Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: We're very excited about this recording. It's a crossover episode
Speaker 2: with Bloomberg's weekly Elon Inc. Podcasts, So we're all about
Speaker 2: Elon today. And to get into that, Tracy, do you
Speaker 2: remember our interview with the Ukraine post CEO.
Speaker 4: Yes, I do, Igor Smolensky. That was a really interesting
Speaker 4: episode for a variety of reasons. One because I just
Speaker 4: really enjoy talking about logistics. But secondly, one of the
Speaker 4: things that stood out to both of us, I think
Speaker 4: from that conversation was when he was talking about how
Speaker 4: they're using Starlink in Ukraine and also the idea that,
Speaker 4: you know, if they were ever to he designed the
Speaker 4: postal service from scratch, they would avoid traditional Internet and
Speaker 4: just use all starlink.
Speaker 2: No, that was like a very eye opening moment for me,
Speaker 2: and I feel like when it comes to Elon Musk
Speaker 2: obviously it feels like, I don't know, forty percent of
Speaker 2: the attention on him is related to Tesla, another forty
Speaker 2: precent is Twitter or x and then we're aware that
Speaker 2: there's like a bunch of all these other companies like
Speaker 2: Neuralink and Grock and SpaceX. But SpaceX and Starlink. That's
Speaker 2: a huge deal because my understanding or my sense is
Speaker 2: that like he is just dominating the skies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's kind of the cool business as well. Right,
Speaker 4: it's really cools like rockets that.
Speaker 3: Can be reused.
Speaker 4: If you ever see the satellites launching into the sky,
Speaker 4: the Starlink ones, they're really beautiful. Satellite internet is really
Speaker 4: interesting to me, partly because of when I was in
Speaker 4: Hong Kong. Yeah, and you know, they had the really
Speaker 4: strict COVID rules and they would basically send you to
Speaker 4: a government facility that was extremely limited. If you came
Speaker 4: down with COVID, you had to have satellite internet in
Speaker 4: there because there was no government internet. So you had
Speaker 4: to get a little box and bring it with you
Speaker 4: if you were spending like three or.
Speaker 5: Four you get it. Wait, you didn't. You never had
Speaker 5: to go.
Speaker 4: I didn't.
Speaker 3: I know a lot of people who did.
Speaker 5: And they had to bring their own box.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because otherwise there was either no internet or it
Speaker 4: was so poor.
Speaker 3: The effectively there was no internet.
Speaker 2: I had not realized that element, but it is pretty wild. Like, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's one company and it just totally dominates satellite communication.
Speaker 2: I know, it dominates rocket launches. And historically space was
Speaker 2: the domain of governments, right, space was the domain of
Speaker 2: the military of any government, and or NASA or the
Speaker 2: NASA equivalent. And now we're in this world where there's
Speaker 2: one individual and basically one company that is just completely
Speaker 2: dominating space. And like I said, you know, I think
Speaker 2: people talk about Tesla and they talk about Twitter, but
Speaker 2: I feel like SpaceX deserves more attention and I want
Speaker 2: to learn more about SpaceX.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, this is something I hadn't really i guess, internalized
Speaker 4: until recently. But the degree to which NASA basically opened
Speaker 4: up space to private companies is kind of remarkable compared
Speaker 4: to the way it was in the past. So absolutely,
Speaker 4: I think this is something we should talk about.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: So, we've wanted to do a space slash SpaceX slash
Speaker 2: Starlink episode for a while to like really understand this
Speaker 2: company and how it fits into the broader elon Musk Empire.
Speaker 2: So I'm very excited to say today we have a
Speaker 2: bunch of perfect guests. They are all are colleagues at Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: But first up we're going to be speaking with Ashley Vance,
Speaker 2: who reports on all kinds of cool tech stuff for
Speaker 2: us here at Bloomberg, sort of like the future cutting
Speaker 2: edge pieces. Every time Ashley writes an article, it's just
Speaker 2: about some crazy, mad scientist, usually out in the Bay
Speaker 2: Area doing anything wild. He's written a biography of Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: and his more recent book is called When the Heavens
Speaker 2: Went On Sale The Misfits and Geniuses racing to put
Speaker 2: Space within reach. So the perfect guest to talk space. So,
Speaker 2: Ashley Vance, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 7: O Locked, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: I'm aware that SpaceX exists, that it's in the business
Speaker 2: of private rockets and satellites and all that stuff, But like,
Speaker 2: how big is SpaceX, or maybe how far ahead is
Speaker 2: SpaceX versus the competition?
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, quite far, you know. I always think of
Speaker 7: this as one of the most unlikely business stories there is.
Speaker 7: SpaceX started roughly twenty years ago. Nobody, you know, had
Speaker 7: really proven anything out as far as being a commercial
Speaker 7: rocket company or satellite company in a meaningful way. Before
Speaker 7: it was all governments that a handful of governments that
Speaker 7: dominated this business. And if you fast forward now twenty
Speaker 7: years later, SpaceX. Last year, for example, they put up
Speaker 7: about fifty percent of the world's rockets and probably close
Speaker 7: to around eighty percent of the world satellites. So that's
Speaker 7: SpaceX versus the entire world. That's SpaceX versus China, Russia, India,
Speaker 7: et cetera. And if you look at this year so far,
Speaker 7: they've put up about ninety percent of the amount of
Speaker 7: stuff that's gone into space this year has been put
Speaker 7: up by SpaceX. So they basically revived the United States
Speaker 7: space program. We'd fallen behind a number of countries that
Speaker 7: looked like China was going to take this thing over,
Speaker 7: and now SpaceX is the clear winner of the space
Speaker 7: economy so far.
Speaker 4: I have a embarrassing question, but what's the difference between
Speaker 4: SpaceX and Starlink.
Speaker 5: Oh that's a good one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, okay, so there's different pieces here. Traditionally, most
Speaker 7: companies you've sort of divided either you were a rocket
Speaker 7: company or you were a satellite company. SpaceX has become
Speaker 7: the dominant player in both, and Starlink fits into that picture.
Speaker 7: So Starlink is a satellite communications service. SpaceX puts up
Speaker 7: thousands of satellites around the Earth. They're always surrounding the Earth.
Speaker 7: They're beaming down high speed Internet, and so it's really
Speaker 7: designed for places where like half the world today cannot
Speaker 7: be reached by fiber optic cables because it's too hard
Speaker 7: or expensive to put them in the ground. So that's
Speaker 7: a lot of people. That's four billion people that cannot
Speaker 7: get high speed internet today. And if you buy a
Speaker 7: SpaceX antenna, it's like a little basketball sized thing and
Speaker 7: you stick it at your house. You then pull down
Speaker 7: this high speed Internet delivered from space. And so SpaceX
Speaker 7: is dominant in rockets that it is really dominant in satellites.
Speaker 7: If I could give you one more data point, just
Speaker 7: to like put this in perspective. So from like nineteen
Speaker 7: fifty until about twenty twenty, all of the world we
Speaker 7: had two thousand, five hundred satellites surrounding the Earth. That's
Speaker 7: what we've done in all those decades, from twenty twenty
Speaker 7: to today, that we've gone from two thousand, five hundred
Speaker 7: satellites to about twelve thousand surrounding the Earth, and the
Speaker 7: vast majority of those now are SpaceX satellites. That's why
Speaker 7: there's that huge jump.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: I feel like it dominates the nights guy amateur like
Speaker 4: photography community as well. Do you ever see that online?
Speaker 4: People talking about, like, what's this light in the sky?
Speaker 4: I can't figure it out? And the answer is always Starlink.
Speaker 4: It's always Starlink launching new things.
Speaker 7: Well, I mean it's funny. So you know when they
Speaker 7: do a Starlink launch, each rocket is filled with dozens
Speaker 7: and dozens of satellites. Said, yeah, it's just cool phenomenon.
Speaker 7: I mean, when they first come out of the rocket,
Speaker 7: they're all kind of clumped together, and then over the
Speaker 7: course of weeks they sort of slowly spread out, and
Speaker 7: so now you can see that in the night sky.
Speaker 7: It used to be a pretty rare thing, but over
Speaker 7: the last two three years, people see this now all
Speaker 7: the time.
Speaker 2: So I used to do a little bit of on
Speaker 2: air reporting for Bloomberg Rocketry, like when they would fire
Speaker 2: up some of those SpaceX trials and then the rocket
Speaker 2: would go up and then come down, and like, I'm
Speaker 2: still pretty blown away when I see those relandings, Like
Speaker 2: it still doesn't seem like that should be physically possible.
Speaker 2: I know there are other competitors. You wrote a whole
Speaker 2: book about them. Jeff Bezos has won. Some of the
Speaker 2: people who used to work for SpaceX have launched their
Speaker 2: own sitting aside the Nu Miracle gap. What is this
Speaker 2: sort of technological gap right now between SpaceX and how
Speaker 2: good it is with its reusable rockets and so forth,
Speaker 2: and where the competition is technologically.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean that's pretty dramatic too. So there used
Speaker 7: to be there was a handful of government programs that
Speaker 7: dominated space since the space race began. And none of
Speaker 7: the government players do reusable rockets at all. So nothing
Speaker 7: from Europe, nothing from Russia, India, Japan, any of that,
Speaker 7: And so you have to kind of turn to the
Speaker 7: commercial players that have popped up over the last ten
Speaker 7: fifteen years. And so SpaceX has this dialed in as
Speaker 7: we all know. You know, they've reused one rocket I
Speaker 7: think as many as twenty times. And I wrote a
Speaker 7: biography on Elon you know, that came out a few
Speaker 7: years ago. When I was researching that book, all the
Speaker 7: traditional players said this was going to be impossible and
Speaker 7: it was wasted time and the math would never pencil out.
Speaker 7: But clearly it has. After SpaceX, the second most successful
Speaker 7: rocket company is Rocket Lab. It was started in New Zealand.
Speaker 7: It's headquartered now in the United States. So SpaceX has
Speaker 7: flown hundreds and hundreds of rockets. Rocket Labs flown about fifty.
Speaker 7: And they have a much smaller, cheaper rocket, and they
Speaker 7: have started to move towards parts of reasonable rocket and
Speaker 7: they are building now a larger, fully reusable rocket that
Speaker 7: they're hoping to fly next year. So they really are
Speaker 7: the only current real rocket competitor to SpaceX, and they're
Speaker 7: doing very well. They're starting to launch once every couple
Speaker 7: of weeks.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 7: The next step is the sort of last great hope
Speaker 7: to really challenge SpaceX is Blue Origin, which has been
Speaker 7: sort of like a sad tale for it was started
Speaker 7: almost the same year as SpaceX and really hasn't done
Speaker 7: that much. They do have a reasonable rocket for the
Speaker 7: tourism flights where you go to space for about six minutes.
Speaker 7: Blue Origin has never sent a satellite up. It's just
Speaker 7: not been involved in sort of the commercial end of
Speaker 7: the business. This year they think will be the first
Speaker 7: time they send up their much larger rocket that can
Speaker 7: take satellites. And Blue Origin is also focused on reusable rockets.
Speaker 4: Wait, I have another basic question, which is, how do
Speaker 4: reusable rockets actually work? And why did SpaceX decide to
Speaker 4: go down that route, because, as you said, a lot
Speaker 4: of people thought it was mathematically or physically impossible.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, there's this thought that there was sort
Speaker 7: of a waste of time because the rockets, they go
Speaker 7: through so much damage and pressure and violence during a
Speaker 7: rocket launch that the idea of bringing this huge tube
Speaker 7: back and it's still being usable again that seemed a
Speaker 7: bit far fetched. And you have to deal with the
Speaker 7: whole process of actually getting that too back instead of
Speaker 7: falling into the ocean or burning up in the atmosphere.
Speaker 7: And so SpaceX, you know, they developed this technique where
Speaker 7: they have these landing legs actually on the big base
Speaker 7: part of the rocket, and it comes back towards Earth
Speaker 7: and it's sort of free falling, and then all of
Speaker 7: a sudden, the engines kick back on again and they
Speaker 7: slow it down and it just lands right back on
Speaker 7: the pad where it took off from. There's a big
Speaker 7: trade off in this, so the physics nobody has a
Speaker 7: great advantage on the physics of rockets, and the physics
Speaker 7: of rockets aren't that great When you have this giant
Speaker 7: tube full of fuel. You know, it's a few percent
Speaker 7: of the total weight of that rocket is the stuff
Speaker 7: that you actually get to take to space. The vast
Speaker 7: majority of it is fuel, and you have to use
Speaker 7: some of your fuel to land the rocket. And so
Speaker 7: people also thought that was a bad trade off to make.
Speaker 7: It's better just to take more stuff.
Speaker 2: Didn't At one point, some people thought that rockets themselves
Speaker 2: would be inherently impossible for that exact reason that just
Speaker 2: like so much.
Speaker 5: Of the weight would be the fuel.
Speaker 2: And so some people just theorized that the idea of
Speaker 2: rocket true would be inherently impossible.
Speaker 7: Yeah, going way back, you know, the first rocket pioneers
Speaker 7: were sort of like in the nineteen tens and twenties,
Speaker 7: This guy Robert Goddard was the American pioneer in this field,
Speaker 7: and he there's a pretty famous moment where he writes
Speaker 7: an op ed for the New York Times talking about
Speaker 7: flying a rocket to the moon, and he was just
Speaker 7: pilloried as this wacko, you know, and that none of
Speaker 7: this would ever happened and the physics don't make sense
Speaker 7: at all, And so it took a while to sort
Speaker 7: of get people to believe that these days, the way
Speaker 7: it basically works is like the bigger you can make
Speaker 7: a rocket, you start to get these advantages, and so
Speaker 7: that's kind of what you want to do. But the
Speaker 7: bigger you make a rocket, the more complicated it is,
Speaker 7: the more engines it needs, it gets harder and harder.
Speaker 7: And SpaceX is really the only one that has dialed
Speaker 7: all this in, has the manufacturing processes to make all
Speaker 7: this this math work. If you look at the government programs,
Speaker 7: they don't really have an answer to what SpaceX is doing.
Speaker 7: And these things take ten twenty thirty years to figure out.
Speaker 4: How did we end up with a system where we
Speaker 4: have you know, the government has a space program, NASA exists,
Speaker 4: and then we have these private companies who are doing
Speaker 4: or providing very important services for entities like NASA. It
Speaker 4: seems like a weird kind of pseudo government private commercial
Speaker 4: system that we ended up in.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, if I could riff for a second,
Speaker 7: I've thought about this a lot. You know, there's an
Speaker 7: economist named Alex McDonald. He works for NASA. He wrote
Speaker 7: a really interesting book kind of on this topic. You know,
Speaker 7: we were talking about these rocket pioneers in the nineteen
Speaker 7: tens and twenties, the US had Robert Goddard. There was
Speaker 7: a similar figure in Germany and Russia, and they were
Speaker 7: all pursuing these kind of liquid fueled rockets, very similar
Speaker 7: to what we use today. They were essentially startups. These
Speaker 7: were researchers who got private money. Back in the day,
Speaker 7: if you were really rich, the cool thing to do
Speaker 7: was to build a giant telescope. That that's what like
Speaker 7: rich guys used to used to put their money towards philanthropically,
Speaker 7: and they started to do that to rockets. It was
Speaker 7: kind of like everyone was interested in space and wanted
Speaker 7: to prove this out, and so it looked like we
Speaker 7: were kind of heading on this commercial path. I think
Speaker 7: World War two spilling into the Cold War, where space
Speaker 7: turned into this national sort of achievement, this point of pride,
Speaker 7: this way to show your scientific prowess, you know, it
Speaker 7: turned into a government effort. And the result of that
Speaker 7: was that the rockets could not fail. We got on
Speaker 7: this race obviously to send humans into space, and so
Speaker 7: you have to build very expensive, infallible rockets, and this
Speaker 7: is it was sort of like history that pushed us there.
Speaker 7: But then we got stuck, you know, literally, rockets really
Speaker 7: did not change from the nineteen sixties until SpaceX came along,
Speaker 7: and so everybody got fixated that these rockets had to
Speaker 7: be huge, costly expensive. They couldn't fail, it was embarrassing
Speaker 7: if they did, and that was the ethos. And so
Speaker 7: SpaceX came along. They were able to take more risk,
Speaker 7: to make the rockets cheaper, to use modern technology, modern software,
Speaker 7: and so they changed that equation. And it's only now
Speaker 7: that we're in this weird world between government and commercial space.
Speaker 7: I think, you know, we are leaving that era of
Speaker 7: government space. I wrote my hope my new book was
Speaker 7: called When the Heavens Went on Sale, because I think
Speaker 7: this is completely becoming a commercial enterprise now.
Speaker 2: It's still fascinating, this sort of like path dependency and
Speaker 2: right like the sort of military over engineered.
Speaker 5: It's about carrying people.
Speaker 2: It's about that triumphalism and then the idea that okay,
Speaker 2: that's what people think a rocket is. And then SpaceX
Speaker 2: comes along and just rethinks it from the ground up
Speaker 2: and sounds like I'm curious about the business. So, you know,
Speaker 2: Tracy and I had a conversation on on Lots several
Speaker 2: months ago, and we were actually talking to the guy
Speaker 2: who runs Ukrainian postal service, and he was talking about how,
Speaker 2: you know, thanks to Starlink specifically, if Ukrainie were able
Speaker 2: to retake a village, they wouldn't rebuild the old internet infrastructure.
Speaker 2: They could get Internet going in a day with satellite.
Speaker 2: And it's sort of like very jarring because you realize,
Speaker 2: you know, just what an incredible asset Elon is building up,
Speaker 2: and so between SpaceX and starlink, I you know, I
Speaker 2: know that like SpaceX will charge you or an individual
Speaker 2: if you want to like get some space on one
Speaker 2: of his rockets to fire up your own satellite. Obviously
Speaker 2: Starlink subscribers pay I guess presumably some monthly fee. But
Speaker 2: you know, where's this going in terms of the monetization
Speaker 2: and business to have both the launching infrastructure and the
Speaker 2: satellite infrastructure together, and what can be done with so
Speaker 2: much physical material out in space owned by one company.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I mean this has been SpaceX's huge advantage.
Speaker 7: It has rivals trying to build this space internet. There's
Speaker 7: one web which started as a sort of quasi US
Speaker 7: and European venture. It's gone through bankruptcy in many twist
Speaker 7: and turns, but It has tons of satellites, but it
Speaker 7: lacks rockets, and it was actually hoping to fly on
Speaker 7: a ton of Russian rockets. And when the Ukrainian War
Speaker 7: broke out, they don't have access to these Russian rockets anymore,
Speaker 7: and so they got sort of stock and SpaceX was
Speaker 7: able to race ahead. Amazon is looking to build a
Speaker 7: giant constellation. Jeff clearly has a rocket company, but he
Speaker 7: doesn't have the rockets right now that can can send
Speaker 7: all these satellites up. And so SpaceX is in this
Speaker 7: unique position. There's trade offs, right. You can think of starlink.
Speaker 7: I think of it as a it's really like the
Speaker 7: first global Internet slash communications provider. As we all know,
Speaker 7: telecoms tends to be a sort of nationalized thing. If
Speaker 7: you're in the US, you're on whatever AT and T
Speaker 7: or Verizon. When you go to Europe you have to
Speaker 7: switch to something else.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: Being in space you get past all of that, and
Speaker 7: so you become this global force. And that is how
Speaker 7: they make their money is on these monthly subscriptions. I
Speaker 7: have Starlink at a house in Mexico. I think it's
Speaker 7: about sixty or seventy dollars a month. To get the service,
Speaker 7: and so you've got consumers paying for that, You've got
Speaker 7: some businesses paying for that, and yeah, so there's this
Speaker 7: idea maybe you could avoid building a lot of infrastructure
Speaker 7: on the ground. There is a trade off, Like space
Speaker 7: Internet is almost definitely never going to be as fast
Speaker 7: as fiber, and so if you're you know, if you're
Speaker 7: in a country like the United States where we have
Speaker 7: this huge land mass and we have the money to
Speaker 7: lay all this fiber, you know, that is still going
Speaker 7: to be in the backbone that most people use. But
Speaker 7: in all these other circumstances, planes, cars, boats, also like
Speaker 7: this idea. This is what I think about the most,
Speaker 7: is this unified fabric of the Internet blanketing the earth,
Speaker 7: so that no matter where you are, there's internet service.
Speaker 7: All of our modern devices are working, things like autonomous
Speaker 7: cars and drones and all this stuff that need to
Speaker 7: be connected all the time. You know, I think SpaceX
Speaker 7: right now is in the pole position to be that
Speaker 7: sort of future backbone of all that.
Speaker 4: You said something interesting earlier, you said, our last hope
Speaker 4: for competition to SpaceX was Blue Origin, And.
Speaker 7: That might have been dramatic, but they are the biggest
Speaker 7: of just because Jeff has so much money.
Speaker 3: To actually right well point taken.
Speaker 4: But I do get the sense that there is a
Speaker 4: desire to have more than one company that's doing this.
Speaker 4: And I guess my question is why is that important?
Speaker 4: Because when I think of natural monopolies, like, it's usually
Speaker 4: something pretty important like infrastructure or rockets. In this case,
Speaker 4: couldn't we have a world where one company is very
Speaker 4: very good at building these and dominates like, what's the
Speaker 4: trade off here?
Speaker 7: Well, we do have a world like that at the moment,
Speaker 7: and you know, we've already seen some I think there's
Speaker 7: a bunch of reasons you would want multiple rocket companies,
Speaker 7: particularly if you're the United States or China or Russia.
Speaker 7: Clearly for political, military, strategic reasons. You don't want to
Speaker 7: be dependent on one company for all kinds of reasons.
Speaker 7: Something could go wrong, their rocket could stop working, they
Speaker 7: could go out of business. You know, you want these
Speaker 7: other paths to space. We've talked about how many satellites
Speaker 7: are going up. I mean, this is the next I
Speaker 7: think of it as them. You know, we spent the
Speaker 7: last thirty years building out this internet infrastructure on Earth.
Speaker 7: We are now doing the exact same thing in space.
Speaker 7: It is going to be the next spot where we
Speaker 7: build out our computing infrastructure, and you want lots of
Speaker 7: access to that and ways to put these satellites up
Speaker 7: replace them. And look, if we look at Ukraine, there's
Speaker 7: a pretty good case you could make that Ukraine would
Speaker 7: have fallen too Russia quite quickly without SpaceX. In the
Speaker 7: early days of the war, all of theseites were providing
Speaker 7: tons of imagery that aided the Ukrainian military. After that
Speaker 7: SpaceX Starlink became this essential part of the Ukrainian military's infrastructure.
Speaker 7: It really undermined Russia's plans for attack. But you know,
Speaker 7: we saw these situations where Elon can turn Starlink on
Speaker 7: and off at his whims And so, you know, do
Speaker 7: you want one person with the power of a nation
Speaker 7: state when things like this happen, And do you want
Speaker 7: that one person to be someone as material as Elon?
Speaker 7: Probably not. You probably want a couple options in this race.
Speaker 7: And definitely nations like China, Europe, Russia are going to
Speaker 7: want their own space, Internet and rockets.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I imagine that pricing is pretty low down on
Speaker 4: the priority list when it comes to rockets. But Joe,
Speaker 4: weren't you looking at the cross for.
Speaker 3: Some of these.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was fun.
Speaker 2: I looked and see what the cost of putting a
Speaker 2: satellite into space, and I was pretty annoyed because I
Speaker 2: thought I could get a fifty kilogram satellite into space
Speaker 2: for six hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: But then I clicked to the next page and there were.
Speaker 2: Tall there's like fuel surch charge and all this stuff
Speaker 2: junk went up to like one point five million. So
Speaker 2: I was like, I was not happy. I felt like
Speaker 2: an Airbnb person.
Speaker 7: That's still pretty good, though. You know, if you go back,
Speaker 7: you go back a few if you go back a
Speaker 7: few years, you're you basically have to pay three hundred
Speaker 7: million dollars. I'm buying an entire rocket and.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, I'll book the one point five million.
Speaker 5: Wait.
Speaker 7: So prices happened coming down like dramatically, So there's there's
Speaker 7: a couple of ways prices have gone down. So SpaceX's
Speaker 7: major competitor in the United States is this company called
Speaker 7: United Launch Alliance. It's a combination of Boeing and Lockheed,
Speaker 7: and they're going rate for rocket launch is usually about
Speaker 7: three hundred million dollars. That's for the entire rocket. SpaceX
Speaker 7: charges about sixty million dollars for the equivalent rocket, So
Speaker 7: already SpaceX pulled the price down. And then there's a
Speaker 7: new model that's emerged where you don't have to buy
Speaker 7: the entire rockets because the satellites used to all be
Speaker 7: the size of a school bus and cost billions of
Speaker 7: dollars and you wanted your own rocket. Now there's tiny
Speaker 7: satellites like the size of a shoe box, and so
Speaker 7: you buy space on a SpaceX rocket.
Speaker 5: I think that's what I was looking at. I was
Speaker 5: looking at that.
Speaker 2: They called it like the ride share program, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: the SpaceX ride shair.
Speaker 7: Well, just one last thing on the price, and then
Speaker 7: you know there are tons now of these small rocket
Speaker 7: companies that have merged. So like with rocket Lab, you
Speaker 7: don't get the giant rocket of SpaceX, but you can
Speaker 7: get an entire rocket for about eight million dollars. Whatever
Speaker 7: you like to space.
Speaker 5: So it's it's part.
Speaker 7: This is what has opened up the opportunity for all
Speaker 7: these satellite startups.
Speaker 2: We gotta check the CPI index for satellite rocket and
Speaker 2: see the disinflation happening there. I just have one last question,
Speaker 2: and you already did sort of hit on it, but
Speaker 2: the national security element and I'm curious about it both
Speaker 2: in the US and maybe China and Europe, Like, it
Speaker 2: is pretty wild that, you know, in a war, a
Speaker 2: lot may depend on the whims of one individual Elon
Speaker 2: Musk and we you know, it's his company. He can
Speaker 2: do whatever he wants in theory, et cetera. But like,
Speaker 2: how are governments around the world thinking about the key
Speaker 2: man risk of the geopolitical risk and this is it
Speaker 2: is an American company, and et cetera, and the sort
Speaker 2: of you know, the potential for yeah, the fact that
Speaker 2: if he wants to turn it off for one country
Speaker 2: and not for another country, he can really impair change
Speaker 2: the course of a war.
Speaker 5: Like, how are they thinking about this risk?
Speaker 7: Well, in the United States, I mean, we do have
Speaker 7: backup plans, you know, there is United Launch Alliance is
Speaker 7: always there with a rocket. They just they haven't been
Speaker 7: able to do things like send humans to space. SpaceX
Speaker 7: has been the only one they can send humans to
Speaker 7: space since the Shuttle stopped. But the US has been
Speaker 7: funding all these startups. Rocket Lab got some military funding.
Speaker 7: There's tons of these small rocket companies that have received
Speaker 7: funding from DARPA, et cetera. And so so they're trying
Speaker 7: to put all these backup plans in place. China has
Speaker 7: a weird mix of government backed and private rocket companies.
Speaker 7: If you look elsewhere, the list gets much smaller. It's
Speaker 7: usually one government program and maybe a rocket startup. And
Speaker 7: so this is like a very expensive, hard to do thing.
Speaker 7: The US was in a pretty bad spot twenty years ago.
Speaker 7: The government programs had slowed down. The US is an
Speaker 7: amazing spot now we have more rocket startups and satellite
Speaker 7: startups than anywhere on Earth by many, many times. Russia's
Speaker 7: space program is cratering. I think people should pay attention
Speaker 7: to this. SpaceX had already undermined their entire business. The
Speaker 7: war in Ukraine has cut off a lot of customers.
Speaker 7: They are the wild card in all this space is
Speaker 7: a point of national pride going back many decades. Corruption
Speaker 7: plus their declining business has eroded their space program. They've
Speaker 7: already done things like sent a missile up from the
Speaker 7: Earth to destroy one of their own satellites, just to
Speaker 7: remind everybody that they have this capability. And so you know,
Speaker 7: you'll also notice that the Space Force formed over the
Speaker 7: last few years, and so so this is how people
Speaker 7: are thinking about this. Space is going to be an
Speaker 7: air are of military combat almost definitely.
Speaker 2: Ashley Vance, that was so fantastic, so great to have
Speaker 2: you on Odd Lots and I feel like I know a.
Speaker 7: Little bit more now, Thanks thanks for having.
Speaker 2: That was our conversation with Ashley Vance. And now we're
Speaker 2: going to turn to two other of our Bloomberg colleagues,
Speaker 2: two of the hosts of the excellent Elon Inc. Podcast,
Speaker 2: which covers the sort of weekly or daily goings on
Speaker 2: of Elon Musk and his universe. They're going to help
Speaker 2: us understand how SpaceX and Starlink fit more directly into
Speaker 2: the broader Elon Musk empire. We're going to be speaking
Speaker 2: with Dana Hall and Max Chafkins. So, Dana and Max,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. So Dana,
Speaker 2: I'll start with you, like, how would you describe that
Speaker 2: specific role in the various assets that Elon has? What
Speaker 2: is SpaceX and I guess Starlink, Like, what does it
Speaker 2: serve together?
Speaker 6: Well, I guess I would say first and foremost that
Speaker 6: SpaceX is Elon's first love. I mean, this is the
Speaker 6: company that Elon founded after he made his millions from PayPal,
Speaker 6: and it's really the company that he began first and
Speaker 6: foremost before anything else. I mean, I feel like in
Speaker 6: the public perception he's known as the CEO of Tesla
Speaker 6: because Tesla is publicly traded and it makes a consumer
Speaker 6: facing product. But Tesla's the company that Musk invested in
Speaker 6: early on and then took over. But SpaceX is really
Speaker 6: the company that he founded, and it's really his first love.
Speaker 6: I Mean, this guy's whole thing is about going to Mars,
Speaker 6: and all the other aspects of his company are really
Speaker 6: sort of building towards that, like a penultimate goal that
Speaker 6: has been his goal for like decades now.
Speaker 8: Just from a like logistic standpoint. Also picking up what
Speaker 8: Dana saying, like Elon Musk has long lived very close
Speaker 8: to SpaceX, like it's been where he sort of located
Speaker 8: his person and then he's flown, you know, a couple
Speaker 8: of days out of the week to Tesla and sort
Speaker 8: of manage that as like a side gig. And the
Speaker 8: other thing that Dana didn't mention this is probably pretty important,
Speaker 8: is it's not just his first love, it's also kind
Speaker 8: of key to his brand and like the way that
Speaker 8: he's managed to sort of create a lot of momentum
Speaker 8: in other businesses. I think draws at least to some
Speaker 8: extent from the success he's had at SpaceX.
Speaker 4: Yes, everyone knows that Tesla's are in fact just earth rockets.
Speaker 3: That was terrible, Max.
Speaker 4: I was gonna ask you you mentioned you mentioned time
Speaker 4: management there.
Speaker 3: This was going to be my next question.
Speaker 4: But when I think about Elon's empire, I can't even
Speaker 4: remember everything he has now. But obviously there's Tesla, there's SpaceX,
Speaker 4: there's the boring company, is that it? And like Neuralinkrock
Speaker 4: grock x X AI, Yeah, Twitter, Where where does he
Speaker 4: find time to tweet?
Speaker 3: That's the important thing.
Speaker 8: I mean, I think if you talk to shareholders Tesla,
Speaker 8: and even in some of Elon Musk's friends, I think
Speaker 8: would say, you know, he's spending too much time tweeting.
Speaker 8: And I do think that one of the things that's
Speaker 8: been so difficult about this X acquisition, the acquisition of Twitter,
Speaker 8: renaming it X, and then Elon Musk's like increased engagement
Speaker 8: on X has been that it has like taken him
Speaker 8: away from these companies that are potentially more lucrative, more valuable,
Speaker 8: and also like more ultimately probably more important in sort
Speaker 8: of achieving the goals as Elon Musk has laid them out.
Speaker 6: Dan, Yeah, I was gonna say, I think he tweets
Speaker 6: a lot when he is on a plane or on
Speaker 6: the toilet. Frankly, I mean I think he's even said
Speaker 6: as much, and he tweets a lot, and he doesn't
Speaker 6: sleep very much, so you know he's when he's in
Speaker 6: between meetings or even if he's in a meeting. I
Speaker 6: think he's just sort of glued to that phone NonStop.
Speaker 2: I can't relate, Like Tracy immediately turns her head to
Speaker 2: me when you said that, but I can't relate to that.
Speaker 5: So keep going you.
Speaker 3: And would have a lot to talk about, I feel like,
Speaker 3: or it.
Speaker 2: Would just be distracted the entire time and not have
Speaker 2: it a lot to talk about.
Speaker 3: Okay, right, here's the serious question.
Speaker 4: Are there synergies between a company like SpaceX and say
Speaker 4: a Tesla or a boring company or neuralink or something
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 8: I mean Elon Musk would say yeah, absolutely. I mean,
Speaker 8: first of all, like the general thing that he did
Speaker 8: with SpaceX, like if you go back to the beginning,
Speaker 8: is sort of take essentially like pre existing technology that
Speaker 8: was more or less already out there and find ways
Speaker 8: to make it more efficient, cheaper, and to sell it
Speaker 8: in a super effective way, originally to the government of course,
Speaker 8: now to private enterprises. And I think in certain ways
Speaker 8: he's followed that playbook with almost every company except maybe
Speaker 8: arguably actually more than maybe with X.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I think that like all of his companies
Speaker 6: still serve this larger purpose. So for example, the Boring Company,
Speaker 6: which we think of as this like weird tunneling startup,
Speaker 6: that's like building tunnels under Las Vegas. Like if he does,
Speaker 6: like colonize Mars, you're going to need to build tunnels
Speaker 6: on Mars because there's not an atmosphere on Mars, so
Speaker 6: you have to like tear a form the planet first.
Speaker 6: So like all of his companies have a role in
Speaker 6: like the bigger project, which is the Mars colony.
Speaker 5: And just in the.
Speaker 6: Way that you know he's using X to train the
Speaker 6: X dot AI, and just the fact that so many
Speaker 6: investors and executives and people are all related to each other.
Speaker 6: It's like it's one big, kind of massive elon universe.
Speaker 6: And I can't think of any other executive who has
Speaker 6: run so many companies simultaneously and he just keeps expanding.
Speaker 6: I mean that's what's so, that's what's so wild, Like
Speaker 6: you would think that SpaceX and Tesla would be enough,
Speaker 6: and now he's got six companies.
Speaker 2: So Dan, it just to be clear on this when
Speaker 2: you talk about Mars and the vision is to get
Speaker 2: to Mond, like should we take that literally?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 5: Oh, should we take it literally or seriously?
Speaker 2: Like is really like the way to understand the constellation
Speaker 2: of companies as a combined project. That's a Mars project
Speaker 2: and we should take it literally that that's what the
Speaker 2: project is.
Speaker 6: I mean that's how I take it. Yeah, because I
Speaker 6: think that like you know, okay, is does Tesla have
Speaker 6: a relationship to Mars? Not really, but like Musk's wealth
Speaker 6: is he Like if you think about Musk needing wealth
Speaker 6: and the amount of money that will be needed to
Speaker 6: go to Mars, Tesla plays a role on that. You're
Speaker 6: gonna need internet service on Mars. You're gonna need like
Speaker 6: if human beings are living on Mars are going to
Speaker 6: need to communicate somehow. So yeah, I think of Mars
Speaker 6: as being the guiding principle behind a lot of what
Speaker 6: this guy does. And it does seem like fanciful and
Speaker 6: Pie in the Sky. But then you think about how
Speaker 6: many decisions he's made. It's all kind of with Mars
Speaker 6: still at the apex of like what is driving him.
Speaker 8: I mean you can see though, some of that starting
Speaker 8: to stretch, right, I mean, like you don't need electric
Speaker 8: cars on Mars. I mean you might need good batteries.
Speaker 8: I guess I think he I think it's like seriously
Speaker 8: not literally, like Elon Musk believes that it would be
Speaker 8: great if we had a Mars colony, and I think
Speaker 8: he does, actually, like with his own be want to
Speaker 8: visit Mars, And he's been able to use that as
Speaker 8: a sort of animating force behind this business that in
Speaker 8: a lot of ways has like nothing to do with
Speaker 8: I mean, SpaceX has something to do with going in
Speaker 8: to Mars in the sense that like, oh well, eventually
Speaker 8: the rockets will get big enough and so on. But
Speaker 8: for many years, right, it had nothing to do with
Speaker 8: going to Mars. It was sending stuff to lower herbit.
Speaker 8: But he's been able to use that belief as like
Speaker 8: the kind of guiding light for SpaceX and amazingly for
Speaker 8: all of these other companies like he's He's people think
Speaker 8: of him as this amazing engineer, but he's also an
Speaker 8: amazing marketer, somebody who's really good at sort of turning
Speaker 8: something that can feel pretty pedestrian, Like, hey, right now,
Speaker 8: the boring company is digging a tunnel between like, you know,
Speaker 8: one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the
Speaker 8: Virgin Hotel, which is like very close if you've been
Speaker 8: to Vegas, and coming up with a story that somehow
Speaker 8: spins that as like this is all about our plan
Speaker 8: to colonize Mars. Right, It's kind of like a Steve
Speaker 8: Jobs level exaggeration slash marketing. It's what makes him really successful,
Speaker 8: but it's also what you know, brings on critics and
Speaker 8: short sellers and and so on.
Speaker 4: Why hasn't he started an agriculture technology business Because I
Speaker 4: feel like you're going to have to grow potatoes on Mars.
Speaker 4: That's one thing I've learned from Hollywood, and that could
Speaker 4: solve an earth problem too.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: Well, Kimba, his.
Speaker 6: Brother Kimball, kind of does that, right. I mean, Kimball
Speaker 6: is like the chef who's got this kitchen communities and
Speaker 6: he's growing organic food and teaching kids how to like cook,
Speaker 6: and he's got restaurants. I sort of feel like Kimball
Speaker 6: plays that role.
Speaker 8: I mean the most extreme version of this kind of
Speaker 8: like weird flight of fancy thing that is the woke
Speaker 8: mind virus. Right where when he took over Twitter. From
Speaker 8: the outside, you're looking at this, You're like, Okay, this
Speaker 8: is the guy who really likes this social media app.
Speaker 8: He really likes posting on it. He also has amazing
Speaker 8: access to great investors. He's got some ideas, and after
Speaker 8: buying it, you know, or I guess in the process
Speaker 8: of buying it, he sort of concocted this idea that
Speaker 8: Twitter would be the key to saving civilization from collapse. Like,
Speaker 8: because if the woke mind virus is Elon Musk describes it,
Speaker 8: were to take over, then our martian quality would be
Speaker 8: irrelevant because we'd all society would collapse. So I don't know,
Speaker 8: it's like he's he's got an endless capacity to like
Speaker 8: stitch these new companies into that pre existing narrative.
Speaker 2: Wait, Max, you said something I want to follow up on.
Speaker 2: People think of Elon as a great engineer. Is he
Speaker 2: a great engineer or is he a great product manager
Speaker 2: product dev who has done an objectively phenomenal job of
Speaker 2: bringing engineers together I mean, there's no question he's built
Speaker 2: what he's built, and SpaceX is SpaceX and et cetera.
Speaker 2: Is he himself considered to have great engineering chops or
Speaker 2: is he just like a great like sort of manager type.
Speaker 8: Yes, Elon right, he's gonna he will insist he's a
Speaker 8: great engineer. In fact, he's like put it in his titles.
Speaker 8: You know, his like official title at SpaceX has long
Speaker 8: been like chief rocket Designer. He like really embraces the
Speaker 8: idea that he is involved in the engineering for better
Speaker 8: or worse. You know, the cyber truck, as recounted in
Speaker 8: the Walter Askcson book, like the cyber truck in a
Speaker 8: lot of ways seems like a miss. And one of
Speaker 8: the reasons is that Elon insisted on all these things. Now,
Speaker 8: is that engineering? Is that product management? Like? I mean,
Speaker 8: I don't know, I don't he's not. I don't think
Speaker 8: he's as hands on as as many people work for him,
Speaker 8: although I will say he's definitely like way more hands
Speaker 8: on than your average Silicon Valley CEO, and he prides
Speaker 8: himself on that. And you know, for better or worse,
Speaker 8: that's that's who he is.
Speaker 4: So going back to SpaceX, for a second, where does
Speaker 4: the money actually come from? Because this must be massively expensive.
Speaker 4: We got the sense from Ashley that, you know, clearly
Speaker 4: the business is exploding, but even with that revenue coming in,
Speaker 4: you're still talking about billions and billions of dollars of
Speaker 4: upfront investment for something like rocket technology.
Speaker 3: Who's funding that well, NASA.
Speaker 6: I mean the company has sort of developed hand in
Speaker 6: glove with NASA, which very early on, you know, after
Speaker 6: the Space Shuttle program ended, NASA wanted commercial companies to
Speaker 6: kind of take the mantle and basically lead a charge
Speaker 6: in terms of privatizing space, and NASA sort of put
Speaker 6: out bids for private companies to kind of bid on
Speaker 6: the right to ferry not just cargo, but humans to
Speaker 6: the Internet National Space Station. Two companies one SpaceX and Boeing.
Speaker 6: SpaceX beat Boeing by years. I mean, SpaceX has been
Speaker 6: bringing astronauts to and from the space station now for
Speaker 6: a while. Boeing has yet to fly. Like, so NASA
Speaker 6: was a huge and very early kind of supporter of SpaceX.
Speaker 6: And then beyond NASA, like, if you think of the
Speaker 6: launch market as like a three legged stool, there's NASA,
Speaker 6: there's the US military, and then there's like other satellite companies,
Speaker 6: So I mean the military is also huge. Like if
Speaker 6: you've got an NRO satellite going up there, you want
Speaker 6: it to go up on an American rocket. So Elon
Speaker 6: has a lot of defense contracts as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's funny because you often hear stories that are
Speaker 8: like Elon Musk beat NASA, right, as if they're in competition,
Speaker 8: And in certain ways, I suppose that's true. Because SpaceX
Speaker 8: is a privately held company, it develops things in a
Speaker 8: somewhat different way than NASA has in the past. But
Speaker 8: you could tell a story about SpaceX where the hero
Speaker 8: is not Elon Musk, it's some like George W. Bush,
Speaker 8: era administrator who has add the sort of brilliant idea
Speaker 8: to give contracts to these private companies for what had
Speaker 8: become essentially a routine mission, Like we don't need to
Speaker 8: spend all this money on the shuttle. We should let
Speaker 8: the likes of Elon Musk do it. And it's to
Speaker 8: NASA's credit that they went for that, but also of
Speaker 8: course to Elon Musk credit that he, you know, followed
Speaker 8: through on it and achieved it.
Speaker 4: Oh, just on that note, do you get the sense
Speaker 4: that SpaceX is particularly adept at bidding for government contracts.
Speaker 4: Is it that they're like especially efficient at providing the
Speaker 4: best cost benefit or is it that they're the only
Speaker 4: ones that have this technology or the only ones able
Speaker 4: to do this at a certain scale.
Speaker 8: I mean, he's an amazing he's amazing at it, Dan,
Speaker 8: go ahead, Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, I mean that's the other thing that's sort of
Speaker 6: a wild part of the backstory is SpaceX actually sued
Speaker 6: the Air Force for the right to compete on these
Speaker 6: national security missions. And everyone thought at the time, like,
Speaker 6: why would you sue the Air Force if you're trying
Speaker 6: to bid on these contracts. But they sued and they won,
Speaker 6: and then they started bidding and they absolutely win a
Speaker 6: lot of the bidz because they are more cost effective.
Speaker 6: It's not a cost plus contract, it's just like it's cheaper.
Speaker 6: And like the Air Force and the Pentagon love Elon Busk.
Speaker 6: I mean, whenever he speaks at any of their like
Speaker 6: military installations, he's like wildly applauded by all the folks there.
Speaker 6: And then in turn, like SpaceX has been very shrewd
Speaker 6: about hiring former military people to come work at SpaceX.
Speaker 6: So the whole revolving door thing. They have an incredible
Speaker 6: lobbying team in Washington, d C. And so when SpaceX started,
Speaker 6: it was on the outside of the military industrial complex,
Speaker 6: and he very shrewdly kind of wormed his way into it,
Speaker 6: and now he is very much a part of it
Speaker 6: and like a big, big benefactor of it.
Speaker 8: We shall also say, like one thing that makes SpaceX
Speaker 8: kind of unique in Elon world is this woman Gwen Shotwell,
Speaker 8: who is the COO and who has been the person
Speaker 8: who has sort of led this push to like sell
Speaker 8: these rockets to the military. As Dan and I talk
Speaker 8: about all the time on the podcast, and we've spent
Speaker 8: time with Gwen as well, Like they have a unique relationship.
Speaker 8: She is like uniquely able to man edge Elon Musk to.
Speaker 2: Get kind of does that not exist at the other
Speaker 2: seven or eight companies, that sort of person who can
Speaker 2: manage him the same way?
Speaker 8: No, it doesn't notari, I don't think it exists at
Speaker 8: any of them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because she's like the longest tenured person and she's
Speaker 6: the only person who's like the clear number two, Like
Speaker 6: Tesla doesn't have a clear number two whatever. There's been
Speaker 6: someone who seemed like the number two, they either get
Speaker 6: fired or they quit, so she's got staying power and
Speaker 6: like this level of EQ that is sort of unparalleled
Speaker 6: at any of his other companies.
Speaker 2: Is SpaceX profitable? Could we get a sent What are
Speaker 2: some of the numbers that we know about it?
Speaker 5: Revenue?
Speaker 2: Profitabilities? Are we going to see an IPO? What are
Speaker 2: the years are we talking about? Give us a talk
Speaker 2: talk business for a second.
Speaker 8: So probably not, but I don't think we totally know.
Speaker 8: And Elon Musk has sort of indicated in all sorts
Speaker 8: of ways that he's not going to take SpaceX public.
Speaker 8: What's sort of come out via reporting and like little
Speaker 8: dribs and drabs of what he said is that he'd
Speaker 8: very much like to take Starlink public, but that would
Speaker 8: leave space sex the defense contractor, to continue to be
Speaker 8: his domain. That kind of makes sense because in theory,
Speaker 8: again there are real challenges with starlink business that I'm
Speaker 8: not sure everyone totally appreciates. But in theory, that could
Speaker 8: be a very profitable business, lots of customers, it's like
Speaker 8: easy to model out and so on, and in theory
Speaker 8: could be separate from SpaceX. The other thing is Starlink
Speaker 8: would create lots and lots of demand for SpaceX launches
Speaker 8: because like if you're launching all these little satellites in
Speaker 8: the space and you have to do it continuously because
Speaker 8: they follow the sky, eventually that's going to create lots
Speaker 8: of demand that SpaceX could use like long run to
Speaker 8: keep the rocket program developing and you know, eventually get
Speaker 8: to Mars. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I also think that Elon doesn't really like being a
Speaker 6: public company CEO. I mean, he tried to take Tesla
Speaker 6: private in twenty eighteen, was forced to basically, you know,
Speaker 6: go back on that idea and keep it public. But
Speaker 6: he kind of hates it. Like he hates the disclosures,
Speaker 6: he hates the rigamarole of earnings calls, he hates Delaware law.
Speaker 6: You know, like there's a lot more scrutiny on you
Speaker 6: when you are a publicly traded company. And so I
Speaker 6: kind of think going public is like a last resort
Speaker 6: for him. I mean, you go public when you are
Speaker 6: trying to raise money, but if you can raise money
Speaker 6: without it, I think he would prefer to stay private
Speaker 6: for as long as possible.
Speaker 8: I Mean there's also like a tension here because he
Speaker 8: doesn't want to go public. He hates the idea of
Speaker 8: giving up control is terrible. On the other hand, he's
Speaker 8: so good at dealing with Wall Street and like, really,
Speaker 8: and I guess that's the line he's trying to walk
Speaker 8: with Starlink. You know, you're able to like break off
Speaker 8: this piece of the business that maybe he doesn't care
Speaker 8: that much about, which allows him to tap capital markets,
Speaker 8: get his investors some kind of return while also keeping
Speaker 8: his first love his own.
Speaker 2: Danna and Max, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: odd Latch, really appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Great to be here.
Speaker 6: Thanks so much for having us.
Speaker 2: Tracy, I'm really glad we had those conversations because well,
Speaker 2: I just want to understand more. But now I like
Speaker 2: more even fully appreciate what an extraordinary sort of I
Speaker 2: guess moment it is that one private individual has such
Speaker 2: a stranglehold I guess, so to speak on space right.
Speaker 3: Now, I'm kind of reusable rocket pills.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Oh and very interacting.
Speaker 4: Yeah No, that was fascinating. There was so much to
Speaker 4: pick out of that conversation. One thing I thought was
Speaker 4: really interesting was when Ashley was talking about NASA and
Speaker 4: the sort of headline risk it felt around rockets and
Speaker 4: various space launches that ended up being a limiting factor
Speaker 4: in developing the technology, and we kind of see that
Speaker 4: time and time again with government projects.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So on the one.
Speaker 4: Hand, the government can be incredibly influential when it comes to,
Speaker 4: you know, promoting or designing new technology, but on the
Speaker 4: other hand, it can end up being very, very conservative
Speaker 4: because if something fails, it's a waste of tax payer
Speaker 4: money and you got all these negative headlines.
Speaker 2: Totally, I had not thought about that at all, but
Speaker 2: it makes so much sense that, like we just come
Speaker 2: to think about, like we know what a rocket is, right,
Speaker 2: It's this extremely expensive, one time thing. It has to
Speaker 2: be so reliable that we could put human life in it,
Speaker 2: and you know, that was the whole purpose. And you know,
Speaker 2: Ashley talked about this sort of the rocket is the
Speaker 2: sort of representation of a nation scientific achievements, particularly during
Speaker 2: the Cold War. But that doesn't necessarily lend itself to
Speaker 2: great commercial operations because it's so expensive. And then you
Speaker 2: could sort of understand how a company can say, like, wait,
Speaker 2: maybe we can rethink this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing I would say is it feels like
Speaker 4: a lot of this kind of happened in the background,
Speaker 4: like the slow growth of SpaceX and Elon's empire and
Speaker 4: the dominance of things like Starlink. But now with Ukraine
Speaker 4: and Russia and various other things, it's kind of bursting
Speaker 4: into the public consciousness, and I wonder if there's going
Speaker 4: to be more awareness, let's say, of that dominance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I just don't see how any government anywhere
Speaker 2: could not be incredibly anxious about that. I mean, it
Speaker 2: seems to be the advantage of the US government that
Speaker 2: it is an American company that is so dominant, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But obviously Elon is Elon, and so I don't know
Speaker 2: how much like any government wants to like sort of
Speaker 2: depend on that. And then for if you're China or
Speaker 2: if you're Japan, or if you're Europe, SpaceX is not
Speaker 2: one of your companies. And I don't know, it feels
Speaker 2: like the sort of national security implications everywhere. I just
Speaker 2: imagine militaries and space agencies around the world must be exciting.
Speaker 5: Of all kinds of alarm bowls.
Speaker 4: The alarm bills would say, it's Elon's universe.
Speaker 2: I mean it literally is also like the idea like
Speaker 2: it really is about Mars is like I find to
Speaker 2: be like a really like fascinating idea that like you
Speaker 2: put all these things together, boring tunnels, batteries, space, internet,
Speaker 2: satellite like the unifying idea here.
Speaker 4: Where does the flamethrower fit in?
Speaker 5: You got any How are you going to fight the Martians?
Speaker 5: I mean, isn't that obvious? Like the Martians aren't going
Speaker 5: to fight themselves, They're gonna have.
Speaker 4: To Like Martians are going to fight themselves, you gotta
Speaker 4: bring the flamethrowers. No, that was kind of an eye
Speaker 4: opening way, I guess of making sense of what it
Speaker 4: first seems like a very disparate universe of companies. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I thought that was incredibly interesting and definitely going to
Speaker 4: be watching what SpaceX does next.
Speaker 5: Likewise, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there, And a big thank you to Ashley,
Speaker 2: Max and Dana and make sure you check out the
Speaker 2: Elon Inc.
Speaker 5: Podcast.
Speaker 2: You can find and subscribe to that in all the
Speaker 2: regular places.
Speaker 4: This has been another episode of the au Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 4: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Follow Ashley Vance. He's at Ashley Vance. Follow Dana Hall.
Speaker 2: She's at Dana Hall and follow Max Chafkin He's at
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