Why the ‘Mother of Dragons’ at SpaceX left her job building rockets to work on nuclear fusion
Darby Dunn, the Vice President of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn held a handful of engineering and production roles at SpaceX.
“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I was leading the build out of our new manufacturing facilities for the crew Dragon vehicle.”
While she was overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to making its very first spacecraft, and then to sending cargo to the International Space Station on it regularly, Dunn says.
Building rockets is a very cool thing to do. But in January 2019, Dunn started work at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that is attempting to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the way the sun and the stars make energy. If it can be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide virtually unlimited clean energy.
But so far, fusion at scale remains in the realm of science fiction.
Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.
Photo courtesy Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the switch from building rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.
“I very much believe SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I’ll see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC at the end of May.
But Dunn has spent large chunks of her life living in California, where SpaceX is based, and has very much seen the effects of climate change in the shape of wildfires and mudslides stemming from extreme rain.
“For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it. So that was the the huge shift for me to come to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the early stages, as its 10th employee, has allowed her to see a different stage on the journey of company growth, too.
“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I joined SpaceX when it was 6 years old with about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been able to see the entire era that I didn’t get to experience at SpaceX and doing so at CFS.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
A key difference between the two jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.
“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. So building a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look really similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works is all very, very well studied and very well understood,” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion machines have been studied in academic settings and research labs since the early 1950s, but the entire industry is just at the very first stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. It’s being a part of that excitement that was a big draw for Dunn.
Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX prepared her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets back from space, everybody said, ‘That’s not possible! You can’t do it!'” Dunn said, referencing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it is possible and so they were going to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took many attempts, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations on our software, many failed attempts off the boat — and then we did it. And then we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she said.
Darby Dunn, vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“Now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Well, why aren’t these other companies also lending their rockets back from space?’ It’s completely changed the way that people are looking at it. They first said, ‘It wasn’t possible. Then, ‘OK, it is possible.’ And now it is saying, ‘Well, why isn’t everybody else jumping in?'”
Dunn is looking to be part of that kind of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.
Speed is key
Dunn is the vice president of operations, which covers manufacturing, safety, quality and facilities. She’s helping Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to manufacturing and full-scale production.
The company spun out of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the company’s goal is to build 10,000 fusion power plants around the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
First, however, Commonwealth has to prove that it can generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is necessary to get the reaction started, a key threshold for the fusion industry called “ignition.” To do that, the company is currently building its SPARC tokamak — a device that will help contain and control the fusion reaction. The company plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net energy shortly thereafter.
To build SPARC, Commonwealth needs to make a lot of magnets using high-temperature superconducting tape.
The advanced manufacturing facility located at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“The cool part of this building is that the concept for it started out as a doodle that I made on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams going up, walls going up, concrete getting poured, it’s a whole vision coming to life, which is super exciting.”
To fund the construction, Commonwealth has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital.
Even as Commonwealth is figuring out how to make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that can eventually scale to a process that looks like an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.
Moving fast is a priority for Dunn, and the rest of the team. After building the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company aims to build a bigger version called ARC, which it says is going to deliver electricity to the grid. The aim is to have ARC online in the 2030s.
“The biggest thing I think about a lot is time, about how fast can we go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can get the magnets built, the sooner we can build SPARC, the sooner we can turn it on, the sooner we can get in net energy, the sooner we get to our first ARC. So I think that’s probably the element that I think about the most.”
Darby Dunn in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems advanced manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed matters because critics argue that it will take too long to get fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that to have “no or limited” overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels will require a 45% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and hitting net zero around 2050.
“I have asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion as opposed to something that is going to be deployed next year?'” she told CNBC. “For me, it comes down to the fact that fusion is the most energy dense reaction in our solar system.”
But she does not believe fusion should be the only solution.
“I very much believe in in solar power and wind and a lot of other renewables — that we absolutely need those. We need those deployed now. We need those deployed all over the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I don’t think they will be enough to get us to 2050 and beyond.”
Electric cars, heat pumps, green steel and green cement all depend on having large quantities of clean electricity. Its Dunn’s focus to build the energy sources that the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.
If Commonwealth is going to deliver that solution, though, Dunn first has to make a whole lot of very high-powered magnets.
“My own personal opinion is I’m going to keep on keeping on — keep on building. And we have a poster in the back stairwell that says, ‘Keep calm and fuse on,” Dunn told CNBC. “Regardless of what the outside world is saying, we are working every day towards our mission of getting net-positive energy from fusion. And I look forward to proving that to the world in a couple of years.”
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely viewed as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.
That follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, Trump was using his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.
“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, who left the company in 2020.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bring political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg pitched the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content-moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to buddy up with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, is joining the company’s board.
And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s policy vice president. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, including as a deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush.
Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect over the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Those cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to shutter several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.
The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines were published by the news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the last two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
Though Meta’s content-policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans in the aftermath of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning the public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“In 2028, they’ll recalibrate again,” she said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the U.S. to meet people in states he hadn’t previously visited. He published a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced harsh criticism about fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
Following the 2020 election, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a harder stand on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that the “amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but it drew the ire of Republicans.
Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.
“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has plenty at stake.
The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared with those in the European Union, where Meta says harsh restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to having Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflects a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and has expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump reiterated that statement in his book, “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
Meta spends $14 million annually on providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president bring their own risks.
After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers that they were quitting Facebook.
“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Apple is losing market share in China due to declining iPhone shipments, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a report on Friday. The stock slid 2.4%.
“Apple has adopted a cautious stance when discussing 2025 iPhone production plans with key suppliers,” Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, wrote in the post. He added that despite the expected launch of the new iPhone SE 4, shipments are expected to decline 6% year over year for the first half of 2025.
Kuo expects Apple’s market share to continue to slide, as two of the coming iPhones are so thin that they likely will only support eSIM, which the Chinese market currently does not promote.
“These two models could face shipping momentum challenges unless their design is modified,” he wrote.
Kuo wrote that in December, overall smartphone shipments in China were flat from a year earlier, but iPhone shipments dropped 10% to 12%.
There is also “no evidence” that Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence offering, is driving hardware upgrades or services revenue, according to Kuo. He wrote that the feature “has not boosted iPhone replacement demand,” according to a supply chain survey he conducted, and added that in his view, the feature’s appeal “has significantly declined compared to cloud-based AI services, which have advanced rapidly in subsequent months.”
Apple’s estimated iPhone shipments total about 220 million units for 2024 and between about 220 million and 225 million for this year, Kuo wrote. That is “below the market consensus of 240 million or more,” he wrote.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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