When SpaceX began trading Friday under the ticker SPCX, at a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion, president and COO Gwynne Shotwell may very well have been wearing a little slip of paper in her shoes—a ritual she does when SpaceX launches things.
It dates back to September 2008. Shotwell was in a Glasgow hotel bathroom, with the shower running so her husband could sleep, while on the phone with her team to price SpaceX’s bid for a $1.6 billion NASA resupply contract. At the same time, the company’s fourth Falcon 1 launch, which Elon Musk believed was the last one the company could afford before going bankrupt, counted down half a world away.
The rocket reached orbit. Shotwell told Stanford Business School’s View From the Top podcast that she ran down the hotel hallway “in my yoga pants and jammy top,” knocking on her team’s doors, and they “kind of” broke into the hotel bar at two in the morning to drink warm Champagne. Ever since, she writes “Scotland” on two sticky notes and puts one in each shoe on launch days, so she is always, technically, in Scotland, and has that moonshot mindset.
