I took this photo on my first day at SpaceX, nearly a decade ago.
It is hard to put into words how much this company has changed my life. From the early days before Starlink was built, to the first Starship launch, the Twitter acquisition, DOGE, xAI, and now SpaceX going public, I feel incredibly grateful to have contributed to such an amazing mission.
I had the opportunity to be involved in something much bigger than myself, something that genuinely pushes the world and humanity forward.
To everyone who built this company, believed in the mission, and gave so much of themselves to make this possible, thank you. I will always be grateful to have been a small part of it.
I fucking love this company from the bottom of my heart.
$SPCX
SpaceX's 11th employee just became a billionaire.
Gwynne Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002. She was employee number 11, joining as VP of Business Development before the company had proven a single rocket could fly.
She didn't even go there looking for a job. She had taken a colleague to lunch to celebrate him leaving for SpaceX, ran into Musk at the restaurant, and got interviewed on the spot. A week later, she joined him.
Her job: sell rocket launches for a company nobody had heard of. She built the Falcon vehicle manifest to over $5 billion in commercial contracts. She managed SpaceX's growth to 22,000 employees. She was the one who told NASA, the Air Force, and paying commercial customers why SpaceX could get to orbit cheaper and faster than anyone before it.
She was also the one who said no to going public for years. "I wasn't sure the company would go public," she said on CNBC yesterday. She resisted the pressure because she believed the public markets would force SpaceX into quarterly thinking, which would kill the mission.
She finally decided it was time. "I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings," she said on IPO day. "What we're doing is very futuristic."
Her stake is now worth north of $1.3 billion. She's SpaceX's fifth-largest Class A shareholder.
The 24 years of operational work that made yesterday possible have Gwynne Shotwell's fingerprints on them.
My video from the Hawthorne office of the final Falcon 1 launch (first ever success with deployment). This is one of those startup moments you never forget, and why you get into tech in the first place. 7/13/09.
This week we have an important update about the Combat & Progression Update as well as Highlights from Week Six on the Public Test Realm. Mastery for Tanks arrives! https://t.co/8bZoK6XaIb
@Kanon_XO@UnchainedGame I'd go so far as to say it's 1.5/10 total dumpster fire. it straight up does not work most the time. skills just don't work. fights have so much lag you can't even have a fair fight. world is so empty you run for 10 min to find a fight and then die in 3 seconds.
@BoosterTribe@SpaceX love it!, for those of us want to do the same what can we do? how can we join I want to be a part as well. I just moved to the space Coast in Florida for this reason! I've sent a few resumes with no results yet, but I'm hopeful.
Ive compiled all of the live stream views of the New Glenn Booster explosion into one video (mainly for myself) but its also a good way to archive this footage as you can only rewind the 24/7 views up to 12 hours in the past so this footage would be lost to the public otherwise.
Also making use of this blue check by uploading a long ass video.
All Credits go towards the livestream providers: NSF, Avid Space, and Spaceflight Now.
Credits and time stamps are provided in the index portion of the video at the very begining