SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell has a message for investors

SpaceX didn’t just rewrite the playbook for aerospace and defense, it helped birth a new space economy.

Now Elon Musk’s company is tackling a different type of moonshot: going public. 

“I wasn’t sure we would go public,” SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in an exclusive interview, just before the company started its investor roadshow. “It actually feels like the right time now.”

Speaking from a walkway overlooking the Starship factory at SpaceX’s rapidly expanding headquarters in the company town of Starbase, Texas, Shotwell said the rocket maker needed to be private in order to focus on long-term goals rather than quarterly financials.

“Today, across SpaceX’s various businesses, the building blocks of a publicly traded company are now in place,” she said. Eight years ago, Shotwell said an IPO probably wouldn’t happen until SpaceX was doing regular missions to Mars.

Shotwell is SpaceX’s top executive underneath Musk, the founder, CEO, technology chief and board chair, and the person who’s stated goal is to make life multiplanetary. Musk focuses on high-level strategy and deep dives into the technical development of the future.

Making the business work on Earth is the job of those around him, namely Shotwell. An early employee recruited in 2002, SpaceX’s first year, Shotwell oversees the day-to-day operations of a 22,000-person full-time workforce. She’s managed everything from rocket development to the creation of Starlink and, more recently, the integration of xAI. She also talks to customers, regulators and, starting now, public investors.  

“Elon jokes that we make the impossible, we just make it late,” said Shotwell, who is also one of the company’s eight board members. “Look at our track record, look at our history. We do really difficult things. We do bring them to product level. In fact, xAI is definitely starting to be product-focused.”

Engineering advanced technology to tackle tough business cases others have deemed unviable, and then commercializing them, is the SpaceX playbook.

With rocketry, the company underbid competitors for launch contracts, implemented reusable boosters, and drastically drove down the cost to fly to space. Making Starlink work involved sending satellites to low Earth orbit and doing so economically. Now, with artificial intelligence infrastructure, SpaceX has its sights set on building a vertically integrated tech stack stretching into space and encompassing everything from chips to AI applications.

With a record $75 billion IPO, SpaceX carries a stratospheric valuation of nearly $1.77 trillion. At that market cap, SpaceX would debut as the seventh most-valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Meta and Musk’s other public company, Tesla. It would also be worth more than the entire S&P 500 aerospace and defense group.

Skeptics on Wall Street are questioning the math. The valuation suggests an estimated 2026 revenue multiple of 40 and an…