Tesla’s share price may be cratering as billionaire CEO Elon Musk pursues his side-hustle of chain-sawing the federal workforce, but investors still believe in his rocket company SpaceX. 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’ estimates

For Shotwell, 61, it’s a rich reward for the gamble she took when she joined SpaceX in 2002 as employee No. 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.

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. “I called him on the phone and I said, ‘I'm a bleeping idiot,’ ” Shotwell recounted in a talk at Stanford University in 2022. “And he laughed and he said, ‘Welcome to the team.’ ”