Obviously if Musk lost his interest in space flight that could very possibly be a death knell for the company but that doesn't seem very likely right now.
Also while Shotwell is a wonderful and competent president with a great business acumen. She doesn't have a lot of engineering vision for what things should be. SpaceX is kind of dual-run by Shotwell and Elon Musk. He drives forward and pushes forward with crazy ideas and then when they're semi-marketable he hands off the project to Shotwell to clean things up and prune out some of the economics. For example Starlink was Elon driven up until early 2020 or so, after they'd already started selling to customers, after which it was handed off to Shotwell.
I want to be clear: I say all this as an outsider. I know SpaceX has a reputation for long hours and a high turnover rate, and I won't try to apportion responsibility for those to her and Musk (though I'm sure she gets her share), but I certainly give her at least 50% of the credit for SpaceX getting where they are today both financially and technically.
I read a while ago words to the effect of "the mark of a captain with superior ship-handling skills is that they don't get into situations where they need their superior ship-handling skills". As near as I can tell from the outside, that's Gwynn Shotwell.
And as to the deserted island. I'd take the Elon Musk personally if I had to pick, but I'd prefer to take both.
And as for ship captains. Ship captaining isn't supposed to be exciting and shouldn't be involving risk taking. That analogy doesn't hold into the world of pioneering the new and different. I agree though, if you're running a business based on things that people know how to do well already, all you need is the good ship captain.
Musk doesnt just hand of projects. He continues to work on iterations and so on. And Shotwell is involved from the beginning of each project as well.
People that keep pushing idea as if there were 2 SpaceX but in reality there is close cooperation from begin to end.
Perhaps my interpretation is incorrect, but what I wrote above is what I read out of this (and other interviews).
> Shotwell: The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. [Interview done in early 2021.] Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.
> The thing about Starship is, we know how to design rockets and fly rockets. What we have failed to do to date is to design and fly a rocket that is easily producible and fully reusable. It's still hard to produce a Falcon 9. It's a lot of work and it's very expensive. The focus for Starship is to make it highly producible, highly reliable, and 100 percent operationally reusable, both for the first and second stage. That's hard.
> He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development.
Still give her the account.
Controversy and perversion generate clicks and attention. Without those, Twitter would be out of business.
The only reason people keep saying that is because Musk is basically one of the most famous people alive and thus gets absurdly more attention then here.
Shotwell is much better known then pretty much every president of any other space company.
(which is worth quite a bit of credit imo)