"rogue employees" are a much bigger issue right now with vague demands and bike shedding stalling progress.
Obviously if Musk lost his interest in space flight that could very possibly be a death knell for the company but that doesn't seem very likely right now.
Yes. And for the love of god (any of them really), could we please get Gwynne Shotwell to take over Elon Musk's twitter account and run it with the competence, diligence, and care with which she's been running SpaceX?
Shotwell explicitly said several times (starting from many years ago) that she won't use twitter.
Also while Shotwell is a wonderful and competent president with a great business acumen. She doesn't have a lot of engineering vision for what things should be. SpaceX is kind of dual-run by Shotwell and Elon Musk. He drives forward and pushes forward with crazy ideas and then when they're semi-marketable he hands off the project to Shotwell to clean things up and prune out some of the economics. For example Starlink was Elon driven up until early 2020 or so, after they'd already started selling to customers, after which it was handed off to Shotwell.
I mean, the world needs both, but if you were proposing to stick me on a desert island with either a batshit-crazy visionary or a boring, immensely competent executor, I know which one I'd pick. And I have a hard time believing that she is completely lacking vision in much the same way that I believe Musk has execution skills as well.
I want to be clear: I say all this as an outsider. I know SpaceX has a reputation for long hours and a high turnover rate, and I won't try to apportion responsibility for those to her and Musk (though I'm sure she gets her share), but I certainly give her at least 50% of the credit for SpaceX getting where they are today both financially and technically.
I read a while ago words to the effect of "the mark of a captain with superior ship-handling skills is that they don't get into situations where they need their superior ship-handling skills". As near as I can tell from the outside, that's Gwynn Shotwell.
Likely Frank Borman (Gemini 7, Apollo 8, test pilot) “A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skill.”
I don't like to try to split up credit. They're both absolutely needed but in different ways. (It's one of the things Tesla has lacked for some time.) One of the other things she's good at is smoothing over ruffled feathers of government bureaucrats. But I personally find that there are a lot fewer Elon Musks in the world than there are Gwynne Shotwells in the world.
And as to the deserted island. I'd take the Elon Musk personally if I had to pick, but I'd prefer to take both.
And as for ship captains. Ship captaining isn't supposed to be exciting and shouldn't be involving risk taking. That analogy doesn't hold into the world of pioneering the new and different. I agree though, if you're running a business based on things that people know how to do well already, all you need is the good ship captain.
Thinking from first principles on what the right solution to escape is, planning resources, putting together a plan and making me believe its possible. Seems like pretty good person to have.
Perhaps my interpretation is incorrect, but what I wrote above is what I read out of this (and other interviews).
> Shotwell: The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. [Interview done in early 2021.] Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.
> The thing about Starship is, we know how to design rockets and fly rockets. What we have failed to do to date is to design and fly a rocket that is easily producible and fully reusable. It's still hard to produce a Falcon 9. It's a lot of work and it's very expensive. The focus for Starship is to make it highly producible, highly reliable, and 100 percent operationally reusable, both for the first and second stage. That's hard.
She gets lots of attention. She is speaker at lots of events, has been on TV many times, has received awards and is universally known by anybody who knows anything about space.
The only reason people keep saying that is because Musk is basically one of the most famous people alive and thus gets absurdly more attention then here.
Shotwell is much better known then pretty much every president of any other space company.
To be fair, most people couldn't name even one executive of a space company except Musk and Bezos. Shotwell has gotten a lot of professional recognition and is well respected by people into spaceflight, but feels like she doesn't get enough of it in more general circles, even though she makes for an amazing role model.
