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

Elon remains the singular visionary: he folded xAI into SpaceX in Feb 2026, creating a $1.25T rocket/satellite/AI powerhouse that just went public.
Gwynne Shotwell is the day-to-day builder—running operations for 22,000 employees and now formally overseeing xAI alongside SpaceX.
A tranche of veteran engineering and production chiefs (Starship, Raptor, Starlink) — many shared across Musk firms — are running the industrial scale-up that will define SpaceX’s next chapter.