SAN FRANCISCO
Donald Harrison, Google's president of global partnerships and corporate development, has resigned from the SpaceX board of directors. SpaceX disclosed the move in a regulatory filing, noting Harrison's departure was not due to any disagreement with operations, policies or practices.
The resignation comes five months after SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering on record. Alphabet remains the largest institutional investor in Elon Musk's rocket company, with its stake valued at $74 billion as of Friday's market close—up from a $12 billion valuation when Alphabet first invested in SpaceX in 2015. SpaceX now carries a market capitalization of roughly $1.8 trillion.
Harrison has held his current role at Google since 2005.
The board exit masks a deepening commercial entanglement between the two companies. Google commits up to $920 million monthly to SpaceX's artificial intelligence division for compute capacity sourced from data centers around Memphis, Tennessee. The companies also collaborated on Project Suncatcher, which launched Google AI chips into orbit—a joint effort that positions SpaceX as critical infrastructure for Google's AI scaling strategy.
Google said in a statement: "While Don is stepping down from the board, we remain deeply supportive of SpaceX's mission and are excited to continue our long-standing partnership."
The dynamic mirrors a familiar Silicon Valley pattern: venture capital and board representation decouple as commercial relationships grow too large and complex to manage through traditional governance. For Alphabet, the $74 billion equity upside and $11 billion annual AI compute spend create structural incentives to maintain the partnership independent of board participation. Harrison's exit may actually reduce friction by removing a formal governance obligation that could complicate what is now a customer-vendor relationship worth billions annually.
