Gwynne Shotwell is not the CEO of SpaceX, she’s the President and COO. Elon Musk it the CEO and chairman of SpaceX.
Yeah… so Presidents are often figureheads, both in corporations and for countries.
Even the CEO can be a figurehead, because what really matters is who’s the majority shareholder. Or do you really think Linda Yaccarino is calling the shots at TwitterX?
But anyway Gwynne Shotwell is COO, so that would involve be overseeing operations of the company. Boca Chica is R&D so it wouldn’t be a thing the COO would have a big hand in.
But the Falcon 9 operations would be something that you’d expect a COO be heavily involved in. So it’s likely Gwynne Shotwell is overseeing operations of that side of things.
You see Elon Musk hanging around Boca Chica sometimes (when he can pry himself away from his insane $44B social media addiction) but doesn’t seem all that involved in the boring routine Falcon 9 launches. Which is kinda the point. SpaceX has a reliable launch system with the Falcon 9, but Elon Musk only cares about big new and shiny things. If he was heavily involved with Falcon 9 he’d be wanting to make all kinds of arbitrary changes which would be problematic in keeping the Falcon 9 human rated, and would likely negatively impact it’s reliability. So give him a few billion dollars and keep him at his little Boca Chica playground where he can’t hurt the core launch business. Well other than taking financial resources away from it of course.
