Air Force Space Pitch Day 5 novembre 2019 Discussion sur scène entre Musk et le lieutenant-général John Thompson sur les fusées réutilisables, Starship et des conseils pour les start-up spatiales.
Discussion sur scène entre Musk et le lieutenant-général John Thompson sur les fusées réutilisables, Starship et des conseils pour les start-up spatiales.
Transcription Elon Musk
We would like to invite General Thompson and Elon Musk to the stage. Round of applause.
Interviewer
All right, well, good morning, everybody. We got about 30 minutes with Elon here. I love the soundtrack that we're listening to throughout the day. We've got the theme or the soundtrack to the Martian, the soundtrack to Interseller, even the soundtrack to the Stranger Things. So hopefully that has lightened the mood a little and hopefully you all have had the opportunity to enjoy the Expo, some of the public pitches and some of the panel sessions that have occurred throughout the day. Our guest today needs no introduction in the Forbes innovation list for 2019. He was co number one on that list with Mr. Jeff Bezos. And if you care to comment on that later, you'll have the opportunity, but I will remain silent on that. He's obviously the founder of a few companies you may all be familiar with, like Tesla Motors and SpaceX. He's also spent time on the board of a nonprofit OpenAI and sponsored innovative competitions like the Hyperloop Initiative. Elon, thank you so much for, for being with us today. So we'll just dive right in unless anybody has any objections to that. I just have some questions we're going to be talking about primarily innovation, but interspersed amongst some of our questions on innovation will be some questions on leadership, some questions on culture, especially in the small business, growing to a large business kind of environment. And then I myself never got these questions until five years ago, but I may throw you a couple work life balance questions, quality of life questions. So without further ado, Elon, a critical question that all businesses face when tackling challenges during product development is do we invest the time and the resources to do this work and internally, or do we contract it out and have an external partner do it with us? Can you talk to the audience a little bit about what kind of decision process you go through, whether you're deciding to do it in one of your companies or contract it out to somebody else?
Elon Musk
Well, in the beginning we try to contract most things out at Tesla and SpaceX, we started off with most things contracted out and that didn't succeed. So we insourced more and more of the time in space, particularly the supply chain is not great. Itar restricts you to really working with US Companies, which is very difficult to work with non US Companies because rockets are weapons technology. So you have a very limited set of suppliers and to the degree that you have legacy parts, you inherit the legacy costs and limitations. And so that required us to insource most of the rocket. There's probably Only less than 10% of the of the rocket is coming from the space supply chain at this point. Automotive supply chain is better. Consumer electronics is a lot better. Wherever there's a lot of competition, the supply chain is better. So it really depends on the part. But it's important to bear in mind that legacy components mean legacy cost limitations. If you want to have something revolutionary, you can't do catalog engineering. Yeah, catalog engineering is not limited, you know, limited ingredients.
Interviewer
So the legacy industrial base isn't able to adapt fast enough to what you're trying to do. So you insource it. Are there any special techniques or cultural aspects of that insourcing that you find you found to be particularly beneficial in Tesla or SpaceX?
Elon Musk
Well, I really think this is like if you want to advance technology, you've got to recruit the world's best engineers and then create an environment which enables them to be as innovative as possible. So the reward structure, you know, you need to really reward and encourage innovation and punish lack of innovation. So it's got to be both sick and character. Well, you know, ideally more characteristic. That was my new philosophy. More characteristic. But yeah. So the. Now the thing is that in a lot of companies this is, we have a risk reward asymmetry where bold moves are, if they go wrong, are punished, but sort of keeping your head down is not punished, that's not good. That will result in a very conservative outcome. So it has to be a requirement that there is significant advancement and simply the lack of doing something significant is bad. So yeah, big companies just become really conservative over time. And really the government is a company in the limit. So the government is the biggest company.
Interviewer
So we have some big companies in the audience, but we have a lot of small businesses in the audience. So not part of the, if you will, the legacy supply chain for rockets or whatever other innovation you are a company that you are associated with might be producing. Is there some advice or counsel that you could give to some of these small businesses about how to market to growing space partnerships like SpaceX or other companies that might be willing to admit them to the supply chain if they don't have that old think or that old process mentality?
Elon Musk
Well, for SpaceX or Tesla, I mean if somebody has got a component that's better than what we're making internally, we would love to buy that for sure. We would just reallocate the resources that we're working on that component to do something else. So like for example, on Falcon 9 we used to build the landing legs, the Big carbon fiber landing legs that rolled out ourselves. And then we contracted it out to all American racing. But normally, like racing cars, they did a great job. They were doing better than us. So we added the building lights to them and worked on other things. So this is by no means like. It would be completely insane for us to want to continue to make a park ourselves internally that is inferior to a park that is variable. Externally, that wouldn't matter. So we'd love to outsource more, right? Yeah.
Interviewer
So that's a pretty high bar. But if you do it better than SpaceX, then they'd like to talk to you.
Interviewer
Elon, given your extensive experience in a nonprofit arena with companies like OpenAI that I mentioned in the introduction, and your ability to tap into the academic environment, that cutting edge innovation environment with things like the Hyperloop competition, are there smart ways for the folks in the audience, this community of space professionals, to be engaging with different sources of innovation in the ecosystem? How do we better cultivate those sources of innovation so that we can take advantage of them in our nation's space capabilities?
Elon Musk
Well, you know, I wouldn't say I'm like an expert in nonprofits, but OpenAI was really intended to mitigate the risk of artificial general intelligence. I hope that that's what it does. There's some chance it may amplify the risk, but hopefully it diminishes the risk. And I have sort of a foundation that gives away money, mostly anonymously, so I'm an expert on this. What I'm mostly trying to do is figure out the set of actions that increase the probability that the future is good and take those actions. Okay. Aspirationally, please.
Interviewer
Okay. So are there techniques that you personally use to identify sources of information? I mean, is it just reading or seeing what's out there? Do you have the continuous market research going on in your companies or in your private life about, hey, what's out there that I should be sponsoring or taking advantage of to make things better than they are?
Elon Musk
I do zero market research whatsoever. Okay. We don't even have a marketing department really, or advertising or any. Just like, what it would be a grant car or great rocket, you know, so it's like, I try to think, like, where's the platonic ideal of, say, the perfect rockets or car? What characteristics would it have? And then make that. And then I find that if you do that, people want to buy it, okay? And it's, that's it. And, you know, like, we're going to come out with the Tesla pickup Truck, or we call it Cybertruck. I mean, it looks like an automatic personnel carrier from the future. Yeah, it's like it'll look like a normal truck. People might not like it. It might not. I like it.
Interviewer
Sounds like a couple other people do too.
Elon Musk
It's going to look like a cable from movie set when it goes down the road. You're like, whoa, what is that? This little bulletproof. Okay,
Interviewer
I look forward to seeing it and perhaps driving it at some point in the future.
Elon Musk
I think, if I can elaborate on that, a lot of times I think people try to make products that they think others would love, but they don't love them themselves. And if you don't love the product, you should not expect that others will. You know your own heart. And if it's compelling to you, it will be compelling to others. Okay, great.
Interviewer
So from a leadership perspective, obviously you started as a leader of a small business. You grew a number of small businesses into large businesses. So from your early days at Zip2 and PayPal, leading very, very small teams of developers, sometimes doing a lot of the development yourself, hands on. Today to today, as you lead very large companies like Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has your leadership approach changed at all or is managing those small teams, you try and keep that culture and your leadership style the same throughout?
Elon Musk
Well, it definitely has to evolve as companies get bigger. Tesla's around 45,000 people and SpaceX is almost 7,000 people. And when a company's little, then
Elon Musk
skill as a sort of like an individual engineer can make a very big difference. When a company is large, you have to kind of teach a lot of people to do it. You have to, you have to be a force multiplier as opposed to like if you have a little band, like if, you know, if you're like a dozen swordsmen or something and you're an ace swordsman, okay, great. You can, that's going to make a difference in a little battle, but not if he was 12,000. You can't run along the entire battle line. It doesn't work. So you have to try to teach people en masse different approaches and just make sure that you reward the right behavior, that the reward structure is incenting the right behavior. This is incredibly important economics 101. Whatever you incent is likely to happen. In fact, it would be bizarre if it didn't. So statistically speaking, it will definitely be what happens. So the incentive structure, reward and punishment must be sensible. And this sounds very obvious, but in most organizations the true reward and punishment is not sensible. And then people are puzzled away. They do not get the outcome that they want. It's because the reward structure isn't right.
Interviewer
Okay, so as businesses grow, as your businesses have grown, and it becomes less and less about the engineer talking to the program manager one on one in a very small team environment. And it becomes conversations between different teams in your enterprise, much larger groups of people. In many organizations there's a tendency that seems will develop and leaders have to manage those seams how or insist that their teams manage those seams. How have you managed the siems in the large businesses that you manage currently?
Elon Musk
I think that's a great point that you're making in the question. In any given product, you can see the mistake, the organizational errors manifest themselves in errors in the product. So you can see like, and I see this in our own products. It's like we, for example, we've got a top cover of the battery and we've got a bottom cover on the car. Like, okay, that's an example of an organizational error. We should only have one cover. You don't need a box in a box. But there's the battery team and the body and chassis team. And so they both made a cover. You know, you'll see sort of flanges and joints and various things that don't make sense or where things are doubled up. And we have subsystem optimization instead of system optimization. So to counteract that which is not easy, I actually insist that teams step on each other's toes. So if so, like in the rocket, the propulsion team, the engine team has to go part way into the airframe and airframe team has to go part way into the engine. But it's hard for people to do that. And so essentially they have to basically offend other people in the company and not be offended themselves. So this is very important. And one of the things I try to propagate is that everyone should be chief engineer. Like meaning everyone, everyone should have at least a sort of cursory understanding of the whole rocket or the whole car. Even though they may have deep expertise in one arena, then they be able to tell if they're optimizing for the product as a whole. So generally I find you can summarize the key characteristics of, of each discipline. You can simplify it down to a few principles. There's like Richard Feynman used to say, that you really know your subject if you can explain it to a smart 10 year old. But if you try to sort of disguise your expertise in obscure language, then maybe you don't understand what you're talking about. So. Like, for example, when say a rock is coming back from orbit, you have like center of pressure and center of mass and effectively it all sounds very complicated, but basically you just have a seesaw. So the things of approximately equal density, It's just going to be, you know, if you put mass on one side, it's going to tip that way. Put mass on the other side, you're going to turn the other way and think of just like a Cecil. Then like, you'll see the mass distribution either makes sense or doesn't make sense or the flaps are too big on one side or the other. And there's, yeah, Many of other examples. But I think a good principle is that everyone should try to have a broad understanding of the product as a whole. And that's very important. Makes me difference.
Interviewer
So other than the. So other than the culture of broad understanding amongst your teams and the culture of don't worry too much about offending people on other teams to make those difficult kind of discussions to not travel risk downstream and identify issues early, are there other aspects, especially in growing your small businesses into large businesses, that have been really important from a culture perspective for either you and your leadership team or for your entire workforce?
Elon Musk
I can't say I'm not trying to really view myself as some great expert on leadership, to be frank. You know, we're doing okay, but we just seem to like, make a lot of mistakes as from what I can see. So, you know, I try to use the tools of physics as much as possible. You know, when I was growing up, I was actually thinking, I have a career in physics, I'd like to collider or something like that, you know, And I was. I don't think I'd be doing this, to be totally frank.
Interviewer
Well, coming from a culture that values leadership, my position is that you don't achieve results and certainly you have achieved results unless you have that kind of leadership skill. So don't sell yourself short, is what I'm saying.
Elon Musk
That's true. There's plenty of others doing that.
Interviewer
All right, so with that, go ahead.
Elon Musk
So one of the things in physics is like, you should always assume that you're some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong. This is a very important frame of mind. People tend to assume that they're right and they must prove that they're right. You're definitely wrong to some degree. The question is how wrong and can you be less wrong tomorrow? This is a very Important principle.
Interviewer
Okay, so instead of leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln or somebody else, leadership lessons from the world of physics.
Elon Musk
Yes. The four constructs of physics can be applied broadly. They're right there. They're amazing. But, you know, figure out all these counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics and general relativity. So these. These are great tools. You can just read about them and use them. Great. Okay.
Interviewer
All right, we'll have a textbook sale later after our session, or for those of you who are in the audience right now, just hit Khan Academy up. Lots of good stuff on there on physics. Okay, so, Elon, let's move on a little bit to work life balance. Do you have a deliberate approach to how you balance your work and the rest of your life, or do you just kind of have a sense of, hey, I am focusing way too much on work right now. I need a break or I need to go do something different?
Elon Musk
Well, I think. I mean, my foot point of view on this, but a life decision, in my case, I actually want to get the most amount done possible. But if you don't take some breaks, then your sort of amount that you get done is less. So the reason I would take breaks is in order to get more done, basically. That's not everyone's decision, though. But a friend of mine was actually. I was talking to his friendline this weekend and said, when's the last time you had a vacation where you didn't do work for a week? And I was like, well, I'll be like, 2000 new 2000, when I had malaria, stuck in the hospital, and didn't
Interviewer
have the Internet,
Elon Musk
so maybe I should take another break. But I think it's probably. I would not recommend running two companies. This is. This does not make for the most fun. I understand.
Interviewer
I understand. Yeah, I understand. So about a year ago, you and I had a conversation on a Saturday morning. And the thing that I remember from the Saturday morning telephone conversation was we spent about the first 15 or 20 minutes talking about the workouts that we had just had on that Saturday morning. Would you care to tell the audience a little bit about how you stay in shape?
Elon Musk
Oh, I don't think I'm in good base shape, to be honest. But you mean, like, physically?
Interviewer
Yeah. The mentally in shape question is next.
Elon Musk
Okay, well, first of all, I don't think I'm in super great shape, but I basically just, like, lift weights and run on a treadmill. And that's, like, the one time that I really watched television was, like, running for 15 to 20 minutes on a treadmill I'm at that side. Okay.
Interviewer
Well, along those lines, what are you watching on television when you're running?
Elon Musk
I just finished watching Space Jam. It's pretty good.
Interviewer
Quest for a Space Jam soundtrack later this afternoon. Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
Interviewer
I know you're a huge reader, but from a lifelong learning perspective, constantly trying to add to your toolkit so that you're, you know, a better leader, a better CEO. Are there recommendations that you have for the audience about those kinds of things that you do to keep yourself mentally sharp?
Elon Musk
Well, I read a lot less these days than I used to. When I was a kid. I just read all the time. I mean, mostly subscribe to scientific theoreticals like the Daily News. I find to be a lot of noise and just very negative. So I generally try to not read the Daily News that much because generally newspapers try to seem to be trying to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? It was big. Okay? There's a lot of people, something terrible happened every single day. Guaranteed. Big, big plan. Also, something great happened with their own anselect question. So that's. The Daily News just tends to make one measurable event. Like, the science and technology periodicals are quite interesting, and usually if there's something, some new discovery, it'll be in there. And find Twitter enlightening at times. And talking to smart people all the time is very helpful because that can be a distillation of interesting things that are going on. Certainly try to ask people for the car, what are we doing wrong? What can we fix? What can we make better? And they usually just want to tell me, oh, it's great, you know, like, good chart, I understand, but what's wrong with it? And like, what can we make better? You know, this is a theory of, like, how do we be less wrong? Right, Right. Yeah.
Elon Musk
But it's like they always want to tell me the good stuff. I'm like, that's cool. But of course tell me the bad stuff. That's very important. Okay. Yeah, even it's more about things that we make better. Okay.
Interviewer
So we, we have a similar culture in Air Force Acquisition. Talking to our operators about, well, that's great that you love it, but tell us what, what part don't you like? Right. So this domain, the space domain, this ecosystem that's represented today, one of the challenges that it faces every day and would face every day, even if the STEM production system across the United States or across the free world was perfect, is a strategic competition for talent. Are there techniques that as you grow from a small business to a large business, that you need to change in terms of how you reach out and find that talent in the ecosystem.
Elon Musk
Yeah. First of all, like the things that, if you want to get great engineering talent, then the work itself has to be exciting. The best engineers want to work on the most innovative things. And then as you add great engineers to the company, they will in turn recruit other great engineers and talents of all kinds. So it's very important that the thing they're working on is intrinsically interesting. And generally that is a high energy environment. If the work is intrinsically interesting and they're making progress, then you just sort of attract more and more grain engineers. When you stop doing really interesting things, then they leave. Okay, all right. And that's, that's the pretty, pretty straightforward. But you also want to make sure you've got a recruiting function that is, that is very good. And that if, if somebody great wants to join the company, that they actually get an interview. But this is actually one of my big worries is like, if Nikola Tesla was live today, could he get an interview? And if not, we're doing something wrong. And like, I'm not totally sure until we get interviewed, you know, if one of the most brilliant engineers ever lived could maybe not get an interview, we should fix that and make sure we're not like barring the doors from talent, you know, or that we're looking at the right things. Like generally look for things that are like evidence of exceptional ability. I don't care if somebody graduated from college or high school or whatever. What evidence of exceptional ability. Just give me three bullet points. Evidence of exceptional ability. Graduating from college is not. That's okay. Yeah, but you know, did they build some really impressive device, win some really tough competition, come up with some great idea, solve some really tough problem? You know, it's like what they do that just was like clear evidence of exceptional ability. It's not necessarily a four pointer gpa, that's that, that's concerning. To be a contraindicator. Yeah, sometimes. Okay, all right.
Interviewer
Clear evidence of exceptional ability. I like that a lot. Okay, so Elon, I want to give you the, the last minute or so for, you know, for Elon to be. Elon. Right. Okay, so you have here, which is Air Force Space Pitch Day. You have in the audience small businesses developing new and innovative capabilities for the space domain. You have Air Force Space command operators, Air Force Space acquisition folks. You have congressional staffers, you have some media, you've got experts in the valley, in the Audience, what is the one thing or two things that you want to tell them all about Air Force Space Pitch Day and how it is to be successfully growing a small business to a large business?
Elon Musk
Okay, well I mean, to be frank, I don't think there's like it's intrinsically good to grow a small business to a large business. Sometimes a small business should be a small business, sometimes businesses shouldn't exist. It's true. Business like a company is a group of people collected together for a purpose, which is to create a compelling product or service. If that product, service is not compelling, that company shouldn't exist. But that's, sometimes people forget to, it's. The point is to create a great product or service and then if you're just one person, it's hard to do that. You need often more than one person. So it's not about growing your business for the sake of growing a business. You have to say like what is this important problem that you're trying to solve that really matters? And then go try to solve that. With respect to space, I think there's really just one problem, one problem primarily, which is the fully and rapidly reusable rocket, orbital rocket. This is the, this is the holy Grail. You know, SpaceX, we've made some progress in this direction with the reuse of the booster and the fairing, but it's absolutely profound to have a reasonable rocket as it would be to have, as it is to have reusable transport in all other domains. Bicycles, aircraft, cars, horses are all reusable. So and if you look at the cost comparison, something like PC12 single engine turboprop has a payload of about 1 ton and costs $5 million. 747 has a payload of over 100 tons and you can lease it for a flight from San Francisco to Sydney and back for half a million dollars. So that is a thousand fold difference in cost per, in cost per ton of transport. And actually the Pilates can't reach Australia so we wouldn't even get there. So what, what I'm trying to say is like a small, a giant reusable craft, it costs a small extendable craft. It stands to reason if you just need to refuel, something doesn't have to lot easier in building. So you know what, when I say like, just like a lot of rocket startups, and I think this is one thing you have to solve for usability, that's it, you know, for our Starship program, which is obviously pretty ambitious, the cost of, of fuel and oxygen and cautiously pressurized it doesn't use helium, which is very expensive. Is about $900,000 for flight. So if the thing is fully reusable, you'll $900,000 per pound or something with around 150 tons to at least 100 tons. Probably over time, 150 tons will. And even if you consider other operational costs, maybe It'll be like $2 million module cost of flight. So this is much less than even a tiny rocket. And so it's the thing. It's the thing that needs to be made. But a small reusable rocket would still be useful. But just a small. Like, it's not like There are only 747. There are a lot of citizens aircraft of all sizes, but they're all reusable. And if you start an aircraft company where, hey, we're a single use aircraft company, you yes. People would say, well, that's pretty funny. And you know, the plus side is that, you know, you take off with no landing gear and you run until your tanks are dry so you have extra range. Great. And then you drop the cargo out with a parachute and the plane crashes. That's how rockets work. It's crazy. This is very, very important.
Interviewer
Well, Yvonne, on behalf of Secretary Barrett, Dr. Roper and myself and the entire Air Force acquisition team, thank you for joining us here today. Everybody, Elon Musk,