“A lot has to go right,” she concedes. “Each of us, the company together, are thinking, ‘Are there things we can do to go faster?’ We’ve had the benefit of working with NASA on the HLS for quite some years.”
At the same time Blue Origin is looking to take a bite out of SpaceX’s portfolio, Musk, Shotwell, and the rest of the leadership team are expanding it. The IPO and the xAI merger, Shotwell believes, are not just business plays; they’re part of the natural maturation of the overall enterprise.
“These are Elon companies,” she says. “Elon makes these kinds of decisions, and as soon as we started talking about [the merger] I was incredibly supportive, especially as I was seeing more and more AI being used at the company. It made perfect sense. It’s a force multiplier.”
Elon Musk’s detractors may scoff at his plans to build a city on the moon, but he’s already proved his chops by building one on Earth. In 2014, SpaceX began acquiring parcels of land in the town of Boca Chica—at the toe of Texas on the Gulf of Mexico—ultimately securing a 1.5-sq.-mi. plot on which to build a rocket factory, high bays, employee housing, and more. Musk dubbed the little enclave Starbase—a moniker that soon became more than just a nickname. In May 2025, polls opened for the 500 Starbase residents to vote on whether to incorporate their little village into a city. The results weren’t even close, with incorporation winning 212-6.
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