By Micah Maidenberg
After celebrating SpaceX's initial public offering with colleagues, Bill Riley plans to pack his bags for a trip to Brooklyn, Mich.
Riley, a top engineering executive at the company, will serve as chief design judge for a race at Michigan International Speedway, according to Chris Ciuca, a vice president at the nonprofit that organizes the event. The competition doesn't involve professional drivers speeding around the track -- it will feature college students racing Formula One-style cars they designed and built over months.
The SpaceX executive's ties to the competition are linked to his time on Cornell University's Formula SAE team in the late 1990s. And he's not the only one at Elon Musk's space and artificial-intelligence enterprise. SpaceX executives Mark Juncosa and Mike Nicolls also cut their engineering teeth making student race cars at Cornell in the early 2000s.
"Race cars and rockets are not that dissimilar," Riley, 49 years old, once told an interviewer for the Ivy League school's magazine.
The Cornell connection at SpaceX is striking, but it also reflects the company's longstanding commitment to hiring people steeped in practical skills, and not just prowess in the classroom.
Human resources execs at the company have said that successful job candidates for SpaceX have experience on extracurricular engineering or personal projects. Musk has cited winning competitions like Formula SAE as evidence of exceptional engineering ability.
SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment.
John Callister, the current faculty adviser for Cornell's team and a former engineer at General Motors, said the group tries to foster independent thinking. "We don't have classes in all the things that you have to know," he said.
That tracks with the experience Juncosa, 44, had with the Cornell racing organization. The Southern California native is known as someone who Musk dispatches to solve tough technical problems, former employees have said.
As an undergrad at Cornell, he studied economics. But Timothy Reissman, who overlapped with him on the racing club, recalled Juncosa as someone who was willing to put in the time to figure out practical engineering skills for himself.
"He was the guy who would grind through that work, to get to that ability to improve something or learn something," said Reissman, now an associate professor at the University of Dayton.
The Cornell team's legend has seeped into SpaceX, in part through the trio of executives.
"There was a mystique around it -- the Cornell SAE people, that was a demographic within SpaceX," said Charlotte Kiang, a former SpaceX employee who earned a master's in engineering from the school.
She recalled that racing team participants from Cornell formed their own social group among a group of interns at one point.
Reissman said Juncosa once relayed a story about how SpaceX had hired a welder who didn't think it was possible to set up an automated welding process involving thin aluminum panels. Juncosa, who knew how to weld from his Cornell racing team days, jumped in to help solve the problem.
"That is just an example of what Mark does," Reissman said.
Michael Jones, a teammate on the club with Nicolls and Juncosa, recalled Nicolls as a quieter presence, but one with unique skills. He worked on electronics, helping the group develop its own engine-control unit.
Nicolls, 45, is now a senior vice president at SpaceX and has spent years working in the company's Starlink satellite-internet business.
Jones, a professor in Canada, said a SpaceX without Riley, Juncosa and Nicolls might be a very different place.
"If you took them all out and they went somewhere else, what would have happened?" said Jones. "I think there was a fine storm of people who came in at the right time and set the standard."
Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 13, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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