Leaving SpaceX: The 90-Day Window and the Exercise-vs.-Walk-Away Decision

The Decision That Comes With a Timer

I've had company departure conversations with dozens of clients. It tends to span two very different moods.

The first is the person who's been planning a move for months. New role lined up, a sabbatical, or early retirement. Savings ready. Knows which grants to exercise, knows how to fund the strike check, knows what's coming at tax time.

The second is the person who got laid off on a Tuesday and is calling me on Wednesday. They have a handful of weeks (~13 at SpaceX) to make a six- or seven-figure decision and no time to spiral. If this is you, I'm sorry. But please use this article to ensure that you have the right context and tackle all that you need to regarding your equity in the limited time you have.

Either way, the timer is the same: SpaceX's post-termination exercise window is typically 90 days from your last day of employment. That sounds like a lot. But it moves quickly — especially once you stack up everything that has to happen inside it. Let's break down what's at stake and what to do with the time you have.

Step 1: The 90-Day Clock and What's on the Table

The day you leave SpaceX, your equity sorts into three buckets:

Vested unexercised options. This is the bucket the 90-day clock applies to. Typically, you have 90 days from your last day of employment to decide whether to exercise (write the check) or walk away (let them expire). After day 90, they're gone — not converted, not extended, gone.

Unvested options and RSUs. Forfeited. Almost always, no exceptions, the day you leave.

Shares you already own. Whether you exercised options previously or you have settled RSUs, those are yours. Leaving doesn't change that.

Step 2: Run the Math, Grant by Grant

For every one of your vested and unexercised options, you need to run the math: how much it will cost to exercise, how much embedded value exists, and what the tax impact will be. Carrying the worked example from Articles 6 and 7:

• 4,000 vested ISOs, $56 strike, $526 FMV

• Cash to exercise: $224,000

• Expected AMT bill the following April: ~$475,000

• Total cash exposure to exercise and hold: ~$700,000

• Embedded value walked away from if you don't: $1.88M at today's 409A

• Note: If the options are NSOs instead, you will owe the taxes when you exercise

The biggest challenge typically comes with ISOs that are deeply in the money. If it's aligned with your plan and risk tolerance, exercising and holding for the qualifying disposition (1+ year from exercise) provides material tax benefits. But that path also comes with significant cash costs — as the worked example above illustrates — that have to be funded out of pocket.

For NSOs, or for ISOs where you'd prefer not to take the risk of exercising and holding for 12+ months, the good news is that SpaceX will be publicly traded soon. While tender offers historically occurred twice a year at SpaceX, they were never guaranteed and normally capped the amount you could sell.

With SpaceX publicly traded and you as an ex-employee, you'll be able to sell shares on any trading day to raise necessary funds after the lockup has expired (and after any blackout window still in effect when you left). Cashless exercise will very likely be available as well, allowing you to monetize the in-the-money value of your options without bringing any cash to the table.

Step 3: Recognize the Optionality You're Giving Up

There's a cost to leaving that doesn't show up on the worked example above, and it's one most clients never see until I point it out.

While you're still employed at SpaceX, your unexercised options are options in the truest financial sense. They give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares at your strike, and they let you wait and watch. If SpaceX doubles in value, your options' value increases by as much. But if SpaceX falls below your strike, you simply don't exercise, and you've risked nothing. That asymmetric setup (unlimited upside, capped downside) is what financial people call time value or optionality. And it is real economic value, not a theoretical one.

For a SpaceX option with several years of remaining life, that time value can be material. The closer your option strike price is to the current FMV — for example, options granted recently with a $526 strike — the higher the proportional time value you're carrying. Alternatively, deep-in-the-money grants (the $56-strike example) hold less time value as a percentage of total.

The day you leave, the time value disappears. Your options' effective life shrinks from many years to 90 days. And you're left with a binary choice: exercise or walk away. There is no third option that preserves the optionality. There is no "I'll wait and decide in five years." That door closes at day 90.

This matters for how you should think about an imperfect exercise decision in your 90-day window. While you're employed, the rational answer to "Should I exercise now?" can absolutely be "No — I want to continue to wait and see." But the moment you leave, the math changes — not because exercise suddenly got more attractive, but because the alternative got worse. The options' value collapsed from "intrinsic plus time" down to just "intrinsic." You're now evaluating exercising versus losing everything, not exercising versus wait and see.

Step 4: Your Holistic SpaceX Exposure Just Dropped

There's another shift the day you leave that most clients miss in the moment, but matters for how you manage the position from here.

While you were at SpaceX, your true concentration exposure to the company was almost always larger than what your owned shares would suggest. Yes, you owned whatever you'd exercised and had settled from RSUs, but you also had a stack of granted-but-unvested equity with a locked strike price (for options) or a locked share count (for RSUs), waiting to vest as you kept showing up. That unvested equity is implicit exposure. You don't own it on the day you check, but if you keep working, you're going to. The price is set. The math is set. Only time is left.

For example, a SpaceX employee with $4 million of owned equity and another $3m vesting over the next few years has $7m in total SpaceX exposure (assuming they plan to stay working at the company).

The day you step away — voluntarily or otherwise — the implicit piece evaporates. You have what you have. Nothing else is coming.

That's not inherently bad, but it is a change, and it may impact your plan and holdings. If your concentrated position thesis was something like "I'll diversify aggressively because my unvested grants will keep refilling the SpaceX bucket," that thesis no longer applies. Your total SpaceX exposure will now be solely what you actually own (plus anything you exercise inside the 90-day window).

Step 5: What Actually Changes Once You're a Former Employee

People focus on what they lose the day they leave: unvested equity, future grants, insider context. But leaving also has some advantages. There are real restrictions that get lifted once you're no longer an employee, and they meaningfully change what you can do with a concentrated SpaceX position post-IPO.

The IPO lockup still applies to you. I want to set that expectation first. If you leave before the IPO (or after, but before lockup expiration), the IPO lockup binds you the same way it binds current employees. Being an alumnus doesn't get you out of it. Plan for the same ~180 day lockup window everyone else faces (as of publication of this article, we're still waiting to see what the lockup terms will be).

After the lockup though, the recurring quarterly blackout schedule generally stops applying to ex-employees. Current employees post-IPO will be subject to a recurring blackout calendar — open windows of a few weeks between earnings, closed windows of 5–8 weeks around earnings, four times a year. As a former employee, once you're past the quarter in which you departed (and any "designated insider" tail the company applies), you're typically out from under that schedule entirely. You can trade in windows current employees can't.

Company-level hedging, pledging, and short-sale prohibitions also typically lapse. SpaceX's insider trading policy (like virtually every public company's) is anticipated to prohibit employees from hedging their position with call/put options, pledging shares as loan collateral, potentially disallowing transferring shares, and conducting short sales. These are company policy restrictions, not securities law. Once you're not an employee, those policy restrictions generally don't apply to you. That opens up real risk-management tools:

• Protective puts and collars, or prepaid variable forwards, to hedge risk on a concentrated position

• Using your SpaceX stock as collateral for a tax-aware long/short strategy

• Using your SpaceX stock as collateral to borrow against via box spread (the most attractive rates available)

The net practical point: a current SpaceX employee post-IPO is managing a concentrated position with both hands tied — limited trading windows, no hedging, no pledging. A former SpaceX employee post-IPO is managing the same position with most of those tools available. That's not a small difference for someone with a seven-figure concentrated position trying to manage risk and tax around an eventual sale.

What's Important to Remember

1. The clock is 90 days. That sounds like a lot. It isn't. The most common way to lose embedded equity value isn't a bad market — it's letting the calendar run out while you meant to look at it.

2. Decide to exercise (or not) grant by grant. Each individual grant has its own math and key considerations.

3. Understand that you're losing "time and optionality" value when you leave. Leaving collapses your options' optionality from years down to 90 days. The intrinsic spread is what you see; the time value you lose is just as real.

4. Your holistic SpaceX exposure just changed. Granted-but-unvested equity was implicit concentration risk that disappears the day you leave.

5. Some restrictions actually get lifted when you leave. Post-lockup, the recurring blackout schedule generally stops applying to ex-employees, and company-level hedging/pledging/collar prohibitions typically lapse. That gives you more tools to manage the position, not fewer.

Like so many things in personal finance, the more advance planning you do, the better your decisions and financial outcomes are likely to be.