AFA Air Warfare Symposium

foreign [Music] foreign [Music] welcome back please take this opportunity to move to your seats so we may begin the program on time [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] please welcome afa's Central Florida Martin hap Harris chapter president Todd freeze thank you 36 years ago our chapter established this great Symposium and has been working closely with AFA to keep it one of the premier professional development events for Airmen today is our honor to participate in continuing that great tradition by hosting this session I am pleased introduce our keynote event to include to conclude our symposium Lieutenant General John Thompson is responsible for approximately six thousand Airmen worldwide

He commands an annual budget of over seven billion dollars 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 [Music] in 1983 he taught himself computer programming at the age of 12.

solve the code for a basic based video game called blaster for approximately five hundred dollars 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 revolutionizing electric cars as CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors development that's all the Tesla owners development and Manufacturing Advanced rockets and spacecraft for Missions to and beyond Earth's orbit as founder of space exploration Technologies SpaceX and conceptualizing high-speed Transportation known as hyperloop and if you haven't heard some of these quotes by Elon Musk or muskisms let me introduce this one here's my first one when I first read it I thought while it applies to Innovation it's also written into the contract of every Airman in this room and every man and woman he was 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 General Thompson Mr musk over to you thank you welcome well Elon thanks so much for being here today as you know and many people in the audience know we uh we're reprising a uh fireless fireside chat that we did at Air Force Space pitch day back in November uh I ran into General goldfein the chief of staff of the United States Air Force this morning and uh um 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 uh 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 so we're going to talk a little bit today about uh Innovation for those of you uh in the audience that nothing that was introduced about Elon uh uh made it to the prefrontal cortex and you're like I still don't know who this guy is um you may remember him from the movie role in Iron Man 2.

or the TV show uh The Big Bang Theory you may remember him if you're old like me when you used to have to do dial-in modems uh you may remember how PayPal actually worked over a dial-in modem yeah um and if just in case you've had your head in the sand for uh the last decade you absolutely have to know him for space exploration Technologies SpaceX a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in uh in the space business and for Tesla so for just 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 Tesla owners do we have in the audience stand up stand up if you're a test loner all right very nice thank you the secretary

so um Elon you and I have talked about whether the air force uh is the most Innovative service um uh the department of the Air Force now and uh the last time we interviewed it was 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 those people who stood up were in the front row we have a lot of first adopters uh here in the front of the audience apparently or maybe those are the folks that just make the most money who knows okay so um again today's uh today's discussion is about uh 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 um when

you put a weapon system uh or a product into production and you start delivering it to your customers very very frequently there is a 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 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 implement 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 uh space slash Air Force um and um I've already had a long relationship with the Air Force and very much appreciate the support of the year so I just want to make sure to say that and look forward to doing a lot of interesting things in the future I I think it's actually um it's cool that that there is that the creation of the space forces is happening um I think it there's you know it makes sense that there's a a major Branch for every domain you know with that uh and and uh so the domain of space the domain of error are both important but uh I think space spaces is is certainly a medium of its own sure um and um I think there's some very

exciting things that are possible if I may just say it like what you know what the public wants I think and Perfection pretty confident that the public doesn't want this is uh staff lead Academy in order like yeah like how do we make stock how do we make Star Trek real you know that'd be pretty amazing I'd love that you know um and uh so I think like the fastest we can make sort of Starfleet real then they're just trying to do that well so Elon speaking speaking for uh the United States space force there already is a Starfleet Academy it's the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs Colorado sure I've I've been there I've given a token um you know the the first launch of Falcon one we had a falcon sat from the Air Force Academy but that rocket

blew up but but but then the funny thing is that it blew up like he's this truth is strange Than Fiction um the the satellite uh were shot through the fairing um through the air a couple hundred meters and then plunged through the roof of a tool shed uh and then landed on the floor um and was actually in reasonably good shape I mean for crashing through the ceiling but you know you're like recognizable you know um and and we have to give it back and so we've not lost one of your satellites so so from a SpaceX perspective buff it up a partial Mission success well it's not lost I'm just saying it's a little the worst it's a little worse for wear but you know but then we subsequently launched a future Falcons that's to actual orbit uh that was great um so

um so I think there's I think we can make go a long way towards making Starfleet real and making uh these uh sort of um utopian or semi-year semi-autopian future is real but it will definitely require radical innovation um one can't get there by incrementally innovating um Expendable boosters there's just no way yeah so the the I think we we need to push for radical breakthroughs um and if you don't push for radical breakthroughs you're not going to get radical outcomes um and that that does mean taking risks um and and common sense that the the if you take a big risk in order to have a big reward there must be a big risk it's it's most the time you cannot find big reward for small risk that's 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 for many reasons um the the goal of having the best technology in space uh 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 uh invention and innovation um to to create space technology that is um the best in the world um and in fact I think if the United States does not use uh breakthrough Innovation uh it will provide so I think this is that this is not something that was a risk in times past but I think is a risk now okay um so yeah um do you characterize that risk in terms of peer adversary Comfort competition

around the planet are you are you um 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 I think there's those little I've zero doubt that if the United States does not take it does not seek great Innovations in space it will be second in space okay with as sure as Nightfall is day so it is a big deal um but this this is uh I mean a very Innovative that you know there's no country more Innovative and an event of the United States so it's just important to use that attribute that's that's the ace card okay yeah and since uh so since it seems like

we're going down the geopolitical path here on the on the the questions how does the United States as a nation maintain that Innovative Edge that that um ability to invest in things and take those risks what kind of 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 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 that's who the Air Force will do business with and we'll procure the thing that is that is radically innovative as measured by the what what is important for leadership in space so um I mean I do think it's

it's absolutely fundamental to achieve full reusability and 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 uh a profound advantage over anyone else was profound um it would be like if um in the Air Force if if you if you had planes that could be used once and or if you're if you're at multi-use planes that could be flown over and over again like normal um and all your adversaries had single-use planes that would be no contest it's the same thing in space okay yeah this is extremely fundamental um so the the cost of a propellant is typically on the order of one percent of the cost of the of the vehicle or less so um if you have a vehicle that is say I don't know

um blocks kerosene like Falcon eye or something like that um it's it's the the the oxygen and the fuel are yeah maybe half million dollars or something like that but then depending upon the mission the admission price can be anywhere from like 60 to 100 million dollars so um and I thought Falcon 9 is a partially reusable vehicle but not fully um the vehicle we're working on right now uh were quite difficult is Starship and uh yeah that has the potential for full reusability um but 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 um it may seem at times that you know shouldn't we Focus all our efforts on on one system and rather than divide them and have two competing systems

um like you know not to cause controversy or a bit like in my opinion like Joint Strike Fighter this should be a competitor to JSO that that's a controversial subject but um you know I think it's it's not it's not good to have uh one one provider um it's good to have competition where that competition is Meaningful and somebody can actually lose that's like you know so then then um so yeah 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 um uh 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 they've got to be a characteristic so if somebody is innovating um and doing 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 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 promote you'll get you'll you'll get Innovation real fast

okay let's stick yeah it's like how much do you want yeah so does that does that carrot and stick approach help do you think people be more risk averse or less risk averse well before when when trying different things you got to have some acceptance of failure uh 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 you may not you may get something even worse than lack of innovation things may go backwards um so if what you really want is uh risk risk to you want reward and Punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek so if uh if what you're seeking is innovation then you should reward success and Innovation um 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 and major negative consequences for not trying Okay so if you have that instead of structure you will get Innovation like you can't believe okay so you've um you've talked at uh Tesla shareholder meetings and in various interviews that you consider um the machine that builds the machine to be just as important if not more important than 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 thank

you well what I mean by the machine that builds the machine is that the the production that designing the production system of a new product is I think at least an order of magnitude or 292 to harder than designing the initial prototype yeah um the I think like in America there's been a lot less of a less important in modern times placed on manufacturing and I think this is this is a mistake um like at this point I was really classified 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 which is Trivial there's like tons of books that'll you read them you know you can understand equations you can design a rocket uh it's real real easy uh yeah if you say like two-stage uh two and two percent

of your lift off Master orbit from just to design something like that piece of cake um uh they 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 um 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 um and then the next level beyond that would be um creating a fully reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch that's that's super super hard um so that's so yeah by building machine at building machine I mean I mean creating the production system and

I keep emphasizing to SpaceX the hard part is making it and making lots of them and launching frequently um 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 refurbing the shuttle between flights was extremely expensive uh it's not even clear whether it was worth recovering was the booster shells from the ocean so so just like an aircraft you the the rocket must be rapidly and completely reusable and then you need lots of them um and then I've been sort of just doing back kind of back of the envelope what's needed to establish a self-sustaining City on Mars and these are like big

numbers but I think you need on the order of a million tons to the surface of Mars useful payload something like that um because we sit on the top of a massive base of infrastructure over you know the economy is uh you think of all the things that are mined and then refined and then and then just many steps in the refinement and in order to produce like your phone or your toast or even those there's a vast base of Industry that was required to produce even a simple household item yeah it's very difficult so so you've got to recreate that on Mars so a million times on Mars means we're just talking orders magnitude here and hopefully it's not 10 million tons and hopefully maybe it's less than a million tons but probably not a hundred thousand tons so that

that means you need to get about 5 million tons to uh 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 okay yeah so um starlink um as you're scaling to build more and more Starling 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 machine that builds the machine yeah as I started selling production is going well actually the that's the that was a hard that's a hard thing to get right um we made many we had many iterations on the stalling prototypes and then as I said the been building the starlink

production line was on a thousand percent harder than designing the satellite to begin with um but but it is important to have like a um to design for manufacturing and have a tight feedback loop between the design of the object and the manufacturing system so as you when people when when you design the object at first you you don't realize all the parts that are really difficult to manufacture uh and so 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 um so we we brought up these 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 uh in the design that are very difficult to make um and so therefore we must change the design and the the satellite ended up having the same capability but just um was very easy to make and launch so what would say very easy it's it's not it's sort of hard but um but it's but but it's being done and we're the satellites are being produced at a rate now faster than we can launch them so and and the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit so even when taking the the Falcon 9 in the most reused configuration which is to get the booster back and you get the bearings back um the cost of the trend of transporting the

satellite to orbit exceeds the cost of the satellite so the satellite's in a good good situation okay and the cost that satellite will keep coming down as we ramp up rates and make design improvements uh 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 okay which is still pretty good um when you when you um 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 a 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 well in the beginning nobody wanted a Tesla let me tell you that the the the when we made the original sort of roads to a sports car uh people were like why would I want an electric car that's my gasoline car works fine um like no electric cars better I should try it um and it was you know hard to get people to do a test drive nobody knew who we were I never heard of this company and like yeah we're named after Nikola Tesla you know that guy nope um so for sure we were

doing push in the beginning because 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 less people coming up to me saying hey I really want an electric car I heard that zero times um some people like it's like man we're gonna make an electric car and show that these things can be good and then people want them um it was like I think it was like Henry Ford said like the you know if we're talking about the Model T it's like if you ask the public what they wanted they'd say a faster horse so if you did like a big survey and say what 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 uh you

know be stronger and live longer and that kind of thing um that will be basically a bunch of incremental improvements on horse um because people aren't we say like what about an automobile that car that drives itself like what are you talking about that's not that sounds crazy um 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 [Laughter] yeah so carry more like more weight than a horse and go further and that kind of thing so anyway it's like when when it's a radically a new product people don't know that they want it because it's just not in their 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 a famous Nationwide survey will you ever buy a TV out I was like 96 of respondents said no hmm something 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're talking about 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 yeah Jane changes the product over time can be incremental changes um then the customers can certainly tell you it's good to get customer feedback to say how can

we improve the product um 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 okay yeah okay so um in the audience here we have a lot of air and space War Fighters we have uh 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 right 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 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 ai okay and if you were recommending to some of the young officers and uh um uh enlisted troops in the room what sort of degrees to pursue uh at college or what sort of Education that they should prioritize for themselves in the modern era what would you recommend um computer science and physics computer science and physics okay how many computer science people do we have out there how many physics people okay we need more apparently okay essentially information

Theory and physical Theory um if you want to understand the nature of the universe um and have these have a very good predictive power physics and computer science 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 from your perspective again I can't emphasize enough how important reusable Rockets are yeah you'll love it um it's great um so um and I think that you could actually do point to point on Earth uh with uh you know to go long distances um and be much better than aircraft because I mean basically just think of like ICBM minus the nuke adeland you know so so it's just sort of in the

option package just you know uncheck nuke and then add Landing system check and and that's definitely going to get you wherever you want to go as the fastest um because that's why they made it icbms they get they're the fastest um so and I think that that's going to be pretty exciting um yeah I think uh yeah I mean once you have a dramatically lower cost access to space then then many things are enabled um you can think of like once you've 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 uh you know so you can just take the train so so you know at the beginning they thought why the heck are they building that

stupid Railway there's nobody there's nobody there and they're like um but once you build the railway they're like okay now it's easy to get to the West Coast uh and now a huge portion of the US population is on the west coast um and actually California is the most popular state in the nation um but it it used to be well least populous I suppose for pretty low um so many things are possible once you once the transport uh problem is solved so that's why I think it's so fundamental if you can't believe you can't get there or getting there is takes a long time and you can't risk and every mission is going to work then it's very hard to innovate um 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

hot I'm harping so much on the cost of transport um so um you know once you're there I think like say establishing a base on the moon or base on Mars uh there's just a tremendous amount of work work that's needed to create a self-sustaining base on the moon on Mars and it opens up a command's amount of opportunity just as the Union Pacific Railroad did by making access to the West Coast not much easier okay um um yeah I mean outside of the space space realm I think there's a lot of opportunity in tunnels I think I've been saying that for a long time um so our tunnels are great um they're really great um and uh the boring company is about to finish its first tunnel in Vegas I encourage I encourage people to copy please copy the boring company or do better

that'd be great there's um so in terms of domains you have Subterranean yeah um obviously Tesla Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities you've got the space domain covered with uh SpaceX and starlink capabilities uh I think this is 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 for the air domain um I think uh things like 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 now I'm just saying that was not I want the future to be this it's just this is what the future will be okay as autonomous drone Warfare um and at a local local level uh the you know um okay I can't

believe I'm saying this because this is this is like dangerous but it's simply what will occur is is sort of a is it drones locally being autonomous um and um but I think we still want to retain sort of like you know that's the authority to damage or destroy uh you know anything that that isn't an autonomous drone keep that Authority back here with the person in the loop okay but it's it's the the fighter jet era has passed that is it's just yeah why did your errors past okay so it's drawings um let's go back to failure for a minute 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 uh that you guys did in I think it was 2017 time frame um was definitely hey we Embrace

this learning that occurs more recently with the the Tesla truck and the and the ball through the window also uh that mind crew that foreign 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 uh sure should we roll the video no or should we not no we should not roll a video not yet okay okay um okay um well I think of the these things as just there's a certain amount of time and within that time you want the the best net outcome so for you know all the set of actions that you can do there's going to be

uh and some which will fail some of which will succeed and you want the the the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest um so um like he's 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 that you're gonna give you three shots third one and they say okay get off the go back to the put somebody else up there um so these three strikes on on baseball um look yeah not on that anymore so you're what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average you know how are you doing on uh on score um and just there's going to be some amount of failure um but you want your net output um that useful output to be maximized failure is essentially

relevant unless it is catastrophic okay yeah okay um intellectual property obviously uh Tesla SpaceX Solar City have amazing capabilities that they're bringing to the uh 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 their your intellectual property yeah well actually at Tesla we just uh open sourced our patents uh some years ago so anyone can use our patents so we really have not been tried to protect intellectual property uh in that sense uh we've tried to actually smooth the path um because the the overarching goal of Tesla is to accelerate the Advent of sustainable energy and so

if we created a pattern portfolio that discouraged other companies from making electric cars they will be inconsistent with our mission so we open sourced all the patterns 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 you actually achieve intellectual property protection right is by innovating fast enough if your rate of innovation is high then you don't need to worry about protecting VIP because other companies will be copying something that you did years ago and that's fine you know um just make sure your rate of innovation is fast speed is really speed of innovation is what is what matters and I do I do say this to my teams like quite a

lot that Innovation per unit time as I go Innovation per year if you want to say it's like is is what matters not Innovation absent time because if you wanted to make say um 100 Improvement in something and that took 100 years or one year that's radically different so um it's like what is your rate of innovation that that matters and is the rate of innovation um is that accelerating or decelerating um and a weird thing happens when companies get big is that most companies um or organizations the bigger they get they tend to get less innovative um not just less Innovative on a per person basis but less Innovative in the absolute um and I think this is probably because data set of structure is not uh it's 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 um so um 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 sure um well I think China is a real interesting country I have to say the the thing to appreciate about China is just that there's a lot of really smart really hard-working people there and they're going to do a lot of great things um this is sort of you know independent of Chinese government

policy they're just going to do a lot of interesting things um 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 US economy maybe three times but at least twice so and that assumes that GDP per capita still less than the us but uh since they have about four or five times the population uh 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 I'm not sure whether that's a Cyber attack

that's uh ongoing or not here so um the clock says I have 11 minutes left is that not true foreign it's coming through the house system we're working to get it shut off okay thank you um yes well um anyway um so so yeah with respect to China China's economy is 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 uh 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 voluntarily uh second okay basic basic math what um from the standpoint of uh uh radical innovation we already talked about Workforce we talked about processes we talked about uh protecting uh 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 well wow this smooth jazz is just honest with a vengeance uh I feel like we're in a big elevator [Laughter] um so first person when we interview people

we we do ask for some evidence of exceptional ability which in most cases includes Innovation this is not said 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 some to some degree in an Innovative so at the interview point we select for it for people who want to create new technology and then the incentive structure is set up that such that uh Innovation is rewarded making mistakes along the way it does not come with a big penalty um and but but failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty you'll be fired okay yeah all right the carrot and stick yes the stick if you don't even try um or or somebody doesn't even try to invade or their Innovation

aspirations are are very are not not very good then yeah they will not be at the company okay okay all right so um 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 uh you know a thousand plus Air and Space professionals and the greatest uh air and space force on the planet so what do you want to tell them we got to make Starfleet happen like so so we were like I don't know real big spaceships that can go far places and uh those probably get me the most trouble of all I think this should be a new uniform that's that you know um that that's like uh I don't know cool uniforms cool spaceships yeah I think that's what

when the public hears space force that's what they think it's like okay we're gonna have like some sweet spaceships and like pretty look good uniforms and stuff and that'll be that's what the public wants um so yeah we want the Sci-Fi Futures the the the good Sci-Fi Futures to be real and ideally to become real while we're still alive you know and everyone want to see it happen and so I think we just really need to drive the rate of innovation to be such that we would see uh big big breakthroughs big improvements in space technology and you know in the years to come so yeah so like just trying to make stuffing happen it's as soon as humanly possible and definitely while we're while we're still alive yeah so I'm not sure about wolf drive but other stuff

I think can be done one driving teleportation probably not but big spaceships that can go far places definitely that can be done understood all right ladies and gentlemen Elon Musk [Applause] [Music] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome back to the stage afa's chairman of the board Gerald Murray [Music] all right isn't it exciting just absolutely incredible and so I see a lot of you exiting probably we've got to go someplace I would ask that if you could that you might want to hold on I mean it's not completely at the end right now but I recognize people have flights and everything uh 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 the capacity and so for that reason I'd like to ask Orville and if you would and general golfing and chief Master of the Air Force right if you would please join me on stage foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] 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.

she messed her the Air Force right you came in in 1989 and it's my great pleasure to be able to present you also the almanacs of our in magazines of the 1989 for you [Applause] [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 been enjoyed this time as much as I uh 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 forces here one of my former colleagues a master sergeant that is now in Junior ROTC has his class back here in the back that got to witness all of this and and every one

of them said that they plan to join the United States Air Force when they graduate from high school either through their through going on to college in the 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 and I thank all of you for joining us as well as always we appreciate your continued support we hope you've learned a lot about this press 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 and the National Harbor in Washington D.

C for the afa's air space and cyber space conference safe travels to all of you God bless you ladies and gentlemen this includes afa's 36th air Warfare symposium foreign [Music]