Meet Gwynne Shotwell, the engineer-turned-COO who runs SpaceX in platform heels and is now worth over $2 billion

When SpaceX began trading Friday under the ticker SPCX, at a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion, President and COO Gwynne Shotwell may very well have been wearing a little slip of paper in her shoes—a ritual she does when SpaceX launches things.

It dates back to September 2008. Shotwell was in a Glasgow hotel bathroom, with the shower running so her husband could sleep, while on the phone with her team to price SpaceX’s bid for a $1.6 billion NASA resupply contract. At the same time, the company’s fourth Falcon 1 launch, which Elon Musk believed was the last one the company could afford before going bankrupt, counted down half a world away.The rocket reached orbit. Shotwell told Stanford Business School’s View from the Top podcast that she ran down the hotel hallway “in my yoga pants and jammy top,” knocking on her team’s doors, and they “kind of” broke into the hotel bar at two in the morning to drink warm champagne. Ever since, she writes “Scotland” on two sticky notes and puts one in each shoe on launch days, so she is always, technically, in Scotland, and has that moonshot mindset. 

Eighteen years later, that woman with paper in her shoes became a billionaire, owning 12.6 million shares of the most valuable company ever to go public. Based on Friday’s closing price, that means her stake is worth more than $2 billion.

The cheerleader who fell in love with an engineer’s shoes

Shoes, as it happens, helped guide Shotwell to where she is now. Shotwell was born in 1963, the middle of three daughters of a brain surgeon and an artist, and raised in Libertyville, Illinois. She watched the Apollo 11 landing at age five and found it boring. At Libertyville High she was a cheerleader and varsity basketball player who finished at the top of her class. But she had no idea what she wanted to do until her mother dragged........

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