Meet the SpaceX insiders Elon Musk trusts to run his $1.25 trillion empire

Everyone knows Elon Musk is the genius behind the biggest stock market debut of all time. But even a genius, in the immortal words of Jim Collins, needs a thousand helpers. So who, exactly, is helping him run SpaceX?

The company Musk founded in an El Segundo, Calif. warehouse in 2002 is not quite the company it was even 18 months ago. In February 2026, Musk folded his artificial intelligence startup xAI into SpaceX in an all-stock deal. The deal created a $1.25 trillion private behemoth—part rocket company, part satellite constellation, part AI firm—before handing shares of it to the public. 

Several of the executives who built SpaceX’s launch business now formally oversee xAI’s operations, too. A longtime general counsel retired without a named successor. And a new board, assembled just months before the IPO, includes two fresh faces elevated to satisfy the governance expectations of public market investors.

The result is an organization that is more complex, more sprawling, and more deeply “Musk” than ever. Below is an updated guide to the power players running SpaceX and the changes that quietly reshaped SpaceX’s leadership in the months leading up to the biggest market debut the world has ever seen.

Cofounder, CEO, Chairman, and Chief Technical Officer

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 after famously trying to buy refurbished Russian ICBMs for a Mars greenhouse mission and deciding he could build rockets more cheaply himself. More than two decades later, he remains what he has always been at the company: not just a CEO but its chief designer, lead systems engineer, and singular decision-making authority. As COO Gwynne Shotwell explained at Stanford, Musk sets the vision while everyone else executes.

President and COO—and now xAI Operational Overseer

If Musk is the architect of SpaceX’s ambitions, Shotwell is the builder. She was recruited in 2002 as the company’s 11th employee. She was named President in 2008 after securing a pivotal NASA contract. Today she oversees a full-time workforce of 22,000, manages all customer and strategic relationships, and sits on the company’s board of directors. Since the SpaceX-xAI merger closed in February, Shotwell also formally helps oversee xAI’s operations, cementing her position as the connective tissue across the entire Musk empire.

Vice President of Vehicle Engineering

Mark Juncosa joined SpaceX in 2005 and has been one of its most quietly consequential engineering executives ever since, according to the corporate transparency platform The Org. He rose through the ranks from senior director of structural engineering (2011) to vice president of structures engineering (2013) before taking on his current role as vice president of vehicle engineering in 2015. In that capacity, he oversees development of SpaceX’s entire vehicle portfolio—Starlink satellites, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy among them.

Juncosa is also the executive most directly associated with Starbase, SpaceX’s sprawling launch and development campus on the Texas Gulf Coast. Along with Shotwell, he is said to oversee the facility’s day-to-day operations—making him a central figure in the Starship program’s progress toward deep-space missions.

CFO and President of Strategic Acquisitions Group

Bret Johnsen has been SpaceX’s sole CFO since 2011—when Musk recruited him with the explicit aim of eventually taking the company public, Fortune previously reported . He spent nearly a decade at Broadcom in senior finance before becoming CFO of networking chip firm........

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