--- title: "Boy Genius Quits SpaceX for Greener Pastures" description: "After landing a job at SpaceX's Starlink internet division at just 14, now-16-year-old Kairan Quazi is leaving satellites for finance." date: "2025-08-21" modified: "2025-08-21" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/boy-genius-quits-spacex" categories: - "Space" - "SpaceX" tags: - "finance" - "labor" - "SpaceX" - "starlink" --- # Boy Genius Quits SpaceX for Greener Pastures ![After landing a job at SpaceX's Starlink internet division at just 14, now-16-year-old Kairan Quazi is leaving satellites for finance.]() *\Image: Shae Hammond / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News via Getty / Futurism (edited) \* After making waves for getting a job at SpaceX's Starlink at the precocious age of 14, Bay Area [boy wonder Kairan Quazi]() is preparing to leave the nest, move to New York, and get a new job. Quazi, now 16, [explained to *Business Insider*]() why he's leaving Starlink to work for Citadel Securities, one of the [world's biggest stock trading firms]() that specializes in the rapid-fire algorithmic transactions of quantitative finance. "After two years at SpaceX," the precocious teen told *BI*, "I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment." Despite sounding a bit like a cover letter, that statement is pretty telling — especially for a teen as gifted as Quazi, who at 14, just before he started at SpaceX, became the [youngest person ever]() to graduate from Santa Clara University. Though he suggests his junior engineer role was fulfilling and maintains that working on Starlink offered him a "broad scope and a lot of responsibility," it seems, when reading between the lines, that Quazi's brilliance may not have been properly utilized at the Elon Musk-owned rocket company. Instead of grabbing coffee or laundry like so many young interns, the teen whiz was tasked with designing and executing beam-tracking software for Starlink's satellites, a daunting task that involved "developing ideas and presenting them to other engineers and leadership, ultimately implementing them, and monitoring the rollouts." While he found that SpaceX had an "ambitious" culture that required "high-performance," Quazi seemed to imply that things moved too slowly for his liking at SpaceX. Ultimately, that desire to move fast and *make* — not break — things led to him turning lots of other job offers to join Citadel Securities, the sister trading firm to billionaire Ken Griffin's hedge fund Citadel LLC. "Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace," the juvenile genius told *BI*. "At Citadel Securities, I'll be able to see measurable impact in days, not months or years like many research environments." The trading firm's openness to his unconventional background — a demure way of saying he's a dyed-in-the-wool wunderkind — was also attractive to Quazi. "They moved very quickly," he said, "and didn't use my age or years of experience to gate-keep opportunities." At this new gig, Quazi will be moving cross-country from Redmond, Washington, where the SpaceX campus he worked at is located, to New York City. Though there will invariably be some growing pains, the prodigy isn't too concerned about being in the Big Apple on his own. As he told the website, his mother — herself a former investment banker — grew up in Astoria, Queens, and he's been visiting since he was (even) younger. Overall, Quazi's cross-country move away from SpaceX seems like a great career trajectory for someone as unique and brilliant as he — and in NYC, where everybody uses public transit, the genius who still hasn't gotten his driver's license won't need his mom to chauffeur him to work anymore. **More on job hunting:** [*Computer Science Grads Are Being Forced to Work Fast Food Jobs as AI Tanks Their Career*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()