AFA Air Warfare Symposium 28. Februar 2020 Kamingespräch, in dem Musk mit Generalleutnant John F. Thompson über wiederverwendbare Raketen, die neue Space Force und das Ende der Ära der Kampfjets spricht.
Kamingespräch, in dem Musk mit Generalleutnant John F. Thompson über wiederverwendbare Raketen, die neue Space Force und das Ende der Ära der Kampfjets spricht.
Transkript Moderator
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Please take this opportunity to move to your seats so we may begin the program on time. SA.
Moderator
Please welcome afa's central florida, martin h. Harris. Chapter president. Todd freeze.
AFA Chapter President
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 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. 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 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 from missions to and beyond Earth 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. 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, every man
Emcee
and woman who served.
AFA Chapter President
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 and welcome.
Moderator
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, 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.
Moderator
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, Space SpaceX, a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in, 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. How many Tesla owners do we have in the audience? Stand up, Stand up if you're a Tesla owner. All right, very nice. 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, 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, 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 weapon 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 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 forces is happening. I think 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, is, is certainly a medium of its own.
Elon Musk
And I think there's some very exciting things that are possible, if I may just say, like what, what, you know, what the public wants. 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'd love that. You know, and so I think like the fastest we can make sort of Starfleet real, then we'll just try to do that.
Moderator
Well, so Elon speaking, Speaking for the United States Space 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, the first launch of Falcon 1, we had a Falcon sat from the, the Air Force Academy. That rocket blew up. But, but, but, but then the funny thing is that it blew up. This truth is stranger than fiction. The, 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, like recognizable, you know, and we gave it back and so we've not lost one of your satellites.
Moderator
So from a SpaceX perspective, buff it out. A partial mission success.
Elon Musk
Well, it's not lost. I'm just saying it's a little, the worst, a little worse for wear. But you know, but then we subsequently launched future Falcons that's to actual orbit that was great. So, so I think there's, I think we can make, 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. Yeah. So the, I think we really, 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. That's, those are rare. So you're going to have some proportionality with 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 going to become increasingly important. And it will be increasingly important for the United States to use what I think is its greatest attribute, which is invention and innovation to, 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
Do you characterize that risk in terms of peer adversary 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, 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. Okay. With as sure as night follows day. So it is a big deal. But this, this, this is, I mean 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, that's the ace card. Okay. Yeah.
Moderator
And since, so since it seems like we're going down the geopolitical path here on the, on the questions, how does the United States as a nation maintain that innovative edge, that, 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, that's who the Air Force will do business with and we'll, we'll procure the thing that is, 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, if you, if you had planes that could be used once and, or if you, if you had, 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. Okay. Yeah, this is extremely fundamental. So the, the cost of a 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 don't know, box kerosene, like Falcon 9 or something like that, The oxygen and the fuel are. Yeah, 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 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, 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, you know, shouldn't we focus all our efforts on, on one system and rather than divide them and have two competing systems. Like, you know, not to cause controversy but like in my opinion, like Joint Strike Fighter should be a competitor to jsf. 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 with that. Competition is meaningful and somebody can actually lose. Like you know, so then, then so yeah, okay.
Moderator
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.
Moderator
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 person? 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 got to be a carrot and stick. So if somebody is innovating 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 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
Okay, the stick.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's like, how much do you want?
Moderator
Yeah. So does that, does that carrot and stick approach help? Do you think people be more risk averse or less risk averse?
Elon Musk
Well, when, when trying different things, you've got to have some acceptance of failure. As you're 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, 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, 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
Okay, so you've, 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 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 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.
AFA Chapter President
Yeah,
Elon Musk
the, I think like in America there's been 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 easy. Yeah. If you say like 2 stage 2 and 2% of your lift off mass to orbit just to design something like that, piece of cake. 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, 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 a creating a fully reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch. That's, that's super, super hard. So that's so. Yeah, but by building the machine and builds 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 revoking 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. And then I've been sort of just doing back kind of 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. Yeah, it's very difficult. So, So you've 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 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. Okay. Yeah.
Moderator
So Starlink, as your 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, it's. Starlink production is going well, actually. The, that's the, that was a hard, 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, I don't know, thousand percent harder than designing the satellite to begin with. But it is important to have like a, to design full 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. 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. 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 discover, oh, there's all these things 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 where it's very easy to make and launch. So 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. So. And the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit. 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, the cost of the trend of transporting 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 this improvements. But 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.
Elon Musk
It's still pretty good
Moderator
when you, when you. So in terms of deciding what to build, you can take feedback from customers and let customers, 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 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 because people said there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car. So it was not out of, like, you know, it wasn't 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're going to make an electric car and show that these things can be good. And then people want them. You know, it's like Henry Ford said, like the, you know, 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, well, 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'll be basically a bunch of incremental improvements on horse. We say, like, what about an automobile? The 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
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 see, 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 great. Okay.
Moderator
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.
Moderator
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.
Moderator
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
Computer science and physics.
AFA Chapter President
Okay.
Moderator
How many computer science people do we have out there? How many physics people? Okay. We need more, apparently.
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. Okay. Yeah.
Moderator
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?
Elon Musk
Again, I can't emphasize enough how important reusable rockets are. You'll love it. It's great. So, and I think 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 ad land, 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 ICVMs. They get there the fastest. So I think that's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, I think,
AFA Chapter President
Yeah.
Elon Musk
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. 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, for pretty low. So many things are possible once you. 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 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.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean outside of the space, 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 a lot of.
Moderator
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 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.
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, 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 errors. Okay, so it's drones.
Moderator
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 the, this learning that occurs more recently with the Tesla truck and the, and the ball through the window. Also that, that, that, 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
No, we should not roll the video. Not yet.
Elon Musk
Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, I think of the, these things is just there's so many amount of time and within that time you want the best net outcome. So for, you know, all the set of actions that you can do, there's going to be some which will fail, some 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. They give you three shots and the third one they say, okay, you get off the, go back to the, put somebody else up there. So three strikes on baseball, not on the bat anymore. So what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average? How are you doing on score? And just there's going to be some amount of failure. But you, you want your net output, net useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic. Okay, okay.
Moderator
Intellectual Property, obviously Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City have amazing capabilities that they're bringing to the, to the public and to the, 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?
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 trying to, 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 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 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 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 through want to say like is, 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, what is your rate of innovation? That, that 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 therefore innovation. It's not enough to use words to encourage innovation. The incentive structure must be aligned with that. That's fundamental.
Moderator
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 consider 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. This is sort of, you know, independent of Chinese government policy. That is going to do a lot of interesting things. The thing that will be, that will feel pretty strange is that the Chinese economy economy is going to be probably at least twice as big as the US economy. Maybe three times, but at least twice. So that assumes GDP per capita still less than the US 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
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.
Moderator
Smooth jazz, Elon.
Elon Musk
It's coming through the house system. We're working to get it shut off. Thank you. Yes, well, So, so yeah, with, 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 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 second. Okay, basic, basic math.
Moderator
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, 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, while this smooth jazz is honest 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, 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 that, such that innovation is rewarded. Making mistakes along the way does not come with a big penalty. And, but, but, but failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty. You'll be fired. Okay. Yeah. All right.
Moderator
The carrot and stick. Yes, 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. Okay.
Moderator
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, so we were 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, That's like, I don't know, cool uniforms, cool spaceships. You know, I think that's what when the public hears spaceports, 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'll be, that's what the public wants. So you know, 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, you know, in the years to come. So yeah, like 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 working other stuff I think can be done. Wolf drive and teleportation probably not, but big spaceships that can go far places. Definitely that can be done.
Moderator
Understood. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. Thanks very much, Ladies and gentlemen, Please welcome back to the stage AFA's chairman of the Board Gerald Murray.
Emcee
All right. Wasn't as exciting, just absolutely incredible. And so I see a lot of you exiting probably if you got to go someplace, I would ask that if you could, that you might want to hold on. I mean, and it's not completely at the end right now, but I recognize people have flights and everything. 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 a 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 Wright, if you would please join me on stage.
Emcee
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 of the Air Force Wright, you came in in 1989 and it's my great pleasure to be able to present present you also the almanacs of our in magazines of 1989 for you. 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 forces here. One of my former colleagues, Master Sergeant that is now in Junior rotc, has his class back here in the back that got to witness all of this, 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 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 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 14th through the 16th. Put that on your calendar in the national harbor in Washington, D.C. for the AFA's Airspace and Cyberspace Conference. Safe travels to all of you. God bless you, ladies and gentlemen. This includes AFA's 36th Air Warfare Symposium. Sam.