Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, has dined with President Trump at the White House, lost a flashy 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 last six months. She spoke at a telecom trade show in Barcelona, Spain, to boost SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink; mingled with politicians in India, a potentially large market for the company; and appeared with tech executives at the White House to pledge that their data centers would not increase energy prices for Americans.
For 24 years, Ms. Shotwell has played the adult-in-the-room foil to Mr. Musk at SpaceX. While he was advising Mr. Trump and running his other companies, such as the electric carmaker Tesla, she was singularly focused on developing SpaceX’s business as the rocket and satellite maker grew into a more than $1 trillion company.
That work — and her ultimate obedience to Mr. Musk — has made her one of the world’s most powerful female executives, who is now being thrust into the spotlight as SpaceX prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering this month. Unlike Mr. Musk, Ms. Shotwell, 62, has long kept a low profile. She rarely posts on social media — usually in service of SpaceX, when she does — and makes just the occasional public appearance.
Perhaps her most notable trait is her ability to persist by Mr. Musk’s side for decades, even as the tech billionaire has churned through executives at his other companies. Two former SpaceX executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their personal relationships used one word to describe her: “survivor.”
In a 2018 interview at a TED conference, Ms. Shotwell outlined how she handled Mr. Musk. She never told him immediately that his ambitions were impossible, she said, and she would “find ways to get that done.”
“I love working for Elon,” she said, adding later, “I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals — make them achievable.”
Ms. Shotwell has been handsomely rewarded for her efforts, accumulating enough SpaceX shares to make her a billionaire. Last year, she was the highest-paid executive at the company, receiving total compensation of more than $85 million, according to SpaceX’s filings.
“Elon represents the brilliant innovation and the vision, and Gwynne is the engine that keeps everything operating on schedule,” said Peter Diamandis, a SpaceX investor and the founder of the XPrize Foundation, a nonprofit that supports technological development. “It’s an incredible partnership.”
Mr. Musk, Ms. Shotwell and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
A mechanical engineer by training with a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, Ms. Shotwell worked at Chrysler before moving to California in the late 1980s to work at a space research nonprofit. She met Mr. Musk, a co-founder of the electronic payments firm PayPal, in 2002. After PayPal was sold to eBay that year, Mr. Musk decided to plunge some of the proceeds from the deal into a rocket start-up.
In their first meeting, Ms. Shotwell proposed that Mr. Musk hire a full-time businessperson for SpaceX. But when he asked her to join, she told him she was happy with her current job. She dithered for about a month before accepting his offer, she said in an interview on a Stanford business school podcast.
“I called him on the phone, and I said, ‘I’ve been a bleeping idiot,’” Ms. Shotwell said. She became SpaceX’s seventh employee.
In its early years, the company worked to prove Mr. Musk’s thesis that it could build rockets cheaper than those flown by NASA. It designed its own rocket parts and ran 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 getting satellites and other gear into orbit cheaper. One customer was Facebook, now Meta. In a deal negotiated by Ms. Shotwell, Facebook contracted with SpaceX to launch a $200 million satellite that would bring internet connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa.
It never made it to space. In a prelaunch test, the SpaceX rocket carrying the 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 down from attacking Mr. Zuckerberg on social media, they said.
Ms. Shotwell is one of the few people who can moderate Mr. Musk’s impulses, former SpaceX executives said. Some 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 in-person self better than his Twitter self,” Ms. Shotwell said of her boss on the Stanford business school podcast. “In fact, they feel like two different people to me many of the times.”
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, in an interview with CNBC, three former SpaceX executives said. In the interview, Mr. Musk said Mr. Trump was “not the right guy,” while calling Ms. 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 Ms. Shotwell’s stepping in to streamline operations and organize staff after another executive was shown the door. She provided workers with 15-minute windows to meet with her on one condition: “No Debbie Downers.”
Ms. Shotwell also led weekly meetings with senior SpaceX officials, sometimes without Mr. Musk, to delve into details and technical problems in different parts of the business, two people who have attended said. And she held regular gatherings for women at SpaceX.
“She was a person I could see myself in,” said Paige Holland-Thielen, a former SpaceX engineer. “I will never be Elon Musk because I’m a woman. But she seemed so much more human.”
Over and over, Ms. Shotwell also proved herself to be Mr. Musk’s ultimate 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 to be false; not because I work for Elon, but because I have worked closely with him for 20 years and never seen nor heard anything resembling these allegations.” (Mr. Musk has denied wrongdoing.)
When SpaceX employees including Ms. Holland-Thielen raised concerns about Mr. Musk’s alleged behavior and his 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 that they were disrupting the company.
The employees were eventually fired. Ms. Shotwell attended some of the meetings via phone when the workers were let go, according to a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board.
As SpaceX has moved closer to going public, Ms. Shotwell has appeared at more public events. In March, she attended Mobile World Congress, the telecom trade show in Barcelona, where she championed Starlink Mobile, a new service that allows users to make calls through SpaceX’s satellites. On social media, she has 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 with Jyotiraditya Scindia, India’s communications minister, to discuss Starlink. India is a large market for Starlink, which is waiting for regulatory approval to operate in the country.
“We look forward to bringing Starlink to your great nation,” Ms. Shotwell posted in April.
More recently, Ms. Shotwell has shifted into an area in which she has little expertise: artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with his A.I. company, xAI, in February and refocused the combined entity on developing orbital data centers. Ms. Shotwell has since taken up his vision, though some investors have wondered what a company that focused on rockets and getting humans to Mars has to do with A.I.
“I actually think we can put a constellation of A.I. satellites in orbit before we could actually build the power capability that we would need to power the data centers here on Earth,” Ms. Shotwell told Time magazine in a recent interview.
Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York.
