Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, April 4th.

Today on Forbes, Gwynne Shotwell rides SpaceX to billion-dollar fortune.

Tesla's share price may be cratering as billionaire CEO Elon Musk pursues his side hustle of chainsawing the federal workforce,

but investors still believe in his rocket

company, SpaceX. And that's made Gwynne Shotwell a billionaire. Musk's longtime lieutenant at

SpaceX holds a 0.3% stake in the company, Forbes estimates, based on accounts of her stock compensation

from investors and early employees.

That stake is worth $1.2 billion after the private company's valuation hit $350 billion

in December in a sale of insider shares.

Shotwell declined to comment on Forbes's estimates.

For Shotwell, who is 61 years old, it's a rich reward for the gamble she took when she joined

SpaceX in 2002 as employee number 11, tasked with leading sales of Musk's as yet unbuilt rocket.

At the time, the Northwestern trained mechanical engineer was going through a divorce,

with two young children to care for, and she hesitated to leave a safe position at a small rocket

maker. After all, she was the space systems director at an established spacecraft developer,

Microcosm. But Musk had pumped $100 million into SpaceX from his proceeds from the sale of PayPal,

and after thinking it over for a month, Shotwell bought into his vision of creating reusable

rockets that could offer low-cost access to space.

In a talk at Stanford University in 2022, Shotwell recounted, quote,

I called him on the phone and I said, I'm a bleeping idiot.

And he laughed and he said, welcome to the team.

In 2008, Musk promoted her to running the team as president and chief operating officer.

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