No, it is Elon. He makes all the final decisions, business and technical. Gwynne is working on Starship now because Elon decided it.

Gwynne is not now 'working on Starship'. The South Texas base was simply integrated into the normal organizational structure rather then being a Skunk works kind of thing. Gwynne always helped with work on Starship.

Its simple a restructuring that was always gone happen after a while and had nothing to do with 'Gwynne' taking over management from Musk or whatever spin Musk-Haters wanted to put on it.

Its always funny when Musk haters have to scratch out arguments to not give him credit. Funny how neither Shotwell or any other of the leaders of SpaceX would agree with you. But I guess you know better.

Shotwell famously has a team of handlers to occupy Musk and keep him from counterproductively terrorizing his employees. There are dozens of firsthand reports of petulant harassment and petty self-aggrandizement at the hands of Musk upon employees at Tesla and SpaceX. Things like firing employees at random in order to instill fear, only for the real adults in the room (like Shotwell) to quietly re-hire the fired person the next day. You don't need to be a "Musk hater" to recognize what a shitty CEO he is (in fact, you only need to pay attention to the disaster that has been his Twitter acquisition), although flippantly denouncing any critics as mere "haters" sure is a favorite tactic of those begging to lick Musk's bootheels.

> Shotwell famously has a team of handlers to occupy Musk

I'm sure you have source for that. And I'm sure she already did that when she was Head of Sales right?

And its funny how Tom Mueller, Hans Königsmann, Garrett Reisman and every other higher up in SpaceX talks about lots and lots direct interaction with Musk.

Funny how 'Liftoff' the book about SpaceX doesn't mention anything about that. And the author of this book is currently writing about the the Falcon 9 days, and I think that book will confirm the same thing again (and the author of those books interviewed literally 100s of current and former SpaceX people).

And again, pretty much every single person in leadership positions at SpaceX would disagree with you. But its great that you know so much more.

> to recognize what a shitty CEO he is

Ok, so how do you define a good CEO if not based on the company he leads are successful. Sure if its a short term success maybe you can point to other factors. Musk has been in his position longer then pretty much every other CEO in both the space and the car industry and both companies are absurdly successful.

Look, you personally dislike him and you don't like his style. But that is just irrelevant. By any actual objective measure Musk is one of the most successful CEOs in history. The results speak for themselves and its not even really debatable.

That you have to bring up individual practices that you dislike, shows that you can't actually point to any aggregate results to make your point.

> you only need to pay attention to the disaster that has been his Twitter acquisition

If you actually think that in a 30+ year career the only thing relevant is one acquisition then you are actually delusional. Any fair assessment takes into account a whole career and not one acquisition.

And in terms of Twitter, the results should be judged after 5-10 years and not the first year.