South African investor headhunted by Elon Musk joins SpaceX’s board

SpaceX said it had elected Roelof Botha, a long-time Sequoia Capital investor, to join the board as an independent director, less than a week after the Elon Musk-led company’s record-setting initial public offering.

Botha would be joining as an independent director and be part of the audit committee effective immediately, according to a SpaceX filing on Wednesday.

Botha, a South African like Musk, was the chief financial officer at PayPal when Musk was CEO more than two decades ago. 

He’s been at Sequoia since 2003 — a venture capital firm that first backed SpaceX at the end of 2019.

Sequoia owns about 1.5% of the company, Bloomberg reported, and had also invested in X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired in 2022. X and xAI have since been folded into SpaceX.

Botha is the latest investor to join SpaceX’s board, with other names including Antonio Gracias, founder of Valour Equity Partners, Luke Nosek and Steve Jurvetson. 

Musk’s company made history with its $75 billion IPO last week, instantly making it one of the largest public companies in the world. It also boosted Musk’s personal fortune as well as that of those who backed him.

Botha was born in Pretoria to renowned economist Dr Roelof Botha and soon moved to Cape Town to be raised in Hout Bay.

Attending Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck, Botha flourished academically and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics. 

Moving to Johannesburg to seek out employment, Botha landed a job as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co., where he began to learn about Silicon Valley. 

After two years at McKinsey, Botha enrolled at Stanford University for an MBA and finished top of his class. Job offers flooded in after that.

An offer from Elon Musk stood out, with Botha being introduced to the entrepreneur by a mutual friend. Musk convinced Botha to join X.com, which was set on revolutionising the financial system. 

Botha stayed at X.com through its various guises. It merged with Confinity to form PayPal, after which Musk was forced out of the company, with Botha rising to become its CFO. 

The South African would lead the company’s IPO in 2000 and its sale to eBay for $1.5 billion, making Botha a millionaire overnight. 

In 2007, Fortune published a photo of thirteen former PayPal employees in gangster attire, creating the moniker ‘PayPal Mafia’. Botha was among them, but Musk was absent. 

Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world. 

Botha has been tremendously successful as an early-stage venture capitalist, growing Sequoia’s assets under management and his own wealth. 

He led the firm’s early investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square – netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Botha attributes this success to his focus on the unconventional and his lack of shame in being made fun of by other investors, forged by his South African background.

Reporting with Bloomberg