SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell, CNBC Interview, June 12, 2026

I am in Starbase, Texas. I'm inside the Starship rocket factory and joining me now is SpaceX president and COO Gwen Shotwell. Wow, it's great to be here. Thank you, Morgan. I'm so glad you could make time to come down to Starbase. It's an incredible place. It really is incredible. And I want to get into Starship specifically here in just a moment. But first, huge moment right now with SpaceX poised to go public, not just for the company, not just for the space industry, but for markets, for the world overall. Why go public? Why now? So it's interesting. I wasn't sure we would go public. Having a private company was important to us early on because we really weren't focused on quarterly financials. We were so focused on the long term outlook for the company. But we've gotten so many of the building blocks completed for so many of these different business areas. It actually feels like the right time. Now, instead of I mean, there's still development left to do. We still have work to do on Starship. We've got work to do on Starlink. But we've got the building blocks there and now it's time to scale. What is being public and able to being private at this point does not? Capital. $75 billion, give or take? Give or take. Minus $20 billion to pay around that. Yeah, scaling is very expensive, actually. And the things that we're doing cost a lot to do. But I don't even want to just focus on the financials. We've been feeling over the last few years, a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock. And there was just no way for these folks to get in. Unfortunately, probably some got scammed. But there was no way to buy SpaceX stock. And it feels like a company that, you know, great people should be able to own a piece of. It's interesting to hear you say that because obviously SpaceX has rewritten their space and defense playbook. Are you rewriting this retail investor playbook too, with this IPO? You know, I think we'll see what happens, right? But certainly letting everyday Americans and everyday people purchase the stock was a big focus for Elon and the team. Yeah, I want to get to the businesses themselves. But first, just one more question on all of this. And that is, you just mentioned the long lead times. I mean, SpaceX has famously done things that everybody else has said was impossible, whether it's broadband LEO, or whether it's reusable rockets, I can go down the list. But all of this takes time to be a publicly traded company. Now you're dealing with investors that are thinking on a quarterly basis and any headline can move the stock. So how are you adjusting to that? So I hope the folks that do decide to invest in SpaceX take a look at our history and see how we do operate and become comfortable with the way we operate, right? Our horizons are very long term. I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings. I'm not saying we're not going to do right by our investors. But what folks that invest in SpaceX, SpaceX AI need to know is they need to know that what we're doing is very futuristic. And we should be thinking about the future as well as the current quarter. Yeah, and 300 page plus perspectives that is very focused on the future. But out of the gate, what should investors be focused on judging the company on right now? Well, I think for sure you need to look at our track record. We do. It's funny, Elon jokes that we make the impossible, we just make it late. And people say, oh, you're moving so quickly. And we feel like we're actually behind. We always feel very behind. I do want people to basically look at our track record, look at our history. We do do really difficult things. We do bring them to product level. In fact, you know, XAI is definitely starting to be product focused. It was very much a lab, very much a research organization. And now, you know, after the acquisition, and obviously, they were focused on product more than just when we purchased them earlier than that. But they're definitely focused on product now. I just want to go back to something you said about that tend to be a little late, but you always get it done. How to think about that in terms of forecast and managing investor expectations around timelines, because it's a little different than what you usually hear. We're very candid. I mean, some people look at us as a very quietly, you know, not very public company. And I don't mean it in the financial way. I think we put a lot out there, actually. I think we're quite candid about what we're trying to do, the risks involved. And when we're late, we're late. Like, it's pretty obvious when you set a launch date and you don't hit it. So I think we're pretty candid about kind of the hurdles in front of us. And if we're late, or if we have a misstep, we'll be very clear about that and why. And by the way, I think it's actually really important to have failure. If you don't have failure, like if a launch goes perfectly, all you've learned is that that launch vehicle on that day worked. You didn't get any more data than that, right? So when you have failure, you actually get this treasure trove of data. So failure, whether it's in the development phase, obviously you don't want failure on the mission phase, or failure in missing milestones from a time perspective, you learn from that and you can get better. Yeah, part of the innovation process within SpaceX. Let's talk a little bit about Starlink, because it is the profit driver of the broader company right now. What does full completion, or I guess, where do we top out here in terms of the build out of Starlink? It's interesting. I'm not, I never really think about topping out. It's just not in the, in the mind frame. We will, so the early satellites, we still have some very early satellites up in orbit. They're not as good as the latest ones. And they certainly don't have as much capacity as the V3s that will be flying later on this year on Starship. And so I feel like we will continually refresh the old satellites that we have, and we'll add a lot more capability. We are actually constrained by capacity in many markets, really important markets. So scaling is actually really quite important to the revenue story for us. Meaning there's more demand than you can actually supply right now? There's more demand than we can fulfill right now, yes. Starlink Mobile, how big is that opportunity? I think that opportunity is huge. If you were to look at numbers of subscribers, I think Starlink Mobile will far exceed Starlink Broadband in the home. I think more than half the population, the global population has a cell phone, which is shocking. But it's somewhat, it's crazy numbers of people have cell phones. Not everybody is going to need broadband, a Starlink Broadband in their home. There's lots of other options as well. But I think the numbers of users of Starlink Mobile will far exceed our Starlink Broadband. Yeah, you just mentioned it. Whether you're talking about the V3 Starlink satellites or some of the other capabilities that you're looking to put to orbit here, it's going to hinge on Starship. So in terms of forecasts, what it's going to take to get Starship to full operation and service? So we had a great most recent flight, Flight 12. Flight 13, we're going to largely do what we did on Flight 12. We obviously had some things that weren't perfect on that flight, for sure. So we'll improve that, we'll fix that, learn that lesson, address it, get back to Flight 13. I hope on Flight 14, we'll follow the same, basically the same flight, with the exception, if we feel like we can actually go to orbit, then we would actually have that gate and have the FAA let us go to orbit on Flight 14. And then maybe Flight 15 actually flies from the Cape. Wow. We'll see. Okay. Yeah. How are you thinking about launch in-house versus out-of-house for government customers, commercial customers over the long term? What I think is really important with launch, or really with almost any tough engineering development, is you want to do that thing a lot. Like production cars tend to be more reliable than the hand-built one-off cars, right? The more you can fly a vehicle, the more reliable it will be, the safer it will be. Starlink provided that market for Falcon 9. We flew, you know, 100 Starlink missions in a year, right? The AI satellites will be that same market, but for Starship. And so we find the AI satellites to be incredibly important to the 2028. As I saw in the prospectus, that targeting as soon as 2028 to begin deploying some of these AI compute satellites. There's also severe lack of atmospheric cooling in terms of challenges, hardware degradation from cosmic radiation, a number of other things. What does it take to actually crack the codes on some of these challenges? You know, the AI satellites are to some extent simpler than the Starlink satellites. I think the technology on the Starlink satellites was harder to achieve. AI satellites are simpler. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk by any stretch, but I'm not worried about the development of the AI satellites. We've got some supply chain challenges in front of us. We've got to get solar cells right. And we have to build a lot of chips. Not because we necessarily want to build chips, but I don't think the chip manufacturers are thinking about scaling in the same ways that we're thinking about scaling, or they don't believe us. All right. I want to get into that in just a moment. But first, just one more question on these data centers in space, and that is up to potentially a million. Where do they go? How do you manage that many satellites in space? You know, it's interesting. People talk about the size of the Starlink constellation, 10,000 satellites. It doesn't seem like a lot to us. I'm not saying that that team doesn't work hard, but so much of it is automated. If you needed 10 people to monitor and babysit a satellite, this would be a total loser, right? But we don't. We have maybe 10 people at a time monitoring the entire 10,000 satellite suite of Starlink. So these are largely very highly automated satellites, and the constellation itself works together in a highly automated way. Okay. So let's go back to the chips. TerraFab, joint venture with Tesla, Intel's in the mix as well. What does this bring online in terms of capacity, capability, supply chain challenges being averted here for SpaceX? Yeah. So there's no question that we have a lot to learn in order to get this done, but we are a company of builders, right? We build launch vehicles. We build our launch sites. We write our own software. We're producing some of our own propellants for the vehicles right now too. This seems like a very obvious thing, next step for us. We'll have a lot to learn. There's a huge amount of equipment that we have to invest in. We'll be making our own solar cells. That's going to be a huge part of it. So the satellite, the AI satellite is basically a rack of compute with a giant solar array. So solar is critically important to us, and we're spending a lot of time and energy thinking about that and being able to produce our own. Is the way to think about this that, especially with XAI as part of SpaceX now, that you are building out, vertically integrating the full AI tech stack, much like you've done in space? That is actually a great way to think about it, and I'd love to reframe it as well. So yes, we are building data centers here on Earth, but the most efficient place to put inference compute is on orbit. It's always sunny in space. You get 6x the amount of power out of a solar cell in space as you do here on Earth, and cooling is free because space is actually quite cold. So radiative cooling is free. When we see these satellites actually go to space and be able to engage in that AI compute, does it disrupt all of the trillions of dollars potentially that's going into the AI infrastructure here on Earth? Does it render it obsolete? No, I think you'll need both actually, but hopefully the massive growth area will be AI in space. I don't think people are making a mistake by building data centers on the planet right now. I'm making a mistake from the perspective that you're not going to need that compute. You're certainly going to need that compute. But I think the growth in compute will far outpace in space than it will here on planet Earth. And of course, SpaceX and under the hood within the AI business, AI specifically is seeing a big ramp in CapEx as well amidst all of this. So how do you think about that trajectory in that sense? So luckily, the Starship program has a huge amount of capital expense as well. I think if I were to go back to the penurious days of Falcon 9 and Dragon, and we were to talk about the capital investment for that program compared to what we're doing in AI, it would be a total mind blow situation. But Starship is also the investment required. We're building our own natural gas pipelines. We're actually looking at basically mining our own natural gas. So these huge investments develop our own propellant and bring it to the rocket. Launch sites are quite expensive. I think you got a tour of our site today. That's billions of dollars of capital out there. So luckily, we could go from those penurious Falcon 9, Dragon days to the more expensive, capital intensive Starship, and then the AI because it is next level expensive. But it feels quite doable. You have this anthropic deal, paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May of 2029. And the amended IPO filing added details, clarifying that this could end after six months if decided upon. Just in terms of what investors need to know and understand about that deal, and whether we can see more deals like that here. So I see SpaceX, I mentioned before, we're builders, right? I see us not only building the tech stack required for AI and operating the X platform, but we are builders of data centers, both here on Earth and in space. I believe we will continue to provide that capability to others. Actually, we will never sell compute capacity that we actually need, which is why we wanted the ability to have these contracts be short term if necessary. But we'll keep building. Okay. The cursor deal as well option to buy the company via stock after the IPO. A lot of investors out there think this is potentially a done deal. We're assuming it is. What does cursor bring to the table for SpaceX? So cursor has their own models, I think, and we can learn from them. They're learning. They're looking at our models. We're looking at their models. Their data set was, their training data was incredibly, it was excellent. And so that's good. And we have compute. So basically, it ended up being kind of another model company that we could collaborate with closely. And that's fundamentally how I would characterize it right now. We're going to collaborate closely. We think this makes a huge amount of sense, but we'll make final decisions in a few months. In general, the approach to M&A, how should investors think about that, especially given that disclosure in the amended filing that the company, quote, may issue a significant amount of equity in connection with future transactions? You know, we weren't really an M&A company. SpaceX wasn't an M&A company for decades. And so it's kind of a new, exciting, it's a new, exciting world for us. I do think M&A is in the future, especially when you look at the AI world. I think you'll see more of that just generally. There's a lot of speculation that SpaceX could merge with its sister company, Tesla. This is just one example of some of the notes that are circulating right now. This is Dan Ives from Webush. Continue to believe that SpaceX and Tesla will eventually merge 80% plus chance, in his view, into one company in 2027 and that the groundwork is already in place for both operations to become one organization. Your response? That might make Elon's life a little easier, actually. There's no question that there's synergies between Tesla and SpaceX and our futures. Definitely, there's a convergence of kind of what we're all trying to accomplish in the future. But right now, I'm focused on keeping the lights on here, keeping rockets in production, flying rockets, flying people, getting to the International Space Station, and critically providing broadband to folks that don't have access to that critical capability. So I'm really focused on that. I'm not focused on that part of the future. Okay. I mean, part of what I think has fueled that chatter is the governance structure. Elon has a supermajority voting rights, controls the board. What do investors need to understand about that governance structure and why it's the right one for SpaceX? There is no one that can run this company other than Elon, frankly. We want Elon to have that kind of control. He's incredible. I think he's the best CEO. He's certainly the best CEO of today, and he's probably the best CEO in history, in my opinion, humble opinion. I mean, the flip side of that is the risk associated with if Elon wasn't at the helm, or if something were to happen as well. So how to think about the bench of talent, yourself included, and what that means in terms of being the future of the company beyond one person. So the company would not collapse, obviously, without Elon, but it would by no means be the same. So I think it's incredibly important that he is the CEO and that we have the governance structure that we've set forth. And we'd survive, but it would be a different company. It would be a shame. I want to ask you about talent because this is a huge liquidity event. It's going to mint many millionaires, many billionaires. What's your expectation for talent churn? And what are you thinking about in terms of recruitment for future talent? You know, it's interesting that people at SpaceX have had liquidity events a couple, one to two times a year already. There's already a lot of folks working at SpaceX that are quite wealthy and they're still working. I don't think this will change that. I don't think it'll change that much dramatically. I don't think it's going to change it dramatically. Those that don't want to work shouldn't be at this company anyhow, right? And so the people that we are blessed to still have as employees, they work hard and they're super focused on the mission. I mean, I'm going to put out one employee in particular, Bill Gerstenmaier, right? The gentleman's in his seventies, had incredibly rich career and he's still working. I don't think he's going to retire just because we have an IPO. I want to circle back on something else here regarding a couple of things regarding Elon Musk. What does that relationship between the two of you look like? How do you work together? What is it like to work for him now? So when Elon asked me to be president in 2008, we made kind of very clear what is my job jar and what is his job jar. Cause he didn't, you know, he didn't want to step on my toes and I certainly didn't want to step on his toes, but we got to be clear, like everybody reports to Elon, right? I feel like I'm there as a partner to help him get the things done that need to get done. And I tend to focus on the day-to-day of the business operations. And he focuses on high level strategy, as well as super deep dive on the technical. I am going to ask you about Mars as still the North star here, especially when I look at, at Elon's pay package, a billion shares when certain milestones are met in tranches, including a permanent human colony of at least 1 million inhabitants on Mars, on Mars. When do we get there? Do we have a million people that want to go there? I'm sure there's at least that many amount that many folks that want to go there. Wow. I'm so bad at predicting timelines, maybe 2040, 2035, 2040. Yeah. Not that far away potentially. Oh, is that not far away? Well, that seems really far away to me. And finally, how old will I be in 2040? And finally, cause I know our time is limited here. I just want to get your thoughts on what you've seen spring up around SpaceX. And that is a broader commercial space ecosystem here. Some of it is actually competitive potentially to SpaceX as well, depending on the business. How do you see all of this continuing to evolve? So first, first and foremost, competition is really good. It's really good for people to motivate people. Actually, I look back, you know, SpaceX started as the underdog. We weren't even considered competition by our competitors. Right. I think it's really important to have someone in front of you that you're chasing after. I think it's a great place for XAI, right? Our model is not number one right now. I think we'll get there. But I think it's really important to be chasing after someone. Yeah. When you're in front, which we clearly are at SpaceX, you know, sometimes it's good to have that kind of kick in the pants to move forward. And competition does that. Okay. One shot. Well, SpaceX, thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's fun. Thank you.