SpaceX's 11th employee just became a billionaire.
Gwynne Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002. She was employee number 11, joining as VP of Business Development before the company had proven a single rocket could fly.
She didn't even go there looking for a job. She had taken a colleague to lunch to celebrate him leaving for SpaceX, ran into Musk at the restaurant, and got interviewed on the spot. A week later, she joined him.
Her job: sell rocket launches for a company nobody had heard of. She built the Falcon vehicle manifest to over $5 billion in commercial contracts. She managed SpaceX's growth to 22,000 employees. She was the one who told NASA, the Air Force, and paying commercial customers why SpaceX could get to orbit cheaper and faster than anyone before it.
She was also the one who said no to going public for years. "I wasn't sure the company would go public," she said on CNBC yesterday. She resisted the pressure because she believed the public markets would force SpaceX into quarterly thinking, which would kill the mission.
She finally decided it was time. "I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings," she said on IPO day. "What we're doing is very futuristic."
Her stake is now worth north of $1.3 billion. She's SpaceX's fifth-largest Class A shareholder.
The 24 years of operational work that made yesterday possible have Gwynne Shotwell's fingerprints on them.