Meet Gwynne Shotwell, the $2B engineer-turned-COO who runs SpaceX in platform heels

IT dates again to September 2008. Shotwell was in a Glasgow resort toilet, with the bathe working so her husband may sleep, whereas on the cellphone together with her crew to cost SpaceX’s bid for a $1.6 billion NASA resupply contract. On the identical time, the corporate’s fourth Falcon 1 launch, which Elon Musk believed was the final one the corporate may afford earlier than going bankrupt, counted down half a world away.

The rocket reached orbit. Shotwell informed Stanford Enterprise College’s View from the High podcast that she ran down the resort hallway “in my yoga pants and jammy high,” knocking on her crew’s doorways, they usually “form of” broke into the resort bar at two within the morning to drink heat champagne. Ever since, she writes “Scotland” on two sticky notes and places one in every shoe on launch days, so she is at all times, technically, in Scotland, and has that moonshot mindset. 

Eighteen years later, that girl with paper in her footwear grew to become a billionaire, proudly owning 12.6 million shares of probably the most useful firm ever to go public. Based mostly on Friday’s closing worth, meaning her stake is price greater than $2 billion.

The cheerleader who fell in love with an engineer’s footwear

Footwear, as IT occurs, helped information Shotwell to the place she is now. Shotwell was born in 1963, the center of three daughters of a mind surgeon and an artist, and raised in Libertyville, Illinois. She watched the Apollo 11 touchdown at age 5 and located IT boring. At Libertyville Excessive she was a cheerleader and varsity basketball participant who completed on the high of her class. However she had no concept what she needed to do till her mom dragged her—vacation spot undisclosed, as a result of she wouldn’t have gone—to a Society of Girls Engineers panel on the Illinois Institute of Technology. 

She stated the convention bored her till she noticed one fabulous girl engineer. “Her footwear had been marvelous, her bag matched, and he or she simply made mechanical engineering accessible to me,” Shotwell told Marie Clarie in 2017. “I left that occasion saying, ‘Okay, I’ll be a mechanical engineer,’ as a result of I assumed she was cool.”

What adopted was a bit much less glamorous. At Northwestern, she was considered one of three girls in an engineering class of 36. She occurred to interview at IBM on the day the house shuttle Challenger exploded; shaken, she didn’t get the supply, and went into Chrysler’s administration coaching program as an alternative. Unhappy, she went again for a grasp’s in utilized math, then spent a decade on the Aerospace Company in El Segundo, Calif., doing thermal evaluation, adopted by 4 years working the house programs division at Microcosm, a low-cost rocketry store. 

Then in 2002, she had lunch with a former colleague who’d jumped to a startup referred to as SpaceX. The colleague gave her a tour afterward, and Shotwell talked to Elon Musk for 3 or 4 minutes. “I wasn’t in search of a job. I didn’t have a résumé,” she stated. However that afternoon, SpaceX referred to as and requested her to use to run enterprise improvement.  

After a month of hesitation that ended whereas pulled over on an LA freeway, she grew to become worker No. 11, leaving a secure job the place she held a 3% stake. 

“I referred to as him on the cellphone and I stated, ‘[I’m] an fool,’” she recalled at Stanford. Musk laughed and stated, “Welcome to the crew.” 

She had made up her thoughts at that time that if SpaceX failed, she was executed with the business totally: “I’d somewhat promote actual property or be a barista.”

She continues to be not the “central casting” engineer. She likes sporting black skinny denims, platform heels and Chardonnay. She reads Outlander novels to go to sleep and has been prepping her 1,000-acre Texas ranch to at some point turn into a winery.  “I drink quite a lot of wine,” she joked to Marie Claire. “Really, studying might be the factor that calms me probably the most.”

“I would like extra information than Elon”

Her job is one which requires inordinate calm. Functionally, the duty is changing Musk’s pie-in-the-sky ambitions into sensible deadlines. “I would like extra information than Elon does to decide,” she stated at Stanford. 

The corporate tends to hit its targets however not its deadlines, a trait she defends with out apology: “We fail on timeline, however that appears like the appropriate fail to make.” Musk’s personal model, which she repeated to buyers on CNBC forward of the IPO, goes one thing like, “We make the unimaginable, we simply make IT late.”

Now, that doctrine is as much as buyers to resolve. SpaceX’s prospectus guarantees the world and past; AI information facilities in orbit by 2028, a Starship that turns round “like an airplane,” and a million-person Mars colony.

When CNBC’s Morgan Brennan requested when to anticipate that colony, Shotwell guessed 2035, then instantly certified that she’s “so unhealthy at predicting timelines.” 

She requested retail buyers to chop the corporate some slack, including that she doesn’t wish to give attention to earnings as a result of “What we’re doing could be very futuristic.”

Which may work within the brief run. However as OpenAI and Anthropic additionally make their public debuts and swallow oxygen from the capital markets, buyers will weigh SpaceX’s model of the long run versus the opposite corporations’ lofty targets. Since SpaceX absorbed xAI, IT has taken on $29 billion in debt, making IT a deeply unprofitable firm. The corporate went “from these penurious Falcon 9 Dragon days to the costlier capital-intensive Starship, after which to AI, as a result of IT is next-level costly,” Shotwell stated. 

However the firm is used to burning money. In spite of everything, that was the story of its first many years; failed launch after failed launch, sufficient that Shotwell understands failures as an asset. “If a launch goes completely, all you’ve realized is that that launch car on that day labored,” she informed buyers. “When you’ve gotten failure, you really get this treasure trove of knowledge.” 

Shotwell embodies the hedge in opposition to “key-man threat.” Throughout Musk’s June 2025 feud with President Donald Trump—when Musk threatened to decommission the Dragon capsule—she quietly assured NASA the tensions would boil over. 

She has defended him on much more private ranges. Towards her press crew’s recommendation, she despatched a companywide letter after harassment allegations surfaced in 2022: “I don’t consider he may have executed what he was accused of. However he’s imperfect. I’m imperfect.” 

She argued Musk is “most likely the most effective CEO in historical past, for my part, humble opinion,” and that the supermajority-voting management he holds is appropriate. Pressed on succession, she allowed solely that “the corporate wouldn’t collapse clearly with out Elon, however IT would certainly not be the identical.”

However her personal ambitions are extra modest than Mars. Given a Starship and anyplace to go, she’d choose the moon. In spite of everything, Mars takes six months to get to, and “I don’t wish to camp.”