SpaceX

SpaceX exemplifies founder-fatal migration strategy - Elon Musk invested $100 million of his $180 million PayPal windfall into the company, nearly going bankrupt in 2008-2009 before succeeding. This individual sacrifice (100% personal wealth risk) for offspring success mirrors biological migration where parents risk death to give offspring better survival odds. The strategy only makes sense when potential payoff justifies existential risk - which space exploration's winner-take-all dynamics and government contract economics provided.

But SpaceX also demonstrates when better engineering beats redundant backups. While traditional aerospace relies heavily on redundant systems, SpaceX's approach uses diverse redundancy strategically (Falcon 9 flight computers: three independent manufacturers running different software implementations to protect against common-mode failures) but invests more heavily in higher-reliability single systems through extreme testing and design refinement. Raptor rocket engines use redundant systems less extensively than traditional aerospace, instead pursuing fundamental reliability.

The lesson: redundancy is expensive insurance - sometimes better engineering eliminates the need for it. SpaceX succeeded by questioning aerospace orthodoxy: rather than accepting failure rates and building redundancy, they asked why systems fail and engineered more reliable primary systems. This works when engineering talent is cheaper than redundancy costs.