Gwynne Shotwell, Elon Musk’s No. 2 at SpaceX, is a firm hand at the company

Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, dined with President Trump at the White House, lost a high-profile trial where he testified against his rival Sam Altman and accompanied Mr Trump to China for a major diplomatic summit.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, has had a different itinerary over the past six months. She appeared at a telecommunications trade show in Barcelona, ​​Spain, to promote SpaceX’s satellite Internet service, Starlink; mingled with politicians in India, a potentially large market for the company; and appeared with technology executives at the White House to promise that their data centers would not raise energy prices for Americans.

For 24 years, Ms. Shotwell has played the role of the adult in the room to Mr. Musk at SpaceX. While he advised Mr. Trump and ran his other companies, such as electric car maker Tesla, she was singularly focused on growing the SpaceX business as the rocket and satellite maker grew into a more than $1 trillion company.

That job — and her ultimate obedience to Mr. Musk — made her one of the world’s most powerful female executives, now taking center stage as SpaceX prepares for a successful initial public offering this month. Unlike Mr Musk, Ms Shotwell, 62, has long kept a low profile. He rarely posts on social media — usually on SpaceX services when he does — and makes only occasional public appearances.

Perhaps her most remarkable quality is her ability to persevere by Mr. Musk’s side for decades, even as the tech billionaire worked his way up to lead his other companies. Two former SpaceX executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their personal relationships, described her in one word: “survivor.”

In a interview 2018 at the TED conference, Ms. Shotwell outlined how she treated Mr. Musk. She never immediately told him that his ambitions were impossible, she said, and that he would “find ways to achieve it.”

“I love working for Elon,” she said, later adding, “I’ve always felt like it was my job to take those ideas and turn them into corporate goals — to make them achievable.”

Ms. Shotwell was richly rewarded for her efforts, amassing enough SpaceX stock to make her a billionaire. She was the company’s highest-paid executive last year, receiving more than $85 million in total compensation, according to SpaceX data.

“Elon represents great innovation and vision, and Gwynne is the engine that keeps everything running on schedule,” said Peter Diamandis, SpaceX investor and founder of the XPrize Foundation, a nonprofit that supports technology development. “It’s an incredible partnership.”

Mr. Musk, Ms. Shotwell and a SpaceX spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Shotwell, a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, worked at Chrysler before moving to California in the late 1980s to work at a nonprofit space research organization. She met Mr. Musk, the co-founder of the electronic payments firm PayPal, in 2002. After PayPal was sold to eBay that year, Mr. Musk decided to throw some of the proceeds from the transaction into the rocket start-up.

At their first meeting, Ms. Shotwell suggested that Mr. Musk hire a full-time marketer for SpaceX. But when he asked her to join, she told him she was happy with her current job. She hesitated for about a month before accepting his offer, she said in an interview on podcast from the Stanford Business School.

“I called him on the phone and said, ‘I was a beeping idiot,'” Ms Shotwell said. She became the seventh employee of SpaceX.

In the early years, the company sought to prove Mr. Musk’s thesis that it could build rockets more cheaply than those flown by NASA. It designed its own rocket components and conducted tests from an island in the South Pacific, where employees witnessed explosion after explosion.

By 2015, SpaceX had successfully landed its first reusable rocket booster, which would make it cheaper to launch satellites and other equipment into orbit. One customer was Facebook, now Meta. In a deal brokered by Ms Shotwell, Facebook contracted with SpaceX to launch a $200m satellite to bring internet connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa.

It never made it into space. In a pre-launch test, a SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite exploded. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, criticized SpaceX on social media, angering Mr. Musk, two people with knowledge of the episode said. Ms. Shotwell talked Mr. Musk out of attacking Mr. Zuckerberg on social media, they said.

Ms. Shotwell is one of the few people who can temper Mr. Musk’s impulses, former SpaceX executives said. Some have called her the “Elon Whisperer” for her ability to clean up messes or absorb bad news and find ways to make it palatable to Mr. Musk.

“I like his personal self better than his Twitter self,” Ms. Shotwell said of her boss on a Stanford business school podcast. “In fact, they often seem like two different people to me.”

Ms. Shotwell also showed how she could influence Mr. Musk in 2016 when she helped push him to endorse Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee. interview with CNBC, three former SpaceX executives said. In the interview, Mr Musk said Mr Trump was “not the right person” while calling Clinton’s environmental policies “the right ones”. Mr Musk has since become a supporter of Mr Trump.

Ms. Shotwell appears willing to listen to feedback and encourages workers to email her after company meetings, four former employees said. In 2021, one employee at Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, recalled that Ms. Shotwell stepped in to streamline operations and organize staff after another manager was shown the door. She gave workers 15-minute windows to meet with her on one condition: “No Debbie Downers.

Ms. Shotwell also held weekly meetings with senior SpaceX officials, sometimes without Mr. Musk present, to delve into details and technical issues in various parts of the business, two people who attended said. And she held regular meetings for women at SpaceX.

“She was the person I saw myself in,” said Paige Holland-Thielen, a former SpaceX engineer. “I’ll never be Elon Musk because I’m a woman. But she seemed much more human.”

Time and time again, Ms. Shotwell has also proven to be Mr. Musk’s best defender.

In 2022, after Business Insider published an article that said SpaceX had paid off a flight attendant who accused Mr. Musk of offering to pay her for a sexual act, Ms. Shotwell wrote a letter to employees saying she believed “the allegations are false; not because I work for Elon, but because I’ve worked closely with him for 20 years and I’ve never seen or heard anything like that.” to all”. (Mr. Musk has denied wrongdoing.)

When SpaceX employees, including Ms. Holland-Thielen, raised concerns about Mr. Musk’s alleged behavior and online activity that year, Ms. Shotwell was initially receptive. But after they wrote an open letter that received media attention, Ms Shotwell told Ms Holland-Thielen and others they were disrupting the company.

The employees were eventually fired. Ms. Shotwell participated in some meetings by telephone when the workers were laid off, according to the complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

As SpaceX moved closer to going public, Ms. Shotwell appeared at more public events. In March, she attended Mobile World Congress, a telecommunications trade show in Barcelona, ​​where she promoted Starlink Mobile, a new service that allows users to make calls via SpaceX satellites. On social networksshe called Starlink “David” in its fight against the Goliaths of Verizon, AT&T and others.

The next month, Ms Shotwell was in New Delhi to meet Jyotiraditya Scindia, India’s communications minister, to discuss Starlink. India is a big market for Starlink, which is awaiting regulatory approval to operate in the country.

“We look forward to bringing Starlink to your wonderful nation,” Ms Shotwell wrote in April.

More recently, Ms. Shotwell has moved into an area in which she has little expertise: artificial intelligence.

Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with his AI company, xAI, in February, refocusing the combined entity on developing orbital data centers. Ms. Shotwell has since embraced his vision, even as some investors have questioned what a company focused on rockets and getting people to Mars has to do with artificial intelligence.

“I actually think we can put a constellation of AI satellites into orbit before we can actually build the power capacity we would need to power the data centers here on Earth,” Ms Shotwell said. Time magazine in a recent interview.

Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York.