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 Space X? 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 x AI into Space X 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. TOP EXECUTIVES Elon Musk 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. Gwynne Shotwell 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 Pr