RAW Elon Musk Interview from Air Warfare Symposium 2020

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(patriotic orchestral music) - [Announcer] Please welcome AFA's central Florida Martin H. Harris Chapter President Todd Freece. (audience applauding) - Thank you. Thirty-six years ago, our chapter established this great symposium and has been working closing with AFA to keep it one of the premiere professional development events for airmen. Today, it's our honor to participate in continuing that great tradition by hosting this session. I am pleased to introduce our keynote event to conclude our symposium. Lieutenant General John Thompson is responsible for approximately 6,000 airmen worldwide. He commands an annual budget of over $7 billion to support the research, design, development, launch, acquisition, and sustainment of satellites and their associated command and control systems. Accompanying General Thompson is global innovator Elon Musk. In 1980-- (crowd cheering and applauding) In 1983, he taught himself computer programming at the age of 12, sold the code for a Basic-based video game called "Blaster" for approximately $500. And in 1990, in 1995, he started Zip2, a web software company later renamed PayPal in 2001. But more recently, you might know him for for revolutionizing electric cars as CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. Development-- (crowd cheering and applauding) That's all the Tesla owners. (chuckles) Development and manufacturing advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth orbit as founder of Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX. (audience cheering and applauding) And conceptualizing high-speed transportation known as Hyperloop. (audience cheering and applauding) And if you haven't heard some of these quotes by Elon Musk, or Muskisms, let me introduce you to one. Here's my first one and when I first read it, I thought, "Well, it applies to innovation, "it's also written into the contract "of every airman in this room, "and every man and woman who has served." The quote is, "If something is important enough, "even if the odds are against you, "you should still do it." Now, looking back to our speech this morning by Dr. Roper when he talked about innovation, one of the Muskism quotes is "Failure is an option here. "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." But my favorite quote, "I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact." (audience laughing and applauding) General Thompson, Mr. Musk, over to you. Thank you and welcome. (chuckling) - Well, 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 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, J.T., you guys are gonna do it until you get it right." (audience laughing) So we're gonna 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 II" 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. - Yeah. - 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, 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? (audience cheering) Stand up, stand up if you're a Tesla owner. (Elon laughing) All right. (audience applauding) Very nice. - (chuckling) (applause drowns out Elon) - So, Elon, you and I have talked about whether the Air Force is the most innovative service. The Department of the Air Force now, and the last time we interviewed, it was just the Air Force. Now we're the Air Force and the Space Force, that's 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. (audience laughing) 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 push-back 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 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? - 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. (laughs) (audience laughing) And, we've obviously had a long relationship with the Air Force and very much appreciate the support over the years, so I just wanna make sure I 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, the creation of the Space Force is happening. I think it makes sense that there's a major branch for every domain, you know? And so the domain of space, the domain of air, are both important. I think space-based is certainly a medium of its own. (laughs) - [General Thompson] Sure. - And I think there's some very exciting things that are possible. If I may just say it, like what the public wants, I think, and I'm actually pretty confident that the public does want this, is a Starfleet Academy. You know with like (laughs) (audience laughing) Yeah, like how do we make "Star Trek" real, you know? That'd be pretty amazing. I'd love that. (laughs) (audience laughing) You know? And so I think the fastest we can make sort of Starfleet real, then, we should try to do that. (chuckles) (audience whoops) - [General Thompson] Well, so, Elon, speaking-- (audience applauding) 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. (audience cheering and applauding - 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. (audience laughing) But then the funny thing is, it blew up, the thing is truth is stranger than fiction, the satellite was shot through the fairing, arced through the air a couple hundred meters, and then plunged through the roof of a tool shed and then landed on the floor. And which was actually in reasonably good shape. I mean, for crashing through the ceiling, but, you know, like, recognizable. (audience chuckling) And we gave it back and said, "We've not lost one of your satellites." (laughs) (audience laughing) - So, from a SpaceX perspective, - Just buff it out. - A partial mission success? - Well, it's like, it's not lost, I'm just saying. (both men laughing) It's a little worse for wear, but, you know, here. But then we subsequently launched a future Falcon sat to actual orbit, that was great. So, I think there's, I think we can go a long way towards making Starfleet real and making these, sort of, 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. - Yeah. - 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. It's, most of the time, you cannot find big reward for small risk, those are rare. So you're gonna have some proportionality to 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 is, I think, gonna become increasingly important. And it'll be 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 that if the United States does not use breakthrough innovation, it will fall behind. So, I think this is not something that was a risk in times past but I think is a risk now. - Okay. So, yeah. - Do you characterize that risk in terms of peer-adversary competition around the planet? Are you suggesting that it's our adversaries that require us to be 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? - I think there's little, I have zero doubt that if the United States does not seek great innovations in space, it will be second in space. - Okay. - With, as sure as night follows day. So it is a big deal. But this is a very innovative, there's no country more innovative and inventive than the United States. So it's just important to use that attribute. That's the ace card. - [General Thompson] Okay. And 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? - Well, I think having outcome-based procurement is actually very important. - Okay. - To say like, this is the outcome that is sought and who can achieve this outcome? Or achieve this outcome to a greater degree? That company will, that's who the Air Force will do business with. And will procure the thing that is radically innovative as measured by what is important for leadership in space. So, I mean I do think it's absolutely fundamental to achieve full reusability in access to space. 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. Profound. It will be like, if, in the Air Force, if you have 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. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah, this is extremely fundamental. So, the cost of propellant is typically on the order of 1% of the cost of the of the vehicle. Or less. So, if you have a vehicle that is, say, I dunno, LOX kerosine, like Falcon 9 or something like that, you know, it's, the oxygen and the fuel are, yeah, maybe a half-million dollars or something like that. But then, depending upon the mission, the mission price can be anywhere from 60 to $100 million. So, the 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'd 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, (moans) but like, in my opinion, Joint Strike Fighter, there should be a competitor to JSF. I know that's a controversial subject but you know, I think it's not good to have one provider. It's good to have competition where that competition is meaningful and somebody can actually lose. Like, so, then, (audience chuckling) so, yeah. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - 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? - 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. There's gotta be a carrot and a stick. So if somebody is innovating and doing, making great 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 is 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. (audience laughing) - [General Thompson] Okay. The stick. - Yeah. It's like, how much do you want it? - Yeah. (audience cheering and applauding) So, does that carrot and stick approach help, do you think, people be more risk averse or less risk averse? - Well, when trying different things, you've gotta 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 get something even worse than lack of innovation, things may go backwards. So, if, what you really want is 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. Those should be minor. Significant rewards for trying and succeeding. Minor consequences for trying and not succeeding. And major negative consequences for not trying. - [General Thompson] Okay. - So, if you have that incentive structure, you will get innovation like you can't believe. - Okay, - Yeah. - So, you've talked at Tesla shareholder meetings and in various interviews that you consider the machine that builds the machine - [Elon] Yes. - To be just as important if not more important than the machine itself. - [Elon] Yep. - 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? - Well, what I mean by the machine that builds the machine is that the the production, 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. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - I think like, in America, there's been less less importance in modern times placed on manufacturing. And I think this is a mistake. At this point, I would really classify, in fact I sent an email to SpaceX just saying this, 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, if you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. Real easy. (audience laughing) Yeah. If you say, like, two-stage, and 2% of your liftoff mass to orbit, to design something like that, piece of cake. Now say you wanna go into production with that. Let's say the next step is you wanna make even one of those things. Okay, now making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard. But 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, but by building the machine that builds the machine, I mean creating the production system and I keep emphasizing to SpaceX the hard part is making it and making lots of them - [General Thompson] Yeah. - and launching frequently. 'Cause reuse must not just be, it can't be reuse like the shuttle. It's gotta 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 refurbing the shuttle between flights was extremely expensive. It's not even clear whether it was worth recovering the booster shells from the ocean. So, just like an aircraft, the rocket must be rapidly and completely reusable. And then you need lots of them. So, just doing kind of back of the envelope, what's needed to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, these are big numbers, but I think 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. The economy is, you think of all the things that are mined and then refined, and then just the 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 is required to produce even a simple household item. - Yeah. - It's very difficult. So, so you've gotta recreate that on Mars. So a million tons on Mars means, and we're just talking orders of magnitude here, and hopefully it's not 10 million tons, and hopefully, maybe it's less than a million tons, but probably not 100,000 tons. So, that means you need to get about about 5 million tons to Earth orbit, of useful payload. So we're talking like, so essentially, unless you have a launch system that is somewhere in the megaton per year range, to orbit, it's not relevant. - Okay. - Yeah. - 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? - Yeah, Starlink production is going well, actually. That's the, that was a hard thing to get right. We made many iterations on the Starlink prototypes. And then, as I said, then building the Starlink production line was, I dunno, 1000% harder than designing the satellite to begin with. But it is important to have like, a, to design for manufacturing and have a type-B backloop between the design of the object and the manufacturing system. So, when you design the object at first, you don't realize all the parts that are really difficult to manufacture. And so having the manufacturing system and the design, bringing 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 is actually the right thing to do. And then we discovered, oh, 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 say very easy, it's sort of hard, but, (laughing) but it's being done and the satellites are being produced at a rate now faster than we can launch them. So, and the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit. Even when taking a Falcon 9 in the most reused configuration, which is to get the booster back and you get the fairings back. The cost of transporting the satellite to orbit exceeds the cost of the satellite. So the satellite's in a good situation. - Okay. - And the cost of that satellite will keep coming down as we ramp up rate and make design improvements. 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. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Which is still pretty good. - 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 owners wanting new features on the existing fleet. Push would be, 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." - [Elon] Sure. - And everybody wants an iPad now. What do you wall think about in terms of that balance between customer pull and company push? - Well, in the beginning, nobody wanted a Tesla. I can tell you that. (audience laughing) When we made the original Roaster sports car, people were like, "Why would I want an electric car? "My gasoline car works fine." I'm like, "No, an electric car's better, you should try it." (audience laughing) And it was hard to get people to do a test drive. First of all, nobody knew who we were, they never heard of this company. I'm like, "Yeah, we're named after Nikola Tesla. "You know that guy? "Nope." (laughs) (audience laughing) So, for sure we were doing push in the beginning 'cause there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car. So it was not out of, like, you know, lots of people coming up to me saying, "Hey, I really want an electric car." I heard that zero times. (audience laughing) 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 would want them. I think it was Henry Ford said, when we was talking about the Model T, if you asked the public what they wanted, they'd say "a faster horse." So, if you did 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 per hour faster "and eat less food and "you know, be stronger "and live longer and that kind of thing." There will be basically a bunch of incremental improvements on a horse. 'Cause when you say, "What about an automobile? "Like a 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." (laughs) (audience laughing) Yeah. So, carry more weight than a horse, and go further and that kind of thing. So, 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 TV's, they did a nationwide survey, I think this may have in like '46 or '48, it was like a famous nationwide survey, "Will you ever buy a TV?" And 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 dunno. But it was famously almost everyone said they would not buy a TV but they didn't know what they were talking about. - So the big game-changing stuff at the beginning is a company push kind of a thing most of the time. - [Elon] Yeah. - But then, changes to the product over time can be a lot more customer pull kind of a focus? - Yeah, changes to the product over time can be, incremental changes, then 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 have the fundamental thing, is great. - Okay. - Yeah. - Okay, so, in the audience here, we have a lot of air and space warfighters, we have people who use systems, we have a lot of developmental teams on both the government and the industry side, and we have the air and space leadership of the nation. So, I've got a little Lightning Round here for ya. - Great. - To try and influence, maybe, some of those younger folks in the back who are looking 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? - Well, it's difficult to assess most in those contexts 'cause they're very different. But I think the probably most transformative, most fundamentally transformative will be A.I. - [General Thompson] A.I.? Okay. 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? - Computer Science and Physics. - [General Thompson] Computer Science and Physics, okay. How many Computer Science people do we have out there? (a few members of the audience whooping) How many Physics people? (a few members of the audience whooping) Okay. We need more, apparently. (audience laughing) Okay-- - Wait, essentially, Information Theory and Physical Theory if you want to understand the nature of the universe, and these have very good predictive power, Physics and Computer Science. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - Okay, as a nation that is interested in radical innovation to maintain its competitive edge, what are the things that the Department of the Air Force should be investing more in, other than reusable rockets? - Right. - From your perspective. - Again, I can't emphasize enough how important reusable rockets are. (laughs) (audience laughing) You know? You'll love it. (audience laughing) It's great. So, and I think you could actually do point to point on Earth, to go long distances and be much better than aircraft. Because basically just think of like an ICBM minus the nuke, add a land, you know? So, just sort of in the option package. Just, you know, (audience laughing) uncheck "Nuke" and then add "Landing System". (laughs) (laughing) And that's definitely going to get you wherever you want to go the fastest. 'Cause that's why they made ICBM's, they get there the fastest. So, I think that's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, I think, uh, yeah, once you have dramatically lower cost access to space, then many things are enabled. You could think of like, once you got the Union Pacific Railroad, then getting to the west coast was much faster and much less dangerous. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - You're not likely to sort of end up eating your compatriots in a snowy situation. (audience laughing) So, you can just take the train. (audience laughing) (Elon laughing) So at the beginning, they thought, "Why the heck are they building that stupid railway? "There's nobody there." (laughs) And they're like, but once you build the railway, they're like, "Okay, now it's easy to get to the west coast." And now a huge portion of the Earth's population is on the west coast. Actually, California is the most populous state in the nation. But it used to be least populous, I suppose, or pretty low. So, many things are possible once the transport problem is solved. So 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, every mission's gotta work, then it's very hard to innovate. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - It's gotta 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 of transport. So, you know, once you're there, I think, like, say establishing a base on the Moon or a 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. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. 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. Tunnels are great. (chuckles) They're really great. And The 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 - So in terms of domains, you have subterranean. - Yeah. - Obviously, Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities. You've got the space domain covered with SpaceX and Starlink capabilities. I think that since this is the Air Warfare Symposium, folks in the audience might be interested in if you have any ideas for the air domain specifically. - Well, for the air domain, I think things are definitely going to go into kind of autonomous or locally autonomous drone warfare, that's 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. - Okay. - It's autonomous drone warfare. And at a local level, the, I can't believe I'm saying this because this is dangerous, but it's simply what will occur, is sort of drones locally being autonomous and but I think we still want to retain sort of like, you know, authority to damage or destroy anything that isn't an autonomous drone. (chuckles) We'll keep that authority back here with a person in the loop. - [General Thompson] Okay. - The fighter jet era has passed. That is, it's just, yeah, the fighter jet era has passed. - Okay. - So, it's drones, yeah. - [General Thompson] Um, let's go back to failure for a minute. (audience laughing) And the mindset 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 - Sure. - I think it was 2017 timeframe. Was definitely, "Hey, we embrace this learning that occurs." More recently with the Tesla truck and the ball through the window. - [Elon] Yeah. - Also, that mindset of-- - Didn't go through the window. (audience laughs) - 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. It 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? - Uh, sure, shall we roll the video? (laughing) Should we not? - No, we should not roll the video, not yet. - Okay, okay. (chuckles) 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, and 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, I'd have to use a baseball analogy. You know, in baseball, they don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until you get a real easy one. They're gonna give you three shots. And then the third one, they say, okay, get off the, go back to the, put somebody else up there. So, you have three strikes on baseball. Look, you're not on bat anymore. So, what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average? You know, how you're doing on on score and there's gonna be some amount of failure. But you want your net output, that useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic. - Okay. - Yeah. - Okay. Intellectual property. Obviously, Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City have amazing capabilities that they're bringing 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? - Yeah, 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 tried to actually smooth the path because 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. - [General Thompson] Okay. - 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 something that you did years ago. And that's fine, you know. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed of innovation is what matters. And I do say this to my teams quite a lot. That innovation-per-unit time, it's like innovation per year if you wanna say it like that is what matters, not innovation absent time. Because if you're wanting to make, say, a 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? 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. So. - 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 could you share with the audience here that are your thoughts on the competition, economic or military, between the United States and China? - Sure. Well, I think China's a real interesting country, I have to say. The thing to appreciate about China is just that there's a lot of really smart, really hard-working people there. And they're gonna do a lot of great things. This is sort of independent of Chinese government policy, they're just gonna do a lot of interesting things. The thing 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. Yeah, so, that assumes a 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 gonna lose. (trumpet music blaring) - I'm not sure whether that's a cyber attack that's ongoing or not here, so. (string music blaring) (audience laughing) The clock says I have 11 minutes left, is that not true? - I guess it's moot. - All right, so Smooth Jazz Elon, - Now the smooth jazz. (audience laughing) - [Announcer] It's coming through the house system, we're working to get it shut off. - Thank you. (audience laughing) - Um, yes, well, um, at any rate, (laughs) so with respect to China, China's economy is gonna be two to three times the size of the U.S. economy, at least double. Therefore, in order for the U.S. to be competitive on a military level, the innovation has to overcome a gigantic gap in economic output. - [General Thompson] Okay. - So in the absence of radical innovation, the U.S. will be militarily second. - Okay. - Basic, basic math. - 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 - Yep. - 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 make employees like that? - Well, wow, this smooth jazz is on us (laughing) with a vengeance. I feel like we're in a big elevator. (laughs) (audience laughing and applauding) So, first of all, when we interview people, we do ask for some evidence of exceptional ability which in most cases includes innovation. That's not to say that everyone needs to be innovative. 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. And but failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty. You'll be fired. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - The carrot and stick, that's the stick. - If you don't even try, or if somebody doesn't even try to innovate or their innovation aspirations are very, are not very good, then, yeah, they will no longer be at the company. - Okay, okay. - Yeah. - All right, so, we've 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 a thousand-plus air and space professionals in the greatest Air and Space Force on the planet. So whaddya wanna tell 'em? - We've gotta make Starfleet happen. (General Thompson laughing) (audience laughing) Like, you know? So we want real big spaceships that can go real far places, and this will probably get me into the most trouble of all, I think there should be a new uniform. (audience laughing) That's like, I dunno, cool uniforms, cool spaceships, you know? (audience laughing) I think when the public hears "Space Force" that's what they think. It's like, okay, we're gonna have some sweet spaceships and, like, pretty good uniforms and stuff. And that'll be, that's what they'll probably want. 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. You know, 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, big breakthroughs, big improvements in space technology in the years to come. So, yeah. Just, like, try to make Starfleet happen as soon as humanly possible and definitely while we're still alive. Yeah, so. I'm not sure about warp drive, but other stuff I think can be done. - [General Thompson] Gotcha. - Warp drive and teleportation, probably not. But big space ships that can go far places, definitely, that can be done. - [General Thompson] Understood. - All right. - Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. (audience cheering and applauding) (patriotic orchestral music) - [General Thompson] Thanks very much, that was great. - [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage, AFA's Chairman of the Board, Gerald Murray. - All right, wasn't this exciting? Just absolutely incredible. So I see a lot of you exiting, probably if you've gotta go some place, I would ask that if you could, that you might wanna hold on, I mean, it's not completely at the end right now. But I recognize people have flights and everything. All right, listen, as we close out this year's Air Warfare Symposium, I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize our great Air Force leaders, again, that are here. And especially for a couple that are here for their last time in that capacity. And so for that reason, I'd like to ask Orville, and if you would, and General Goldfein, and Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Wright. If you would please join me onstage. (triumphant patriotic music) (audience applauding) (upbeat acoustic guitar rock music) (audience cheering and applauding) (triumphant patriotic music) - Chief, sir, we've had no two greater leaders to lead our force as a team together. Sir, you came into the Air Force in 1983. And so to remember your Air Force and our Air Force Association, Orville has a book for you that was the Air Force magazines all put together in this book from 1983. Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Wright, you came in in 1989 and it is my great pleasure to be able to present you also the almanacs of our and magazines of 1989 for you. (audience applauding) (triumphant patriotic music) Well, what a great two days of rich discussion of the challenges and issues that are facing our Air Force. I hope you have enjoyed this time as much as I. The excitement, the lessons that we have learned, the messages that have been brought by the senior leadership of our Air Force and today the Spark Tank. Just the innovation that is coming from you, our airmen across this Air Force. The future of our force is here, one of my former colleagues, a Master Sergeant, that is now in Junior ROTC has his class back here in the back. They got to witness all of this and every one of them said that they plan to join the United States Air Force when they graduate from high school, either through goin' on to college and to commission or directly into our Air Force. Our future that is here and we couldn't be happier and prouder for the opportunity to be supporting you. We also want to thank the cadets of the University of Central Florida for their assistance. Our industry partners, I thank all of you for joining us as well. As always, we appreciate your continued support. We hope you've learned a lot at this professional education program sponsored by your association. If you like what you've seen here, I invite you again to be a member of this great association. So we may continue to support our Air Force and be the force behind the Force now and into the future. Again, thank you for joining us, we hope to see you in September the 14th through the 16th, put that on your calendar, in the National Harbor in Washington D.C. For the AFA's Air, Space, and Cyberspace Conference. Safe travels to all of you. God bless you. Ladies and gentlemen, this includes AFA's 36th Air Warfare Symposium. (triumphant patriotic music) (audience applauding)
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Channel: The Space Archive
Views: 758,549
Rating: 4.8649273 out of 5
Keywords: elon musk, spacex, elon musk interview
Id: sp8smJFaKYE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 55min 23sec (3323 seconds)
Published: Mon Mar 02 2020
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