Virgin Galactic

How it happened

Virgin Galactic is a commercial spaceflight company aiming to fly tourists to suborbital space, reaching a ~$13B valuation after its 2021 trading peak following a 2019 SPAC listing. Repeated delays in commercial service, limited flight cadence, and heavy cash burn eroded investor confidence, and its market capitalization fell roughly 96% to around $0.2-0.5B by 2026. Employee reviews from the slide years echoed the delays: staff described timelines management kept over-promising, a steady exodus of veteran engineers, benefits pared back amid aggressive cost-cutting, and the roughly 18% layoff in late 2023 — which, insiders said, landed via company-wide email.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.