SpaceX, there is a female president behind the IPO

Behind the SpaceX IPO, there is not only the director of the operation, Elon Musk. But a woman, Gwynne Shotwell, one of the first executives hired by the billionaire entrepreneur and who helped transform the space company into one of the most valuable in the world. Shotwell is an engineer, and has served as president of SpaceX since 2008. He oversaw the development of the rockets and also managed their day-to-day operations.

The reassuring role at SpaceX

Those who know her maintain that she has a reassuring role within the company and that she has a role to play mediator between employees and Musk himself, smoothing out his excesses. She is good at translating the ‘boss’ ambitious ideas into concrete plans. As the WSJ recalls, she said it herself in a 2018 conference: “I always thought that my job was to take her ideas and transform them into business objectives, in order to achieve them.” As one might expect, she is a billionaire: last year her compensation amounted to $86 million, mostly in the form of stock options. And after the IPO, his salary will well exceed $1 billion as he already owns around 12.6 million shares in SpaceX. The partnership with Musk has lasted 20 years. She, who is 62, has never made a secret of being happy to work with him: “He gives me the freedom and flexibility necessary to do my job”.

Superstition

Despite being a high-level manager, Shotwell is not a one-piece woman but she too has her weaknesses. For example, she is superstitious. She confided this herself in 2022. Since she was in Scotland the first time the company managed to put a rocket into orbit, she now writes “Scotland” on two post-it notes and puts them in her shoes to be “in Scotland” for every launch. She’s not even a “yes man”, in fact she has openly said that she doesn’t like the image Musk gives of himself on social media. She doesn’t expose herself, she rarely posts and only on SpaceX.

There are those who swear that Musk wouldn’t be Musk if Shotwell wasn’t behind him, who has always taken his side, even after the 2022 accusations that the Tesla owner had harassed a flight attendant. On that occasion he sent an email to all company staff stating that he believed these accusations to be false. When some employees later published an internal letter criticizing Musk and the company’s response, Shotwell called the letter an example of “excessive activism.” It appears that those employees were then fired.

You are Gwynne

Daughter of a neurosurgeon and an artistGwynne always wanted to be an engineer: ha began his career at Chrysler after earning his bachelor’s degree in engineering and his master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern. His first role at SpaceX was as vice president of business development, where he developed contacts with satellite industry executives and government officials around the world, proposing the company’s goals to them long before it had real success.

She was promoted to president and chief operating officer of SpaceX in 2008, the same year the company won a major $1.6 billion contract with NASA to transport cargo. He lives on a 1,000-acre ranch near a SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas, is married to a fellow space engineer and has two children from a previous marriage. And, Ca Vans can tell, she’s such a workaholic that she installed a Starlink Mini terminal on the roof of her car so she can talk to Musk during her 40-minute commute from home to work without the call dropping.