The girl made good use of her experience and connections.

In 2016, 25-year-old Elissa Butterfield went to work for Elon Musk. At the time, Musk was not a household name. His net worth was about $10 billion, one-thirty-eighth of what it is now.

For two years, as one of Musk’s executive assistants, Butterfield helped manage his boss’s erratic schedule as priorities changed. She also coordinated calls with investors, arranged meetings, and juggled a diverse portfolio.

“I got the impression that she was extremely loyal,” said a former SpaceX employee.

Now, Butterfield is putting her experience and connections to good use. She left SpaceX and joined Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Island Green Capital Management in 2024, where she will lead investments in xAI and SpaceX.

Island Green, founded in 2023 by former Goldman Sachs trader Ateet Ahluwalia, was one of at least 61 investors who participated in xAI’s $6 billion investment round last May, valuing the startup at $24 billion, according to Pitchbook. In January, Island Green bought a stake in SpaceX from an unnamed seller.

Island Green’s Musk-related bets have been wildly successful. xAI raised another $6 billion in November at a $50 billion valuation. That valuation hit $80 billion in a merger between xAI and social media company X.

Likewise, SpaceX shares are currently trading on the secondary market at a valuation of between $380 million and $400 billion, according to market data trackers PM Insights and Caplight.

Island Green has also backed Impulse Space, the startup of another SpaceX alumnus, Tom Mueller, one of the rocket maker’s earliest employees. Butterfield’s company participated in a $150 million fundraising round last October that valued the startup at $510 million, according to PitchBook. Butterfield joins a growing list of Musk alums who have helped seal deals and launch companies in the startup and venture capital worlds. Unlike her former boss, Butterfield has kept a low profile. The 34-year-old Los Angeles native graduated magna cum laude in 2013 from Belmont University, a private Christian college in Nashville, with a degree in music business, according to the university’s registrar’s office. She began her career at talent agency WME, rising to assistant to the head of events, according to LinkedIn. She then moved to Musk’s executive assistant team.

Butterfield has been drawn into Musk’s flights of fancy. In July 2018, when he tasked a team of engineers at SpaceX and the Boring Company with building a mini-submarine to rescue a group of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, Butterfield was one of the people who coordinated the details. She helped schedule Musk’s flight to Thailand and appears to have relayed Musk’s technical ideas to Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller, and engineer Steve Davis, president of the Boring Company.

And like any effective corporate employee, Butterfield learned to handle her boss’s moods. By 2021, she was the director of SpaceX’s CEO office in 2021.

However, in 2022, Butterfield left SpaceX to join a biotech company as an executive and start her own company, Bread and Butterfield LLC. However, the business did not go well and she ventured into Island Green.