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