[bryant]

Although Gwynne Shotwell manages day to day ops at SpaceX in her role as COO (including executing existing strategy), it's likely she's driving new strategy with Elon's decisionmaking where relevant, so she's essentially steering the ship at this point and has been for what, a decade? She's been at SpaceX for 20 years but at this point SpaceX is likely profitable from BAU so it's not a surprise that she's likely running nearly everything.

TL;DR: Gwynne Shotwell runs SpaceX.

[filoleg]

Agreed. Gwynne Shotwell's hand in SpaceX's success cannot be overstated. Seems like Musk made a very good bet on her, and their partnership keeps working rather great, even after over a decade of that. If SpaceX keeps going on its current track, my prediction is that Shotwell is only going to keep receiving more and more public recognition for her hard achievements. Which makes me happy, as she clearly deserves it.

In my eyes, just like with engineering managers and devs, the strength of an impactful CEO is in collaborating with and enabling their direct reports to deliver great results. It takes two to tango.