How Elon Musk Winged It With Twitter, and Everything Else

Kimbal Musk and Mr. Gracias, who left Tesla’s board past 12 months and serves as a SpaceX director, declined to remark for this write-up.

Now, Mr. Musk oversees or is involved with at minimum a dozen corporations, together with community ones, personal types and holding organizations this sort of as Wyoming Metal, which he utilizes to manage serious estate. His net worth stands at about $250 billion.

A Near Circle

As Mr. Musk set up extra companies, he collected associates he could deploy throughout several of the endeavors.

One particular was Mary Beth Brown, who was hired in 2002 to in essence be Mr. Musk’s government assistant. Acknowledged as M.B., she soon became a kind of main of staff, handling media requests and some economical matters for SpaceX and Tesla, as perfectly as supporting to manage Mr. Musk’s own existence, explained Ashlee Vance, the writer of “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Wonderful Upcoming.”

That similar calendar year, Mr. Musk hired Gwynne Shotwell as SpaceX’s seventh personnel. As the rocket maker’s president and chief working officer, Ms. Shotwell has overseen the company’s expansion, turning out to be a person of Mr. Musk’s longest-long lasting staff members.

At a conference in 2018, Ms. Shotwell spelled out how she managed Mr. Musk.

“When Elon states anything, you have to pause and not straight away blurt out, ‘Well, which is unachievable,’ or, ‘There’s no way we’re heading to do that. I really don’t know how,’” she claimed. “So you zip it, and you think about it. And you locate ways to get that carried out.”