Brian Aggrey worked at SpaceX for over a decade. After the company's record-breaking IPO in June, he and his wife, Phoebe Novack, saw their fortunes increase dramatically. So they quit their jobs and left the country.
In July, they traveled to Milan and Cote d'Azur and stayed in the French countryside, where Novack took acting classes over the summer. In September, they went to Chamonix in the Alps to paraglide, and to Italy for the Formula One Italian Grand Prix and the Venice Biennale and film festival.
Now in Paris, they plan to fly to Mexico City this fall, where Aggrey will study sculpture and the country's water crisis.
This is just the autumn itinerary for a wild year of letting themselves chase hobbies and passions, completely unencumbered by the corporate career paths they have built. They have budgeted $25,000 a month for 365 days. The couple is calling it their "Year of Freak."
"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," said Aggrey, 35, who worked at SpaceX for 14 years before quitting in July. "It's a risk we decided to take, and thankfully it paid off."
The somewhat unexpected money has given them permission to act on their "biggest, craziest, weirdest dreams," said Novack, 35, who was most recently a senior category manager at Impossible Foods. "It felt like the universe was saying 'yes, please, have your freak, and we'll help you out."
Aggrey started at SpaceX as an intern when he was 21, a decade after the company was incorporated. Before he left earlier this year, he was a senior software engineer and among the few hundred people who had worked at the company the longest.
It had always been a dream job, he said. He'd wanted to work on rockets since middle school.
Throughout his 14-year tenure, he worked on the mechanical structures of the Falcon 9 rocket, avionics (electronics for flight vehicles) for various spacecraft, and on the design of those avionics components. Aggrey accumulated a sizable number of SpaceX shares from both his initial signing allocation and from his annual performance bonuses.
Aggrey and Novack, who met in college at Washington University in St. Louis, at one point saved money by living with roommates in Los Angeles while Aggrey put as much money as possible into purchasing SpaceX stock options. I also went to Washington University in St. Louis, where I was in the same circle of friends as Novack. After years of being in touch only sporadically, I reached out to hear if the Space X IPO had changed any of their life plans. Aggrey recalled a time in 2015 when he wasn't able to afford both the taxes on those options and rent, and his roommate fronted him $200.
Living in Los Angeles, where Novack is from, since graduation, the couple said they have always focused on structure, stability, and saving money, even going on biannual retreats together to plot out their finances. Now, it is serendipity and improvisation that guide them.
"The reaction from people who have known us for a long time has been, 'You're doing what? You're where?' I think it was shocking because it is so different from how we've lived life," Novack said.
This year, SpaceX's June 12 IPO, the world's largest IPO to date, gave the company a valuation of $2.1 trillion after its first day of trading, minting not just the world's first trillionaire but new millionaires, too. Some of Aggrey and Novack's peers are considering retiring and purchasing additional homes, the couple said.
To fund their year of exploration, the pair sold enough shares to feel insulated from the volatility of SpaceX stock, but the majority of their stake remains in the market. "The IPO really gave us the confidence to treat that stake as real capital," Aggrey said.
"We're privileged to be in this place," he added. "It's been a long road."
During August, the couple lived in Fontainebleau, a bucolic town southeast of Paris surrounded by forest and featuring a UNESCO-designated Château that royals, including Napoleon, once called home. "It's full of possibility, kind of romantic, very French," Novack said.
There, Novack attended the Fontainebleau School of Acting (called "Fonact") for 35 hours a week. It's known for featuring faculty who trained and taught at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, one of the world's most prestigious conservatories. While Novack had taken improv classes, the summer program at Fonact was a chance to train in dramatic acting (she's a fan of National Theatre Live), with students from around the world, aged 16 to 72; they put on a showcase of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.
With Novack in class, Aggrey would often bike into nearby towns on a 1980s Peugeot bike he bought on Leboncoin, a kind of Craigslist for France. Some days, he would take the train into Paris to visit museums or sit in cafes and read French novels. Both Novack and Aggrey took lessons with a French tutor.
When Aggrey discovered that a total solar eclipse would be visible in Valencia, Spain in August, he made a last-minute trip across the border to photograph the cosmic event. "It was an emotional experience," he said. "The sun's corona, its atmosphere, is always there. But I could only see it, and all its colors, when the sun was blocked out. It was a great allegory for this year itself. If I didn't take this trip, I never would have seen this thing that was there the whole time, this beautiful part of our universe."
Aggrey's major creative project will begin later this fall. He plans to spend time in Mexico City, collaborating with sculptor Brian Thoreen on a project that they hope will illuminate new solutions to the city's water shortages. Thoreen works with bronze, leather, and earthen materials; Aggrey specializes in precision components and mechanical elements.
"We need to be able to play with our environment, to interact with our world to really understand it better," Aggrey said.
In the following months, Novack plans to take classes in landscape design, visual arts and film production. "I've spent 13 years being like, 'No, I can't do that,'" she said. "Now it is: 'No, we do everything, and there's no limit-for one year.'"
The pair plans to come back to California for the winter: El Niño is expected to produce intense snowfall they'd like to ski, and ocean swells they'd like to surf.
Aggrey and Novack have set a firm end date for their creative rumspringa: July 31, 2027. They may go back to work in similar careers to those they left behind. Or maybe they will pivot. After experiencing public transit in Europe, Aggrey is especially interested in improving systems in the U.S.
They also hope the experiment will help them appreciate life at a different pace and in a different way.
A few weeks ago, the mother of Fonact founder Laurent de Montalembert hosted the acting students in Novack's program for dinner at her villa compound, which features a gray stone archway, a fountain, vegetable garden, and greenhouse.
That morning, Aggrey bought fresh fruit from the open-air market and baguettes from the local boulangerie, then helped cook the meal with a group of de Montalembert's friends and family. They laid a buffet with French wine and cheeses, roast chicken, and Aggrey's salads, one with watermelon, one with peach.
The magic of the evening was as much about the couple's ability to be there as it was embracing the specificity of the place, they said. They left the party well after 1AM.
"I think it is going to be very important for the second half of our lives," Aggrey said, "to have had this experience and been like 'Yeah, OK, we tried things differently.'"
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