KAtkinson

The woman on this TIME cover running a company heading toward the largest IPO in history chose her career because she liked someone’s shoes. As a teenager in suburban Chicago, Gwynne Shotwell thought engineers were, in her words, “nerds, social outcasts, nose pickers.” Her mom dragged her to a Society of Women Engineers event without telling her where they were going, because she knew Gwynne would refuse. Shotwell sat in the audience, bored and annoyed, until a mechanical engineer walked on stage. The engineering didn’t grab her. The woman’s suit did. Her shoes were, as Shotwell later said, “marvelous.” Her bag matched. Shotwell went up after the panel, talked about the outfit first, then the career, and walked out saying she’d be a mechanical engineer. She applied to one college. Just one. Northwestern. Got in. She was one of three women in a class of 36 engineering students. During college, she landed an internship at a heating and cooling company based purely on her resume. Days before she was supposed to start, her new boss called and heard her voice for the first time. “You’re a girl,” he said. “There’s no way you can do this job. There’s heavy lifting involved.” Shotwell, a varsity basketball player who also played lacrosse, told him she could probably kick the butts of every intern he’d hired. He hung up on her. Two decades of career detours followed. Chrysler, a PhD she dropped after nine months when the $12,000 fellowship couldn’t compete with a real salary, and a decade at an aerospace research center. In 2002, a former colleague named Hans Koenigsmann invited her to visit a small startup called SpaceX. She met the founder, a guy mostly known at the time for helping start PayPal. He wanted to sell reusable rockets at the lowest possible price. Shotwell told Musk he needed someone doing business development full-time, but she had zero intention of taking the job herself. Musk called her later that day. She was in the middle of a divorce, raising two kids, and renovating her house. She took the job anyway, becoming employee number seven. That startup is now valued at $800 billion and preparing for what could be the largest IPO ever, targeting $1.5 trillion. SpaceX has completed 630 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. Starlink serves over 9 million subscribers across 150+ countries and pulls in roughly $10 billion a year on its own. The seven-person company now employs around 14,000. The woman running all of it picked her career because she liked a stranger’s shoes at an event she tried to skip.