Brian Aggrey spent 14 years at SpaceX, starting as a 21-year-old intern and staying long enough to build a stock position that turned into serious money when the company went public. Now he’s spending it — deliberately and fast.
Aggrey, 35, and his wife Phoebe Novack have quit their jobs and set a $25,000-a-month budget for a self-declared “Year of Freak,” a stretch of pure travel and hobby-chasing running from this summer through July 31, 2027, according to the Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX’s IPO opened at $150 a share in June, the largest public offering in history, and briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It also minted a new tier of wealthy former employees who had spent years quietly accumulating stock through signing allocations and performance bonuses without knowing if any of it would ever pay off.
“We’re in this position because of how well SpaceX stock did. We had no idea, while we were going through it, accumulating stock, whether it was ever going to be worth anything,” Aggrey said. “It’s a risk we decided to take, and thankfully it paid off.”
The couple sold off part of their SpaceX holdings, kept the rest invested, and pointed the proceeds at a year of travel most people never take. Novack, who left her job as a senior manager at Impossible Foods, and Aggrey have already been to Milan and the French countryside in July, then Chamonix in the Alps and Paris in September. Mexico City is next on the list this fall.
From Rationed Cash to Fontainebleau
The couple met in college at Washington University in St. Louis. Early on, Aggrey lived with roommates in Los Angeles to funnel as much cash as possible into SpaceX stock — a bet that once left him short. In 2015, he told the Journal, a roommate had to front him $200 because he couldn’t cover taxes on his stock options and rent at the same time.
By August of this year, that same bet had put them up in Fontainebleau, a town southeast of Paris. Novack spent 35 hours a week at the Fontainebleau School of Acting, known as Fonact. Aggrey biked to nearby towns for museums, cafes and French novels. When he learned a total solar eclipse would be visible in Valencia, Spain, he booked a last-minute trip from France just to photograph it.
What’s Left on the Itinerary
This fall, Aggrey plans to work in Mexico City with sculptor Brian Thoreen on a project addressing the city’s water crisis, then take classes in landscape design, visual arts and film production. The couple plan to head back to California for winter skiing and surfing.
When the year is up, Aggrey said they might return to work in fields close to what they left, or try something new — he’s mentioned an interest in improving U.S. public transit to match European systems.
An analysis by Hill.com earlier this year projected the SpaceX IPO would turn more than 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires overnight, with roughly 400 of them clearing $100 million or more.
