Elon Musk is ‘very misunderstood,' says SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell

Elon Musk
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24 Video Views·Jun 19, 2026
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell joins CNBC's Morgan Brennan to discuss the company's historic market debut, potential business risks, and more.
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedThe discussion focuses on the public perception of Elon Musk and the significance of opening investment opportunities to retail investors. The speaker emphasizes Musk's commitment to accessibility, highlighting a recent milestone where a significant portion of a funding round was available to non-institutional investors, including employees and the general public.
And finally, well, and I hear about this a lot for military exports in terms of what it's doing in the warfighting domains.
But finally, I just I want to go back to
something you and I have talked about before and that is founder, CEO, CTO, chairman of the board Elon Musk.
What is something that is maybe
misunderstood or lesser known about him that investors,
Wall Street, now Main Street, should know? I think he's very misunderstood across the board. I want people to know him.
In fact, he participated in some of the discussions that we have we have out over the last couple of weeks with investors and the investors
left saying I had no idea that that is the man and I said that's the man I've worked for for 24 years.
I love him.
I think his focus on retail, by the way, is
kind of, I think that embodies a lot of what he's trying to do. He's trying to make space open for everybody.
He wanted this IPO. He wanted regular people to be able to buy the stock and
a lot of folks
participated at the retail level.
Not even traditional retail, but by the way, if you look at all the individuals that were able to buy outside of the institution,
it's like 33% of the round. It's pretty incredible.
The retail investor playbook and what this milestone means for that as well.
I hope it kind of ships more companies to allow everyday people to buy stock.
By the way, I'm not saying I don't love our institutional investors. They were incredibly supportive.
They've been incredibly supportive and they continue to be, but we've had so much demand over the last few years
from friends and from family and from Tesla
shareholders. Tesla employees wanted to buy SpaceX stock and they couldn't do it before today.
Well, and even just to give a little bit color to the viewers,
I mean outside of here for bell ringing, the amount of people that were standing here taking pictures and sharing it on.
Did you see all the kids? I did. There were so many kids out there, like,
fantastic.
