Elon Musk Interview from Air Warfare Symposium 4 years Ago!!!

Summary

Podcast Summary: Elon Musk Thinking Host: Astronaut Man
Episode: Elon Musk Interview from Air Warfare Symposium 4 Years Ago
Release Date: December 20, 2024

---

Introduction to the Air Warfare Symposium

The episode opens with Astronaut Man welcoming listeners to a pivotal session from the Air Warfare Symposium, where Elon Musk offers his insights on innovation, space exploration, and the future of technology within the context of the Department of the Air Force and Space Force.

Elon Musk’s Role in Space Exploration and Air Force Collaboration

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and SpaceX, discusses his longstanding partnership with the United States Air Force. The moderator highlights Musk's contributions, noting, “SpaceX is a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in the space business” ([02:25]).

Key Points:

• Space Force Establishment: Musk endorses the creation of the Space Force, emphasizing the uniqueness of space as a domain. “Space is certainly a medium of its own,” he remarks ([05:07]).
• Legacy Systems and Innovation: Addressing the challenge of updating legacy systems, Musk underscores the necessity of continuous innovation to prevent stagnation.

The Imperative of Radical Innovation

Musk stresses that incremental improvements are insufficient for achieving groundbreaking advancements. He states, “If you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes” ([10:15]).

Key Points:

• Risk and Reward: Emphasizes that significant rewards necessitate taking considerable risks. “There must be a big risk,” Musk explains ([10:34]).
• National Competitiveness: Highlights the importance of the U.S. leveraging its innovative prowess to maintain a leading edge in space technology. “If the United States does not use breakthrough innovation, it will fall behind” ([10:54]).

Government Policies to Foster Innovation

Discussing governmental strategies to encourage innovation, Musk advocates for outcome-based procurement. “Say this is the outcome that is sought, and whoever can achieve this will be the one the Air Force will do business with” ([13:36]).

Key Points:

• Reusability of Rockets: Identifies full reusability in space vehicles as the "holy grail." “Achieving full reusability for orbital rockets would be a profound advantage” ([14:59]).
• Comparative Advantage: Draws parallels between reusable rockets and reusable aircraft, illustrating their strategic importance.

Workforce Motivation and Incentive Structures

Elon Musk delves into the importance of motivating a workforce to foster innovation. “Innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished” ([19:27]).

Key Points:

• Carrot and Stick Approach: Advocates for promoting employees who innovate and exiting those who do not contribute to innovation.
• Acceptance of Failure: Encourages an environment where failure is an option, as long as it does not lead to catastrophic outcomes. “Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it’s going to result in extremely conservative choices” ([20:34]).

Processes for Building Innovative Machines

Musk emphasizes that designing production systems is significantly more challenging than creating prototypes. “Designing the production system of a new product is at least an order of magnitude harder than designing the initial prototype” ([22:27]).

Key Points:

• Rapid and Complete Reusability: Contrasts SpaceX’s approach with the Space Shuttle’s limited reusability. “Reuse must not just be reusable like the shuttle. It’s got to be rapid and complete reuse” ([22:49]).
• Starship Development: Discusses the complexities and goals of making Starship fully reusable to support massive payloads to Mars. “Starship has the potential for full reusability” ([26:37]).

Intellectual Property and Open Source Strategy

In an unexpected approach, Musk reveals Tesla’s strategy of open-sourcing its patents. “At Tesla, we just open sourced our patents some years ago so anyone can use our patents” ([48:30]).

Key Points:

• Mission Alignment: Tesla’s mission to accelerate sustainable energy drives the decision to open-source patents, fostering widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
• Focus on Innovation Rate: “If your rate of innovation is high, you don’t need to worry about protecting the IP” ([49:05]).

Economic and Military Competition with China

Musk provides a candid assessment of the economic trajectory between the United States and China. “China’s economy is going to be probably at least twice as big as the U.S. economy” ([51:31]).

Key Points:

• Economic Foundations of War: “The foundation of war is economics. If you have half the resources of the counterparty, then you better be real innovative” ([52:09]).
• Necessity of Innovation: Stresses that without radical innovation, the U.S. risks falling behind militarily and economically.

Cultivating a Culture of Innovation

Discussing corporate culture, Musk outlines the traits that drive success at SpaceX and Tesla. “At the interview point we select for people who want to create new technology” ([55:29]).

Key Points:

• Selective Hiring: Prioritizes hiring individuals with proven innovative abilities.
• Aligned Incentive Structures: “Innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished” ([56:48]).
• Encouraging Risk-Taking: Fosters an environment where attempting and failing does not carry severe penalties unless innovation is neglected.

Future Technologies and Recommendations

When prompted about the most transformative technology, Musk identifies Artificial Intelligence as paramount. “Probably the most transformative will be AI” ([36:40]).

Key Points:

• Educational Priorities: Recommends pursuing degrees in computer science and physics to prepare for future advancements.
• Point of View on Autonomy in Warfare: Envisions a future dominated by autonomous drone warfare, maintaining human oversight for critical decisions. “The fighter jet era has passed. It’s drones” ([43:51]).

Vision for Starfleet and Space Colonization

Concluding the interview, Musk shares his ambitious vision for the future of space exploration. “We got to make Starfleet happen. We want real big spaceships that can go far places” ([57:27]).

Key Points:

• Starfleet Realization: Aspires to create a Starfleet-like force with advanced spaceships and infrastructure reminiscent of sci-fi futures.
• Mars Colonization: Highlights the logistical challenges of establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars, requiring immense payload capacities. “You need a launch system that is somewhere in the megaton per year range to orbit” ([28:31]).

Conclusion

Elon Musk’s discourse during the Air Warfare Symposium underscores the critical need for radical innovation, robust incentive structures, and strategic foresight to maintain the United States’ competitive edge in both economic and military spheres. His visionary outlook on space exploration and technological advancement offers a roadmap for integrating cutting-edge innovations within governmental and military frameworks.

---

Notable Quotes:

• “If you don’t push for radical breakthroughs, you’re not going to get radical outcomes.” – Elon Musk ([10:15])
• “At Tesla, we just open sourced our patents some years ago so anyone can use our patents.” – Elon Musk ([48:30])
• “The fighter jet era has passed. It’s drones.” – Elon Musk ([43:51])
• “We got to make Starfleet happen.” – Elon Musk ([57:27])

---

This episode serves as a deep dive into Elon Musk’s philosophies on innovation, strategic partnerships, and the future of space and military technology, providing valuable insights for professionals and enthusiasts alike.

Transcript

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find some time to relax a little you time. Enter Chumba Casino. With no download required. You can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino style games, all for free. Go to Chumbacasino.com to collect your free welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 18 terms and conditions apply.

[John Morgan]

Getting help for mental health shouldn't be as hard as it is. Thankfully, Mindful Therapy Group is here to make your mental health journey as painless as possible. Be seen in as little as 48 hours for in person or telehealth appointments. Mindful partners with thousands of licensed clinicians to find the perfect fit for you. Whether you need talk therapy, psychological testing, even medication management, Mindful has you covered. Mindful Therapy Group also accepts insurance so you can focus on you and not your wallet. Visit mindfultherapygroup.com to get started today.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Elon, thanks so much for being here today. As you know and many people in the audience know, we're reprising a fireless fireside chat that we did at Air Force Space Pitch Day back in November. I ran into General Goldfein, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force this morning, and maybe I was being a little bit too confident, but I said, hey, I. I think that we did such a good job together at Space Pitch Day that Elon and I got invited back for a much bigger audience, higher stakes and everything like that. And General Goldfein looked at me and went, no, jt, you guys are going to do it until you get it right. So we're going to talk a little bit today about innovation. For those of you in the audience, that nothing that was introduced about Elon made it to the prefrontal cortex and you're like, I still don't know who this guy is. You may remember him from a movie role in Iron Man 2 or the TV show the Big Bang Theory. You may remember him if you're old like me. When you used to have to do dial in modems, you may remember how PayPal actually worked over a dial in modem.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

And if, just in case you've had your head in the sand for the last decade, you absolutely have to know him for Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in the space business, and for Tesla. So for just for grins this fastest growing auto company on the planet. Most amazing capability. And when Elon pulled up, he pulled up, he and his entourage in three different Teslas this morning. How many Tesla owners do we have in the audience? Stand up. Stand up if you're a Tesla owner. All right, very nice.

[Elon Musk]

The secretary.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So, Elon, you and I have talked about whether the Air Force is the most innovative service the Department of the Air Force. Now the last time we interviewed, it was just the Air Force. Now we're the Air Force and the Space Force. As part of the Department of the Air Force, most of those people who stood up were in the front row. We have a lot of first adopters here in the front of the audience, apparently. Or maybe those are the folks that just make the most money. Who knows? Okay, so again, today's discussion is about innovation and how we can make the Department of the Air Force the most innovative department within the Department of Defense and perhaps across the United States government. So, Elon, question number one. When you put a weapons system or a product into production and you start delivering it to your customers very, very frequently, there is a pushback within the production organization that, you know, we don't want to change that product too much. It's successful. We have a lot of legacy systems that we're responsible for in the Department of the Air Force. There is a lot of, of reticence at times to incrementally improve or add new capabilities to those systems from the context of Tesla and SpaceX. How do you motivate your workforce? How do you work with your customers? How do you work with technologists in your ecosystems, your various ecosystems to try and make sure that products don't become stagnant and they continue to incrementally improve over time.

[Elon Musk]

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. It's an honor to be here with you and with everyone else from the Space Air Force and long relationship with the Air Force and very much appreciate the support over the years. So I just want to make sure I to say that and look forward to doing a lot of interesting things in the future. I think it's actually, it's cool that there is, that the creation of the Space Force is, is happening. I think it, there's, you know, it makes sense that there's a major branch for every domain, you know, with that. And so the domain of space and the domain of error are both important. But I think space is certainly a medium of its own. Sure. And I think there's some very exciting things that are possible if I may just say what the public once I think and actually I'm pretty confident that the public does want. This is Starfleet Academy, you know, like, yeah, like how do we make star. How do we make Star Trek real? You know, that'd be pretty amazing. I would love that. You know and so I think like the fastest we can make sort of Starfleet real. Thank just try to do that.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Well, so Elon, speaking for the United States Space Force, there already is a Starfleet Academy. It's the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

[Elon Musk]

Sure, I've been there, I've given a talk and you know the first launch of Falcon 1, we had a Falcon sat from the Air Force Academy. That rocket blew up. But then the funny thing is that it blew up. Truth is stranger than fiction. The satellite was shot through the fairing through the air a couple hundred meters and then plunged through the roof of a tool shed and then landed on the floor and was actually in reasonably good shape, I mean for crashing through the ceiling. But you know, you're like recognizable, you know, and we gave it back and so we've not lost one of your satellites.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So from a SpaceX perspective, a partial mission success.

[Elon Musk]

Well, it's not lost. I'm just saying it's a little the worse for. A little bit worse for wear. But you know, but, but here you go. But then we subsequently launched future Falcon sets to actual orbit. That was great. So hello, it is Ryan.

[Ryan Seacrest]

And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free, anytime, any, anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up [e-mail] that's chumbacasino.com sponsored by Chumba Casino.

[John Morgan]

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY VGW GROUP VOID where prohibited by law 18/ terms and conditions.

APPLY Recently a new client called me and started by saying, Mr. Morgan, I really need your help, but I'm just a nobody. Those words stunned me and I immediately called him back and we're now helping him and his family after a terrible accident. I'm John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan. Everybody who comes to our firm at their time of need is a somebody. I grew up poor, but my grandmother was like a queen to us. At Morgan and Morgan, our goal is to level the playing field for you and Your family at your time of need. The insurance company has unlimited money and resources. You need a firm who can fight them toe to toe for right at 30 years, we have fought them in courtrooms throughout America. Our results speak for themselves. And always remember this, everybody is a somebody and nobody is a nobody. Visit forthepeople.com to learn about our firm, Morgan and Morgan. For the people injured, visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Elon Musk]

So I think there's, I think we can go a long way towards making Starfleet real and making these sort of utopian or semi, semi utopian futures real. But it will definitely require radical innovation. One can't get there by incrementally innovating expendable boosters. There's just no way.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

So the. I think we need to push for radical breakthroughs. And if you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes. And that does mean taking risks and common sense that if you take a big risk, in order to have a big reward, there must be a big risk. Most of the time you cannot find big reward for small risk. Those are rare. So you're going to have some proportionality of the risk and reward. But if the goal is important enough, and I think increasingly the goal is important for many reasons. The goal of having the best technology in space, that, that is, I think, going to become increasingly important and it'll be increasingly, increasingly important for the United States to use what I think is its greatest attribute, which is invention and innovation, to create space technology that is the best in the world. And in fact, I think if the United States does not use breakthrough innovation, it will fall behind. So I think this is, this is not something that was a risk in times past, but I think is a risk now. Okay, so, yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Do you characterize that risk in terms of peer adversary conference competition around the planet? Are you, are you, are you suggesting that it's our adversaries that require us to be that those radical innovators? Or is it just we can't become complacent and stay incrementally improving our systems? We must take those giant leaps forward as a nation, regardless of the competition.

[Elon Musk]

I think there's little, I have zero doubt that if the United States does not take, does not seek great innovations in space, it will be second in space as sure as nightfall is day. So it is a big deal. But this is a very innovative. There's no country more innovative, inventive than the United States. So it's just Important to use that attribute. That's the ace card.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

And since. So since it seems like we're going down the geopolitical path here on the questions, how does the United States as a nation maintain that innovative edge, that ability to invest in things and take those risks? What kind of governmental policies or processes do we have to encourage the right kinds of behavior in your view?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I think having outcome based procurement is actually very important. So you say like this is the outcome that is sought and whoever can achieve this outcome or achieve this outcome to a greater degree that that company will. That's who the Air Force will do business with and will. Will procure the thing that is the. That is radically innovative as measured by the what. What is important for leadership in space. So I mean, I do think it's. It's absolutely fundamental to achieve full reusability in access to space. This is, this is the holy grail of space. At the point at which you have full reusability for orbital rockets, then you have a profound advantage over anyone else. It's profound. It would be like if in the Air Force, if you had planes that could be used once, or if you had multi use planes that could be flown over and over again like normal, and all your adversaries had single use planes, that would be no contest. It's the same thing in space.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. This is extremely fundamental.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. Life comes at you fast. Which is why it's important to find some time to relax a little you time. Enter Chumba Casino. With no download required, you can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino style games, all for free. Go to Chumbacasino.com to collect your free welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary VGW Group void where prohibited by law 18 terms and conditions.

[John Morgan]

Apply Recently a new client called me and started by saying, Mr. Morgan, I really need your help, but I'm just a nobody. Those words stunned me and I immediately called him back. And we're now helping him and his family after a terrible accident. I'm John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan. Everybody who comes to our firm at their time of need is a somebody. I grew up poor, but my grandmother was like a queen to us. At Morgan and Morgan, our goal is to level the playing field for years. You and your family at your time of need. The insurance company has unlimited money and resources. You need a firm who can fight them toe to toe for right at 30 years, we have fought them in courtrooms throughout America. Our results speak for themselves. And always remember this. Everybody is a somebody and nobody is a nobody. Visit forthepeople.com to learn about our firm, Morgan and Morgan. For the people injured, visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Elon Musk]

So the cost of a propellant is typically on the order of 1% of the cost of the vehicle or less. So if you have a vehicle that is, say, lox, kerosene, like Falcon 9 or something like that, the oxygen and the fuel are maybe half a million dollars or something like that. But then depending upon the mission, the mission price can be anywhere from like 60 to $100 million. So Falcon 9 is a partially reusable vehicle, but not fully. The vehicle we're working on right now, quite difficult is Starship. And yeah, that has the potential for full reusability, but I think it would be great to have other companies as well that are doing full reusability. I think competition is a good thing. It may seem at times that shouldn't we focus all our efforts on one system and rather than divide them and have two competing systems, like, not to cause controversy, but in my opinion, join Strike Fighter. There should be a competitor to jso that, that's. I know it's a controversial subject, but, you know, I think it's. It's not. It's not good to have one, one provider. It's good to have competition where, where that competition is meaningful and somebody can actually lose. That's like, you know, so then, then, so, yeah, okay. Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So in radical innovation, obviously the workforce is a really key component of that. I mean, as, I mean, during your PayPal days, you were actually doing coding, right. But in SpaceX and Tesla, they are so large that Elon can't do everything. What sort of things do you think about in terms of motivating a workforce like. Like we have in the department of the Air Force that will help them become more radically innovative. What sort of things do you look for in people or in processes that make the workforce better?

[Elon Musk]

Sure. Well, I think the massive thing that can be done is to make sure your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished. They've got to be a carrot and stick. So if somebody is innovating and making good progress, then they should be promoted sooner. And if somebody is completely failing to innovate. Not every role requires innovation. But if they're in a role where innovation should be happening and it's not happening, then they should either not be promoted or exited. And let me tell you, you'll get innovation real fast.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay, let's stick.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, it's like how much do you want?

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Yeah. So does that carrot and stick approach help? Do you think people be more risk averse or less risk averse?

[Elon Musk]

Well, when trying different things, you got to have some acceptance of failure. As you were alluding to earlier, failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices. And you may not may get something even worse than lack of innovation. Things may go backwards. So if what you really want is risk, you want reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek. So if what you're seeking is innovation, then you should reward success and innovation. And only there should be minor consequences for lack of minor consequences for trying and failing. There should be minor, significant rewards for trying and succeeding, minor consequences for trying and not succeeding, and big and major negative consequences for not trying. Okay, so if you have that incentive structure, you will get innovation like you can't believe.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay, so you've talked at Tesla shareholder meetings and in various interviews that you consider the machine that builds the machine to be just as important, if not more important than and the machine itself. Yeah, so we talked about the workforce aspects. Are there processes that you use within your company that are parts of that machine that you think are particularly valuable for innovative, radical change?

[Elon Musk]

Well, what I mean by the machine that builds the machine is that the, the, the production, that designing the production system of a new product is I think at least an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude harder than designing the initial prototype.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

The, I think like in America there's been less of a, less importance in modern times placed on manufacturing. And I think this is, this is a mistake. Like at this point I really classify and in fact I sent an email to the to SpaceX just saying this. Like at this point I think designing a rocket is trivial, just trivial. There's like tons of books that'll you read them, you know, you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. It's real, real easy. Yeah, if you say like two stage and 2% of your liftoff mass to orbit just to design something like that psk. Now say you want to go into production with that or if you want, you want to actually make, let's say the next step is you want to make even one of those things. Okay, now making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard for the designing of it is not hard. The making of it, of even one is hard. The making of a production line that builds and launches many is extremely hard. And then the next level beyond that would be creating a fully reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch. That's super, super hard. So that's so yeah, but by building a machine that builds a machine, I mean, I mean creating the production system and I, I Keep emphasizing to SpaceX, the hard part is making it and making lots of them and launching frequently. Because reuse must not just be, it can't be reused like the shuttle. It's got to be rapid and complete reuse. So the shuttle was a case where the reuse was very slow and it was not complete. The main tank was lost every time. And refurbishing the shuttle between flights was extremely expensive. It's not even clear whether it was worth recovering the booster shells from the ocean. So, so just like an aircraft, the rocket must be rapidly and completely reusable. And then you need lots of them. And then I've been sort of just doing back of the envelope of what's needed to establish a self sustaining city on Mars. These are like big numbers, but like you need on the order of a million tons to the surface of Mars, useful payload, something like that. Because we sit on the top of a massive base of infrastructure or the economy is. You think of all the things that are mined and then refined and then there's many steps in the refinement and in order to produce like your phone or your toaster even, there's a vast base of industry that was required to produce even a simple household item. It's very difficult. So you got to recreate that on Mars. So a million tons on Mars means we're just talking orders of magnitude here. Hopefully it's not 10 million tons and hopefully.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find some time to relax a little you time. Enter Chumba Casino. With no download required. You can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino style games, all for free. Go to Chumbacasino.com to collect your free welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No PURCHASE NECESSARY VGW Group VOID where prohibited by law 18 terms and conditions apply.

[John Morgan]

Recently a new client called me and started by saying, Mr. Morgan, I really need your help, but I'm just a nobody. Those words stunned me and I immediately Called him back and we're now helping him and his family after a terrible accident. I'm John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan. Everybody who comes to our firm at their time of need is a somebody. I grew up poor, but my grandmother was like a queen to us. At Morgan and Morgan, our goal is to level the playing field for you and your family at your time of need. The insurance company has unlimited money and resources. You need a firm who can fight them toe to toe for right at 30 years, we have fought them in courtrooms throughout America. Our results speak for themselves. And always remember this. Everybody is a somebody, and nobody is a nobody. Visit forthepeople.com to learn about our firm, Morgan and Morgan. For the people injured, visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Elon Musk]

Maybe it's less than a million tons, but probably not 100,000 tons. So that means you need to get about 5 million tons to Earth orbit of useful payload. So you're talking like the like. So essentially, unless you have a launch system that is somewhere in the megaton per year range to orbit, it's not, it's not relevant.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So Starlink, as you're scaling to build more and more Starlink satellites to go on more and more reusable rockets, what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome in Starlink production so that you can perfect that machine that builds the machine?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, as Starlink production is going well, actually that's a hard thing to get right. We made many, we had many iterations on the Starlink prototypes. And then as I said, the building the Starlink production line was thousand percent harder than designing the satellite to begin with. But it is important to have like a, to design for manufacturing and have a tight feedback loop between the design of the object and the manufacturing system. So when you design the object, at first you, you don't realize all the parts that are really difficult to manufacture. And so having the manufacturing system and the design bring those up at the same time so that you're actually in the beginning making a thing that you know is wrong, but you're actually figuring out what's hard to manufacture, that's the real problem. So we brought up the Starlink production line before we actually had the design finalized, which, which is actually the right thing to do. And then we discover, oh, there's all, there's all these things that in the design that are very difficult to make. And so therefore we must change the design. And the satellite ended up having the same capability, but just was very Easy to make and launch. So I'll say very easy. It's sort of hard, but it's being done. And the satellites are being produced at a rate now faster than we can launch them. And the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit. Even when taking the a Falcon nine in the most reused configuration, which is to get the booster back and you get the fairings back, the cost of the, of transporting the satellite to orbit exceeds the cost of the satellite. So the satellite's in a good, good situation.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

And the cost, that satellite will keep coming down as we ramp up rates and make design improvements. But so, so we really need Starship to carry Starlink in order to get the total delivered cost to orbit to be much better than it is today.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

It's still pretty good.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

When you, when you. So in terms of deciding what to build, you can take feedback from customers and let customers pull to you what they want, or you can be radically innovative within your company or, you know, a small set of individuals and develop something and push it into the industrial base. So customer pull would be Tesla, Tesla owners wanting new features on the existing fleet. Push would be, you know, company push would be something like when Apple pushed the iPad to everybody and nobody knew what an iPad was until they touched it and went, wow, sure, everybody wants an iPad. Now what do you all think about in terms of that balance between customer pull and company push?

[Elon Musk]

Well, in the beginning, nobody wanted a Tesla. I can tell you that. When we made the original sort of roadster sports car, people were like, why would I want an electric car? That's my gasoline car, works fine. I'm like, no, electric car is better. I should try it. And it was hard to get people to do a test drive. First of all, nobody knew who we were. Never heard of this company. And like, yeah, we're named after Nikola Tesla. You know that guy? Nope. So for sure we were doing push. In the beginning, people said there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car. So it was not, it was not out of like, you know, it was like lots of people coming up to me saying, hey, I really want an electric car. I heard that zero times. So we were like, it's like, man, we better make an electric car and show that these things can be good and then people will want them. You know, it's like, I think it's like Henry Ford said, like the, you know, we talk about the Model T is like if you ask the public what they wanted, they'd say, A faster horse. So if you did, like a big survey and said, hey, public before automobiles, what would you like? It's like, well, I'd like my horse to go three miles an hour faster and eat less food and, you know, be stronger and live longer and that kind of thing. There will be a basis, a bunch of incremental improvements on horse. Because people, when you say, like, what about an automobile, like, car that drives itself, like, what are you talking about? That sounds crazy. But when you actually make an automobile and give it to people and say, okay, now this is a horse where you can keep it in the barn, and if you leave for a month, it's still alive. Yeah, so carry more weight than a horse and go further and that kind of thing. So anyway, it's like, when it's a radically new product, people don't know that they want it because it's just not in their scope. I think when they first started making TVs, they did a nationwide survey. I think this might have been like 46 or 48. It was like famous nationwide survey, will you ever buy a TV? It was like 96% of respondents said no. Some crazy number. Like, basically everyone's like, would you buy a tv? And maybe they put a price in there or something. I don't know. But it was famously. Almost everyone said they would not buy a tv, but they didn't know what they were talking about.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So the big game changing stuff at the beginning is a company push kind of a thing most of the time. But then changes to the product over time can be a lot more customer pull kind of a focus.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Changes to the product over time can be incremental changes. Then the customers can certainly tell you it's good to get customer feedback to say, how can we improve the product? And once they're using it, they can say, okay, I like this thing about it. I don't like this other thing. And then we can improve the product over time. Customer feedback after they. They have the fundamental thing is. Is great.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay. So in the audience here, we have a lot of air and space warfighters. We have so people who use systems. We have a lot of developmental teams on both the government and the industry side. And we have the. The air and space leadership of the nation. So I got a little lightning round here for you to try and influence maybe some of those younger folks in the back who are looking for the. For the next big thing. So in terms of different kinds of technology, whether it's artificial intelligence or medical or batteries, or whatever in the next five years, what technology do you think will see the most advancement?

[Elon Musk]

Well, it's difficult to. To assess most in those contexts because they're very different. But I think the. Probably the most transformative, most fundamentally transformative will be AI.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

AI. Okay.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

And if you were recommending to some of the young officers and enlisted troops in the room what sort of degrees to pursue at college or what sort of education that they should prioritize for themselves in the modern era, what would you recommend?

[Elon Musk]

Computer science and physics.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Computer science and physics.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

How many computer science people do we have out there? How many physics people? Okay. We need more, apparently. Okay.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, essentially information theory and physical theory, if you want to understand the nature of the universe and have these have very good predictive power. Physics and computer science.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

As a nation that is interested in radical innovation to maintain its competitive edge, what are the things that the dependent department of the Air Force should be investing more in every day?

[John Morgan]

When you log into chumbacasino.com, the ultimate online social casino, you get a free daily bonus. Imagine if you got daily bonuses in other parts of your life.

[Elon Musk]

I chose french fries.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Over loaded french fries.

[Ryan Seacrest]

I asked Stuart from accounting about his weekend.

[Elon Musk]

Even though I don't care, I updated.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

My operating system without having to call tech support.

[John Morgan]

Collect your free daily [e-mail] now and live the Chumba life. VGW Group. No purchase NECESSARY VOID WORK PROHIBITED by law. See terms and conditions 18.

Recently, a new client called me and started by saying, Mr. Morgan, I really need your help, but I'm just a nobody. Those words stunned me, and I immediately called him back. And we're now helping him and his family after a terrible accident. I'm John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan. Everybody who comes to our firm at their time of need is a somebody. I grew up poor, but my grandmother was like a queen to us. At Morgan and Morgan, our goal is to level the playing field for you and your family at your time of need. The insurance company has unlimited money and resources. You need a firm who can fight them toe to toe for right at 30 years, we have fought them in courtrooms throughout America. Our results speak for themselves. And always remember this. Everybody is a somebody, and nobody is a nobody. Visit forthepeople.com to learn about our firm, Morgan and Morgan. For the people injured, visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Other than reusable rockets from your perspective.

[Elon Musk]

Again, I can't emphasize enough how important reusable Rockets are, you'll love it. It's great. So, and I think that you could actually do point to point on Earth with, you know, to go long distances and be much better than aircraft because I mean basically just think of like ICBM minus the nuke Adaland, you know, so, so it's just sort of in the option package. Just uncheck nuke and then add landing system check. And that's definitely going to get you wherever you want to go the fastest because that's why they made ICBMs. They get there the fastest. So I think that's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, I think, yeah. I mean once you have a dramatically lower cost access to space, then many things are enabled. You can think of like once you got the Union Pacific Railroad, then, you know, getting to the west coast was much faster and much less dangerous. Yeah, you're not likely to sort of end up eating your compatriots in a snowy situation. So you can just take the train. So in the beginning they thought why the heck are they building that stupid railway? There's nobody there. And they're like. But once you build the railway, like, okay, now it's easy to get to the west coast. And now a huge portion of the US population is on the west coast. And actually California is the most populous state in the nation. But it used to be, well, least populous I suppose, or pretty low. So many things are possible once the transportation problem is solved. That's why I think it's so fundamental. If you can't get there or getting there takes a long time and you can't risk and every mission's got to work, then it's very hard to innovate. It's got to be that, okay, some missions won't work and the cost of running the experiment is low. That's why I'm harping so much on the cost, cost of transport. So you know, once you're there, I think like say establishing a base on the moon or base on Mars, there's just a tremendous amount of work that's needed to create a self sustaining base on the moon or Mars. And it opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity just as the Union Pacific Railroad did by making access to the west coast much easier.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. I mean outside of the space realm, I think there's still a lot of opportunity in tunnels. I've been saying that for a long time and tunnels are great. They're really great and boring. Company is about to finish its first tunnel in Vegas. I encourage people to copy, please Copy the boring company or do better. That'd be great. There's.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So in terms of domains you have subterranean, obviously Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities. You've got the space domain covered with SpaceX and Starlink capabilities. I think this is the air warfare symposium. Folks might not in the audience might be interested in, if you have any ideas for the air domain specifically.

[Elon Musk]

Well, for the air domain, I think things are very definitely going to go into kind of autonomous, locally autonomous drone warfare is where it's at, where the future will be. I'm just saying it's not. I want the future to be this, it's just this is what the future will be is autonomous drone warfare. And at a local level, the, you know, can't believe I'm saying this because this is, this is like dangerous, but it's simply what will occur is sort of a drones locally being autonomous. And, but I think we still want to retain sort of, you know, authority to damage or destroy, you know, anything that, that isn't an autonomous drone. Keep that authority back here with a person in the loop. Okay, but it's, it's the, the fighter jet era has passed. That is, it's just. Yeah, fighter jet era has passed. Okay, so it's, it's drones.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Let's go back to failure for a minute. And, and, and the mindset that, that you have, you and your leadership team at Tesla and SpaceX have on failure. I mean the SpaceX blooper reel that you guys did in, I think it was 2017 time frame was definitely, hey, we embrace that, this learning that occurs more recently with the Tesla truck and the ball through the window. Also that mindset that embraces failure. How do you personally, I mean, those kinds of failures would drive a lot of us in this room nuts, but doesn't seem to drive you nuts. Seems like you're very comfortable with it. Can you talk about the mindset that requires for you to be that accepting of that kind of failure?

[Elon Musk]

Should we roll the video?

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

No.

[Elon Musk]

Should we not?

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

No, we should not roll the video. Not yet.

[Elon Musk]

Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, I think of these things as just, there's a certain amount of time and within that time you want the best net outcome. So for all the set of actions that you can do, there's going to be some of which will fail, some of which will succeed, and you want the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest. So like use like a baseball analogy. Like, you know, baseball. They don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until you get a real easy one. You can give you three shots and the third one say, okay, get off the, go back to the, put somebody else up there. So, so your three strikes on baseball not on your bat anymore. So what you're really looking for is what's the batting average? How are you doing on score? And just there's going to be some amount of failure, but you want your net output, net useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay, okay.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Intellectual Property, obviously Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity have amazing capabilities that they're bringing to the, to the public and to the government every day. How do you protect your intellectual property in a world where it seems like the cloud and servers and things are constantly under attack from people wishing to free you of your intellectual property?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, well, actually at Tesla we just open sourced our patents some years ago so anyone can use our patents. So we really have not been tried to protect intellectual property in that sense. We've, we've tried to actually smooth the path because the, the overarching goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. And so if we created a patent portfolio that discouraged other companies from making electric cars, that would be inconsistent with our mission. So we open sourced all the patents.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

In order to help the other, anyone else who wants to make an electric car. So I guess that's the opposite of protecting the ip. Now the real way I think you actually achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don't need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying some something that you did years ago and that's fine. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed is really, speed of innovation is what matters. And I do say this to my teams quite a lot, that innovation per unit time as I go, innovation per year, if you want to say it is what matters, not innovation, absent time. Because if you wanted to make say 100% improvement in something and that took 100 years or one year, that's radically different. So it's like what is your rate of innovation that matters? And is the rate of innovation is that accelerating or decelerating? And a weird thing happens when companies get big is that most companies or organizations, the bigger they get, they tend to get less innovative. Not just less innovative on a per person basis, but less innovative in the absolute. And I think this is probably because the incentive structure is not, is not there for innovation. It's not enough to use Words to encourage innovation, the incentive structure must be aligned with that. That's fundamental.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

So taking that from a business level to a national level, in terms of obviously United States, largest economy in the world, China, the second largest economy in the world currently and gaining fast. What sort of things that could you share with the audience here that are your thoughts on the competition, economic or military, between the United States and China?

[Elon Musk]

Sure. Well, I think China is a real interesting country, I have to say. The thing to appreciate about China is just that there's a lot of, of really smart, really hard working people there and they're going to do a lot of great things. This is sort of, you know, independent of Chinese government policy. They're just going to do a lot of interesting things. The thing that will be, that will feel pretty strange is that the Chinese economy is going to be probably at least twice as big as the U.S. economy. Maybe three times, but at least twice. So that assumes GDP per capita, still less than the U.S. but since they have about four or five times the population, then it would only require getting to a GDP per capita of half the United States for their economy to be twice the size of ours. And as I'm sure people in this room know, the foundation of war is economics. And so if you, if you have half the resources of the counterparty, then you better be real innovative. If you're not innovative, you're going to lose.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

I'm not sure whether that's a cyber attack that's ongoing or not here. So the clock says I have 11 minutes left. Is that not true? Smooth jazz, Elon.

[Elon Musk]

It's coming through the house system.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

We're working to get it shut off. Thank you.

[John Morgan]

Hotel.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, well, anyway, so, so yeah, with respect to China, China's economy is going to be two to three times the size of the US economy, at least, at least double. Therefore, in order for the US to be competitive on military level, the innovation has to overcome a gigantic gap in economic output. Okay, so in the absence of radical innovation, the US will be militarily second.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

Basic, basic math.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

What from the standpoint of radical innovation. We already talked about workforce, we talked about processes, we talked about protecting intellectual property rights. Let's talk about overall culture. That culture that you try and push into your companies that makes them successful. Any of us. And I sat right next to one of your SpaceX employees on the plane here yesterday, a young engineer. It was motivating for me just to talk to her about what she was doing every day and how important her job was. And I Just felt like the only other place I've seen that kind of culture is frankly in the department of the Air Force with some of our young folks that are sprinkled around the back of the room. How do you create that culture at SpaceX and Tesla to, to make employees like that?

[Elon Musk]

Well, wow, this smooth jazz is on us with a vengeance. I feel like we're in a big elevator. So first of all, when we interview people, we do ask for some evidence of exceptional ability, which in most cases includes innovation. This is not to say that everyone needs to be innovative. It's. But we certainly need those that are doing advanced engineering to be innovative. And ideally everyone is at least to some degree innovative. So at the interview point we select for people who want to create new technology and then the incentive structure is set up such that innovation is rewarded. Making mistakes along the way does not come with a big penalty. But failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty. You'll be fired.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay, yeah, all right.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

The carrot and stick, that's the stick.

[Elon Musk]

If you don't even try, or somebody doesn't even try to innovate, or their innovation aspirations are not very good, then yeah, they will no longer be at the company.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Okay. Okay.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

All right, so we got about five minutes left and what I'd like to do is just turn it over to you, Elon, to talk about whatever you'd like to talk about. If you have a message for the audience here. You have, you know, a thousand plus air and space professionals and the greatest air and space force on the planet. So what do you want to tell them?

[Elon Musk]

We got to make Starfleet happen. So we want like real big spaceships that can go far places. And this will probably get me into the most trouble of all. I think this should be a new uniform that's, you know, that's like, I don't know, cool uniforms, cool spaceships, you know, I think that's what, when the public hears Space Force, that's what they think it's like, okay, we're going to have like some sweet spaceships and like pretty good uniforms and stuff and that'd be, that's what the public wants. So we want the sci fi futures, the good sci fi futures to be real and ideally to become real while we're still alive. And we want to see it happen. And so I think we really need to drive the rate of innovation to be such that we would see big breakthroughs, big improvements in space technology in the years to come. So yeah, just trying to make Starfleet happen as soon as humanly possible and definitely while we're still alive. Yeah. So I'm not sure about Wolf Drive, but other stuff I think can be done.

[Audience Member (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Gotcha.

[Elon Musk]

Wolf Drive and teleportation probably not. But big spaceships that can go far places. Definitely that can be done.

[Moderator (possibly a military or aerospace figure)]

Understood. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.

[Ryan Seacrest]

It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba casino has over 100 online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus [e-mail] sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void where prohibited by law, 18 + terms and conditions apply.