Google’s Man on SpaceX’s Board Just Quit After 11 Years
Alphabet's stake in SpaceX keeps growing, yet its seat at the table just vanished. With a huge computing contract in play and no replacement named, the filing leaves one question hanging over both stocks.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) disclosed in a Form 8-K filed after the close on November 6, 2026, that Donald Harrison, a Class B director and Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development, had told the company on November 4 that he was resigning from the board effective immediately.
Harrison joined the board in February 2015 and served about eleven years and nine months. That made him the board’s longest-tenured non-management director.
The filing came out after the market closed, so Friday’s trading tells you nothing about how investors view the exit. SpaceX finished at $134.27, up 8.62%, a day after it fell 9.05% to $123.62. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) rose 0.78% to $284.78. For holders of either stock, the open question is what happens when Alphabet’s money stays in SpaceX, but its seat on the board sits empty.
What the Filing Says
The 8-K states that Harrison’s decision did not come from any disagreement over the company’s operations, policies, or practices. It thanks him for his service, names no replacement, and carries the signature of CFO Bret Johnsen.
It gives no other reason. Nothing in it points to a share sale or a smaller stake, and it does not say whether Google will get the seat back. Google said it remains “deeply supportive of SpaceX’s mission.”
Alphabet Owns More SpaceX Than It Did Before
Alphabet’s 13F for the quarter ended September 30, filed the same Friday, lists 555,043,560 SpaceX Class A shares worth $83.73 billion, up from 551.2 million. The position made up about 95% of the filing’s $88.35 billion total.
At Friday’s close, the stake was worth about $74 billion, or roughly 4.1% of SpaceX. At Thursday’s close, it was worth $68.6 billion. Google bought in when SpaceX was valued near $12 billion, and the company now sits near $1.77 trillion.
Why a Board Seat Gets Awkward After an IPO
A board profile published before the IPO, dated May 21, 2026, noted that the board had reviewed whether Google’s commercial ties to SpaceX and its investment in the company affected Harrison’s independence.
Those ties keep growing. Google agreed to pay SpaceX’s AI division up to $920 million a month for computing capacity from data centers near Memphis, and the two companies worked together on Project Suncatcher, which put Google AI chips in orbit.
A Google executive on the board gave Alphabet both information and influence, but he also had a stake in both sides of a large customer contract. His departure removes that conflict, and Alphabet loses its formal channel into the company along with it. The computing and orbital-data-center deals are the kind of AI expansion work we identified across seven non-chipmaker suppliers in a free report.
SpaceX now moves Alphabet’s earnings.
The stake’s value runs through Alphabet’s income statement every quarter. A reported $8.7 billion loss on equity securities cut third-quarter diluted EPS by $0.55, and GAAP EPS came in at $2.12, missing the $2.97 consensus. We covered that loss and the lock-up on Alphabet’s shares in an earlier piece.
Valuation Risks SPCX Holders Should Weigh
SpaceX is down 19.89% over the past month and still trades at a $1.77 trillion market value. Third-quarter revenue was $14.60 billion, and the board has just lost its most experienced outside director.
Alphabet offers a useful comparison. Google Cloud grew 103%, and the SpaceX stake is only about 2.1% of Alphabet’s $3.47 trillion value.
The governance picture would look stronger if SpaceX names an independent replacement before its next proxy and the stock gets back above its $148.72 level from October 20. Until then, look for the replacement announcement and for Alphabet’s share count in its next 13F.
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Omor Ibne Ehsan is a writer at 24/7 Wall St. He is a self-taught investor with a focus on growth, cyclical, and dividend equities that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as penny stocks.
