Musk doesn't build alone — and that's a strength, not a gotcha. These are some of the exceptional engineers and operators who turn the vision into hardware.
President & Chief Operating Officer
Gwynne Shotwell (born 1963) is a mechanical engineer who joined SpaceX in 2002 as its eleventh employee. Promoted to President in 2008 after negotiating SpaceX's first NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract, she runs day-to-day operations and built the Falcon manifest into a business worth tens of billions. Holding degrees from Northwestern, she was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 and is widely credited as the operational engine behind SpaceX's commercial success. Often described as the executive who turns Musk's ambitions into a shipped, profitable business, she has steered SpaceX through the Falcon 9, Dragon, Crew Dragon and Starlink eras and the negotiations that won its foundational NASA contracts. She is routinely ranked among the most powerful women in technology and aerospace, and is frequently floated as a future leader of an independent SpaceX or Starlink.
Read profileFounding propulsion lead (former VP/CTO of Propulsion)
Tom Mueller is a rocket-engine designer often called SpaceX employee No. 1. Before SpaceX he built the world's largest amateur liquid-fuel engine in a garage, which drew Musk's attention. As VP and later CTO of Propulsion he led development of the Merlin engines for Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, the Draco and SuperDraco engines for Dragon, and helped seed the Raptor program. He retired in 2020 and founded Impulse Space. The Merlin engine he championed became the most-flown US rocket engine in history, and its reusability is central to the economics that reset the launch industry. At Impulse Space he is now building in-space transportation vehicles to move payloads between orbits — extending the low-cost-access revolution he helped start at SpaceX into the next layer of the space economy.
Read profileCo-founder & former CTO
Jeffrey B. Straubel (born 1975) joined Tesla as its fifth employee in 2004 and is a named co-founder. As CTO for 15 years he led battery cell design, the supply chain, and the original Gigafactory concept through the Model 3 ramp, and is listed on many of Tesla’s battery patents. He now leads Redwood Materials, which he founded to recycle lithium-ion batteries, and rejoined Tesla’s board in 2023. As the engineer who arguably understood Tesla’s batteries better than anyone, Straubel shaped the cell chemistry, packs and the original Gigafactory model that made affordable long-range EVs possible. Redwood, now a major player in the battery-materials supply chain, closes the loop he helped open — recovering critical metals to feed the next generation of cells, the recycling piece many critics said the EV transition would never solve.
Read profileChief Designer
Franz von Holzhausen joined Tesla as chief designer in 2008 and has shaped nearly every production vehicle since: the Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y, Semi, and the Cybertruck, whose 2019 unveiling he led. An ArtCenter College of Design graduate, he previously worked at Volkswagen, General Motors and Mazda. At Tesla he oversees a studio of roughly 300 designers and is regarded as one of the most influential automotive designers of the EV era.
Read profilePrincipal Mars Landing Engineer (rocket landing/GNC)
Lars Blackmore is a British-American aerospace engineer who led the guidance, navigation and control work that made Falcon 9 boosters reusable. From 2011 to 2018 he was responsible for the rocket’s entry, descent and landing, and his team achieved the first controlled landing of an orbital-class booster in December 2015 — since followed by hundreds of landings. A Cambridge and MIT graduate, he now leads landing systems for Starship.
Read profileFormer VP of Build & Flight Reliability (4th employee)
Hans Koenigsmann (born 1963) is a German aerospace engineer who became SpaceX's fourth technical employee in 2002. He joined as VP of Avionics, later serving as Launch Chief Engineer and then VP of Flight Reliability, responsible for mission safety and failure investigations. He helped develop Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon and Starlink, received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2014, and retired in 2021.
Read profileFormer SVP of Powertrain & Energy Engineering
Drew Baglino joined Tesla in 2006 and spent 18 years there, rising to Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering in 2019. A Stanford graduate, he worked across motor, battery and power-electronics engineering and led Tesla Energy’s grid-scale battery products. He was a frequent presenter at Tesla’s Battery Day events, helping define the 4680 cell and energy-storage strategy, before departing in 2024. Baglino was the public face of Tesla’s battery and powertrain engineering for years, translating dense technical roadmaps into the cost and range gains that powered the Model 3 and Model Y. He also helped build Tesla Energy into a fast-growing, high-margin business — the Powerwall and Megapack lines that turned Tesla from a carmaker into an energy company as much as an automaker.
Read profileCo-founder, President & COO
DJ Seo is a co-founder and the President and COO of Neuralink. He earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, where his research on 'neural dust' — tiny wireless sensors that interface with neural tissue — informed Neuralink's implant approach. Named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, Seo leads implant development and the N1 implant and surgical-robot programs.
Read profilePresident
Steve Davis is the long-time president of The Boring Company, leading it from its 2017 founding through the opening of the Las Vegas Loop and the development of the Prufrock tunnel boring machines. An aerospace engineer, he was one of SpaceX's early employees and is known as one of Musk's most trusted, relentlessly cost-focused operators — a reputation that later saw him play a central role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Under Davis, the Vegas Loop grew into the first operational commercial Loop, carrying millions of passengers, while the Prufrock machines pushed tunnelling speeds toward the order-of-magnitude cost reductions Musk set as the goal. His trademark frugality — famously stretching tiny budgets at SpaceX — became the operating culture of The Boring Company and, later, the cost-cutting ethos he brought to government.
Read profileCo-founder
Igor Babuschkin is a co-founder of xAI, which he helped Musk launch in 2023, and led core engineering on the Grok models and the Colossus training infrastructure. A physicist by training, he previously worked as a research engineer at Google DeepMind and OpenAI, giving xAI frontier-lab pedigree from day one. He helped take xAI from a standing start to near-frontier AI performance in under two years. He led the engineering behind the Colossus supercomputer buildout — installing 100,000 GPUs in 122 days — and the rapid Grok release cadence that closed the gap with OpenAI and Google faster than any rival lab. Few engineers have a track record spanning DeepMind, OpenAI and a founding role at a third frontier lab, making him one of the most pedigreed builders in modern AI.
Read profileCommander, Inspiration4 & Polaris Dawn
Jared Isaacman is an entrepreneur and pilot who commanded SpaceX's Inspiration4 (2021) — the first all-civilian orbital mission — and Polaris Dawn (2024), on which he performed the first commercial spacewalk. He funded the missions and used them to raise hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, demonstrating the new era of private human spaceflight that SpaceX made possible.
Read profileCo-founder (Zip2); Tesla & SpaceX board member
Kimbal Musk co-founded Zip2 with his brother Elon in 1995 and has served on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX, giving him a four-decade view of the companies from the inside. An entrepreneur and restaurateur in his own right, he founded The Kitchen restaurant group and the Big Green nonprofit, which builds learning gardens in schools.
Read profileSenior Vice President, Automotive (former President, Greater China)
Tom Zhu (Zhu Xiaotong) is one of Tesla's most senior global executives. He joined in 2014, built out the China sales and Supercharger operations, and led Gigafactory Shanghai to become Tesla's highest-volume, fastest-built plant. Promoted to oversee global production and deliveries, he is widely regarded as one of the few operators trusted to run Tesla's factories worldwide and is frequently cited as a key reason for the company's manufacturing turnarounds. Zhu's rise from running China sales to overseeing global automotive operations is unusual at Tesla, where Musk keeps a small inner circle of trusted executives. Under his watch Gigafactory Shanghai became the template for Tesla's fastest, most cost-efficient plants — a model later exported to Berlin and Texas — and he is often named among the most influential operators in the global auto industry.
Read profileVice President of Vehicle Engineering
Mark Juncosa is one of Elon Musk's closest engineering lieutenants at SpaceX, where he has led vehicle engineering since 2015. A Cornell-trained engineer who joined in 2009, he has driven development across Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, Starlink and Starship, and is known for the fast, iterative, hardware-rich design culture that lets SpaceX move quickly. Musk has repeatedly singled him out as indispensable to the company's engineering. Juncosa is known for compressing development timelines that the rest of the industry measures in years — a discipline of building, flying and fixing hardware fast rather than perfecting it on paper. That culture, which he helps run day to day, is the operational reason SpaceX out-iterates far larger and better-funded competitors.
Read profileSenior Director / VP, Starship Engineering
Bill Riley is a senior SpaceX engineering leader central to the Starship program, having risen through structures and reliability roles. With a background in Formula SAE and a Cornell engineering pedigree, he is a fixture of the Starbase development effort, helping drive the rapid build-test-fly cadence behind Starship and Super Heavy — including the iterative campaign that produced the first booster tower catch and reflight. The Starbase program he helps lead pioneered an unusual engineering philosophy: build many cheap prototypes, fly them to failure, and learn faster than careful paper design allows. The string of Starship test flights — each pushing further on reentry, the tower catch, and booster reuse — is the visible product of that relentless, hardware-first cadence.
Read profileManaging Director, Excession LLC (Musk family office)
Jared Birchall runs Excession LLC, Elon Musk's family office, which he has managed since 2016. A former Morgan Stanley banker, he oversees Musk's personal wealth and financing and played a central role in arranging the funding for the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Operating largely behind the scenes, he is among the most influential figures in Musk's financial and corporate dealings, including the Musk Foundation. As the steward of Musk's stakes in SpaceX, Tesla, xAI and X, Birchall sits at the center of arguably the most complex personal balance sheet in the world, structuring the loans and equity that let Musk fund ventures and acquisitions. He also helps administer the Musk Foundation's charitable giving, giving him a quiet but significant hand in both Musk's wealth and his philanthropy.
Read profileCo-founder, Ad Astra / Astra Nova school
Josh Dahn co-founded Ad Astra, the experimental grade-less school Elon Musk started on the SpaceX campus in 2014, and went on to lead its successor, the online Astra Nova school, and co-found the education startup Synthesis. His project- and ethics-based, first-principles approach to teaching is the practical expression of Musk's interest in reinventing STEM education for a new generation. Ad Astra began as a tiny school for the children of SpaceX employees that replaced grade levels and rote testing with collaborative problem-solving, ethics debates and hands-on engineering. Through Astra Nova and the education startup Synthesis, Dahn has worked to scale that model to thousands of students worldwide — the on-the-ground vehicle for Musk's stated belief that how children are taught to think matters as much as what they are taught.
Read profileCo-founder & former CEO, PayPal; investor
Peter Thiel (born 1967) co-founded Confinity, which merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000 to form PayPal, where Thiel served as CEO. After eBay bought PayPal in 2002, he became the informal figurehead of the “PayPal Mafia” — the group of PayPal alumni, Musk among them, who went on to found or fund an extraordinary run of technology companies. Thiel co-founded the data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies and the venture firm Founders Fund, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. His career alongside Musk illustrates how the PayPal cohort seeded much of 21st-century Silicon Valley, from payments to defence software to social media. Musk and Thiel clashed over the X.com/PayPal merger and Musk's removal as CEO, but both describe the PayPal years as formative — and Founders Fund later became an early investor in SpaceX.
Read profileFormer COO, PayPal; co-founder, LinkedIn
Reid Hoffman (born 1967) was an early executive and board member at PayPal, serving as chief operating officer through its 2002 sale to eBay. A core member of the “PayPal Mafia” alongside Musk, he co-founded the professional network LinkedIn in 2003 — later acquired by Microsoft for about $26 billion — and became a leading venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, backing companies including Airbnb. His path shows the reach of the PayPal network Musk helped build: its alumni went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Palantir, SpaceX and Tesla, among many others. Hoffman has since become a prominent political critic of Musk, but the two were part of the same founding cohort that reshaped Silicon Valley.
Read profileCo-founder & former CTO, PayPal; founder, Affirm
Max Levchin (born 1975) co-founded Confinity — the company behind the original PayPal product — and served as PayPal's chief technology officer, where he built much of the anti-fraud technology that made online payments viable at scale. A central figure in the “PayPal Mafia” that included Musk, he later founded the “buy now, pay later” fintech Affirm and the health-tech company Glow. Levchin's fraud-detection work is often credited as one of the reasons PayPal survived its early years — the foundation on which Musk and the other founders built the fortunes and companies that followed.
Read profileFormer COO, PayPal; founder, Yammer
David Sacks (born 1972) was PayPal's chief operating officer and ran product during its rise — another core member of the “PayPal Mafia” alongside Musk. He went on to found the enterprise social network Yammer (acquired by Microsoft for about $1.2 billion), produced the film “Thank You for Smoking,” and co-founded the venture firm Craft Ventures, and is a co-host of the widely followed All-In podcast. His trajectory is emblematic of how the PayPal team — with Musk at its centre — dispersed into a generation of founders and investors who shaped much of the modern technology industry.
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