>>13168123Gwynne would never leave SpaceX, not even if Bezos offered her $60M/yr in salary. She's at SpaceX for the mission and not the money. She was hired very early on in the company's life, and has been there for F9 to Block5, Merlin-1D, worked closely alongside Elon and Muller, a whole variety of other top notch spaceX talent, seen the birth and success of Starlink (thus far), birth and success of Raptor (thus far), and Starship/SuperHeavy (thus far). She also has complete authority of which rocket is chosen for which mission, best suited for customer needs. She oversees all CRS, CCS, Commercial, and NSSL contracts for F9 and FH fleets.
Starlink has the potential to make SpaceX into a multi-trillion dollar corporation that will eclipse Apple, and she's got enough shares that if she wanted to cash out, she'd walk with hundreds of millions in cash post tax. She basically has secured enough money to make sure that her, her husband, and children, and their children and their children, and their children for their entire lives would never have to work for a single cent EVER again. Further, with Starship's success, she'll end up overseeing CRS, CCS, Commercial, and NSSL contracts for F9, FH, and Starship as well as delivering massive cargo contracts to Moon, Mars, and beyond; coupled with major colonization efforts and all the NEW technology initiatives that SpaceX will have to create under its umbrella to support that effort. We're talking dozens of mini-startup-like companies inside of SpaceX each specializing on one arm/sector of the colonization effort: recycling of air/water, power generation at scale, material logistics, software to integrate it all together, habitation, agriculture/aquaculture off-world, etc.
What can Bezos offer her? A fat salary with no vision, engineering direction, at the top; pursuant of NSSL and HLS only, massive delays, a FUCKED engine, no reusable heavy lifter, and a pathfinder with 0 human launches.
NEGATIVE INCENTIVE TO SAY YES.
