Photo credit: Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Gwynne Shotwell is laying the groundwork for that lunar vacation you’re going to take someday. That’s because she’s become the steady, highly effective operator behind SpaceX’s most ambitious leaps forward.
As President and COO, she’s the one turning Elon Musk’s big visions into actual hardware, launches, and revenue. Few, including me, thought SpaceX would be anything but a vanity project when it started. Still, Shotwell has me eating crow by growing SpaceX into a $350 billion company with more than 13,000 employees.
Over the past year, she’s overseen two major SpaceX successes. First, there’s the progress that’s been made in the Starship project. After a string of failures, the 10th test flight went well, becoming a turning point that allowed Shotwell to push toward the V3 design that could someday take humans to the Moon and Mars.
She also negotiated a massive $17 billion spectrum deal with EchoStar to expand Starlink. That’s unlocked SpaceX’s direct-to-cell service and is reshaping how the company works with global telecoms. Musk may have the headlines, but Shotwell’s combination of engineering skill, operational discipline, and deal-making savvy actually makes her one of the most influential figures in space and telecom.
