Google executive Donald Harrison resigns from SpaceX board

SpaceX board member Donald Harrison resigned from his position on the board after over a decade of service, leaving the company as a group of independent directors considers a potential merger with Tesla Inc. This decision was made by Harrison on November 4, just one day after the US midterm election, according to a SpaceX filing issued after the close of business on Friday.

The company stated that Harrison's departure was not due to any disagreement with the company. Harrison had joined the board in 2015 as part of Google's investment in SpaceX, Musk's rocket, satellite, and artificial intelligence company. He continues to work for Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., leading its corporate partnerships and development team.

In addition to SpaceX, Harrison was also part of the board for Tesla Inc. SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees of independent directors to explore the possibility of a merger between the two companies. CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, announced this plan last month, indicating a push to announce a deal by the first half of the following year in order to have it complete during the current administration, as reported by Bloomberg News.

While Musk has not disclosed the specific board members serving on the companies' special committees, Harrison was among the listed independent directors, alongside Ira Ehrenpreis, Roelof Botha, Luke Nosek, Steve Jurvetson, and Randy Glein. Alphabet, Google's parent company, remains a significant backer of SpaceX, holding the second-largest share after Musk, which had an impact on Alphabet's earnings results last week due to the decline in SpaceX shares.

Both Google and SpaceX possess rival AI models and chatbots, Gemini and Grok, respectively, that compete with those of Anthropic PBC's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT.