothermal and electric systems. In practical terms, a rocket engineer’s stock options are being turned into modern heat for an Alpine town that has relied on burning wood for generations.

Part of a much larger group

Lavoie is one of roughly 4,400 SpaceX workers who became millionaires when the company listed, a group that runs from executives to welders to ship crews. What separates the early engineers is time. The longer the hold, the greater the compounding, and Lavoie held for well over a decade after walking away from the job.

A note of caution

The $28 million figure is an estimate based on the offering price, not a bank balance. Newly public companies typically bar insiders from selling for a period after the debut, and the value of a concentrated stock position can swing sharply once trading is underway. Like the stock itself, Lavoie’s plans may keep shifting.

From rockets to radiators

There is a tidy symmetry to where he has landed. The man who once helped push rockets off the ground is now busy with a smaller and slower kind of engineering: rewiring a mountain town, one renovation and one heating system at a time. The stock that keeps messing up his plans is, it turns out, also funding them.