Gwynne Shotwell Is The Right Hand Of Elon Musk
Meet Gwynne Shotwell, the right hand of Elon Musk. Gwynne is the President and COO of SpaceX. She is in charge of the firm’s day-to-day operations as well as its expansion. To put it another way, she is in charge of selling rockets. Read: 8 Female Inventors Who Changed The Course Of History
As a child, Gwynne was never interested in rockets. She was five years old when her neurosurgeon father gathered the family around the television to see the Apollo 11 lunar landing. At that time, watching an Apollo landing was least attractive to her. She did not grow up watching Star Trek. Nonetheless, fate led her to SpaceX.
Early Life Of Gwynne Shotwell
Gwynne Shotwell was the middle child of two sisters and grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, a tiny town north of Chicago. As a child, she loved machines. She used to ask her mother about vehicle engines when she was in third grade.
In high school, she was a varsity basketball player and cheerleader, who wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after graduation. Her mother desired Gwynne to become an engineer, so she dragged Gwynne to a women’s engineering conference that eventually transformed her life. Gwynne admired the female mechanical engineer on the panel and the lovely outfit she was wearing. She inquired about the outfit and what the female mechanical engineer did. And that day, she told her mother, ‘OK, mum, you can get off my back; I’m going to be a mechanical engineer.’
Gwynne applied to Northwestern University which was about a half-hour drive from her house. It was the only university to which she applied. Gwynne was one of three women among 36 mechanical engineering undergrads, but as she once said she didn’t mind being in what was then considered a “man’s world.”
Initially, Gwynne had some difficulty securing an internship with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning design firm. The boss was impressed with her credentials, but when he called her for the first time, she described the interaction as follows, as featured in Northwestern University’s magazine.
“The guy said, ‘You’re a girl?’
I said, ‘Well, of course, I’m a girl.’
He says, ‘Well, you can’t possibly do this job. There’ll be heavy lifting.’
I said, ‘I lift weights. I’m an athlete,’
and he basically said, ‘You can’t have this job’ and hung up. It was so blatant — what a jerk.”
She earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1986 and interviewed with IBM on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident — a mission that drew a lot of attention because a teacher was on board. Even though Gwynne did not receive a job at IBM, she was employed by Chrysler as part of a programme that prepared graduates for management. She did everything at Chrysler, from rebuilding engines to working alongside engineers who created the automobiles.
She didn’t enjoy the work, so she left to go to graduate school at Northwestern. After earning her Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics, she stumbled across a former teaching assistant who happened to be working for The Aerospace Corporation in California. He advised her to do the same, so she applied and was employed as a thermal analyst, which included running real-time models of the space shuttle heating on supercomputers and providing that data to NASA. But this work didn’t excite her either. She was eager to get out there and create something big.
After a decade at The Aerospace Corporation, she moved on to Microcosm, a low-cost rocket manufacturer, where she rose to the position of director, focusing on selling services to the government and other businesses. She honed the business abilities that were ultimately critical for SpaceX’s success.
How did she get to SpaceX?
According to Eric Berger’s book Liftoff, Gwynne’s colleague at Microcosm, engineer Hans Koenigsmann, was about to quit to join SpaceX, which was then a little-known firm. Gwynne took him out for a farewell meal before dropping him off at his new workstation. Koenigsmann volunteered to show her the sights. That’s how Gwynne met Elon Musk. Musk discussed his plans to reduce the cost of space travel by developing his own rockets in-house. Musk’s vision and the desire to shake things up in the aerospace industry impressed Gwynne a lot.
Gwynne suggested that Musk engage a salesperson to locate a customer for SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1. Musk heeded her advice and eventually offered her the job, albeit she did not accept it straight away. She already had a steady career, two small children to care for, and had recently divorced her first husband. She remarked on her difficult decision when she delivered a virtual commencement address at her alma mater in 2021. It appeared extremely risky for me to join this small start-up in a sector where no one had ever succeeded. I was a part-time single mother at the time, and this was simply out of my league.
I was driving down the interstate in Los Angeles when it suddenly dawned on me: I was being a complete idiot. What does it matter if I tried this job and either I or the company failed? What I realised at that point was that the most essential component was the trying part.
Take that risk and be a part of something extraordinary. I don’t want to think about how my life and career would have turned out if I had said no. I’m sure I’d be fine, but I wouldn’t have been a part of this incredible firm, working with such fantastic individuals. The failure would have been if I had not taken the job.
Read: The Importance of Artificial Intelligence: How It’ll Impact the World in 10 Years
The Secret Sauce Behind Space X Success
Gwynne joined SpaceX in 2002 as Vice President of Sales. She was the eleventh employee. Today, some refer to her as the “secret sauce” behind the company’s success, owing to her engineering expertise, business acumen, and industry connections that helped her score lucrative contracts. She negotiated a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to ferry cargo and supplies to astronauts on the International Space Station after SpaceX launched the Falcon 1 into orbit on its fourth try in 2008. That transaction saved SpaceX from going bankrupt. In 2013, Gwynne was instrumental in winning a 20-year lease of Kennedy Space Center’s launchpad 39A, which had previously been used for Apollo moon missions and space shuttle flights.
Working for Musk is not easy, as some former employees at his other business, Tesla, have acknowledged. “It’s a culture in which, if you don’t have a solution to an issue and you don’t get that problem resolved within a few days or a week or two, you’re gone,” an ex-manager there told Business Insider. So you should keep your mouth shut.”
Gwynne, the right hand of Elon Musk, feels otherwise. She says Musk motivates you to perform your best job. At a TED Conference Gwynne mentioned,
“…when Elon says something, you have to pause and not quickly blurt out, ‘Well, that’s impossible’ or ‘There’s no way we’re going to achieve that…’ So you zip it, think about it, and figure out how to get it done.”
SpaceX was the first private corporation to send American astronauts to the International Space Station. It then intends to send humans to the moon and then to Mars on a fully reusable rocket called Starship. We wish to change the world for the better. And our role is to create systems that will transport humans to other planets, thereby spreading the human species. And I know that sounds insane, and it’s not very businesslike, but that’s why we’re in business.
Gwynne has helped SpaceX grow from 10 to 10,000 people over the last two decades. From zero to billions of dollars in sales per year. Elon and Gwynne may appear to be diametrically opposite. He is occasionally awkward. She’s smooth and cheerful. Nonetheless, they share a common vision that is to get things done.
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