Elon, thanks so much for being here today. As you know, and many people in the audience know, we're reprising a fireless fireside chat that we did at Air Force Space Pitch Day back in November. I ran into General Goldfeend, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, this morning, and maybe I was being a little bit too confident, but I said, hey, I think that we did such a good job together at Space Pitch Day that Elon and I got invited back for a much
bigger audience, higher stakes and everything like that. And General Goldfeind looked at me and went, no, JT. You guys are going to do it until you get it right. So we're going to talk a little bit today about innovation. For those of you in the audience that nothing that was introduced about Elon made it to the prefrontal cortex, and you're like, I still don't know who this guy is. You may remember him from a movie role in Iron Man two or the TV show The Big Bang Theory.
You may remember him if you're.
Old like me, when you used to have to do dial in modems, you may remember how PayPal actually worked over a dial in modem. And if just In case you've had your head in the sand for the last decade, you absolutely have.
To know him.
For Space Exploration Technologies SpaceX, a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in the space business.
And for Tesla.
So for just for grins, this fastest growing auto company on the planet, most amazing capability. And when Elon pulled up, he pulled up, he and his entourage in three different Tesla's this morning.
How many Tesla owners do we have in the audience?
Stand up? Stand up if you're a Tesl owner? All right, very nice. So Elon, you and I have talked about whether the Air Force is the most innovative service the Department of the Air Force now and the last time we interviewed it was.
It was just the Air Force.
Now we're the Air Force and the Space Force as part of the Department of the Air Force. Most of those people who stood up were in the front row. We have a lot of first adopters here in the front of the audience apparently, or maybe those.
Are the folks that just make the most money. Who knows.
Okay, So again, today's today's discussion is about innovation and how we can make the Department of the Air Force, the most innovative department within the Department of Defense and perhaps across the United States government.
So elon question number one.
When you put a weapon system or a product into production and you start delivering it to your customers, very very frequently, there is a pushback within the production organization that you know, we don't want to change that product too much.
It's successful.
We have a lot of legacy systems that we're responsible for in the Department of the Air Force. There is a lot of reticence at times to incrementally improve or add new capabilities to those systems. From the context of Tesla and SpaceX, how do you motivate your workforce, how do you work with your customers, how do you work with technologists in your ecosystems, your various ecosystems to try and make sure that products don't become stagnant and they continue to incrementally improve over time.
Sure, well, first of all, thanks for having me here.
It's an honor to be here with you and with with everyone else from the Space Slash Air Force, and obviously had long relationship with the Air Force and very much appreciate the support of the years. So I just want to make sure to say that and look forward to doing a lot of interesting things in the future. I think it's actually it's cool that that there is
that the creation of the space forces is happening. I think there's you know, it makes sense that there's a major branch for every domain, you know, with that and and so the domain of space the domain of error are both important. But I think space space is is certainly a medium of its own, and I think there's some very exciting things that are possible. If I may just say it, like what, you know, what the public wants? I think, and direction pretty confident that the public doesn't want.
This is a starfleet academy, you know, like.
Yeah, like how do we make start, how do we make star Trek real? You know, that'd be pretty amazing. I would love that, you know, And so I think, like, the fastest we can make sort of star fleet reel, then let's try to do that.
Well.
So elon speaking speaking.
For the United States Space Force, there already is a starfleet academy. It's the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Yep.
But I've been there, I've given a talk, and you know, the first launch of Falcon one, we had a Falcon SAT from the Air Force Academy.
That rocket blew up.
But but but but then the funny thing is that it blew up like he's this truth of strange than fiction.
The the satellite.
Was shot through the firing, walked through the air a couple hundred meters, and then plunged through the roof of a tool shed, uh and then landed on the floor and was actually in reasonably good shape, I mean for crashing through the ceiling. But you know, you're like recognizable, you know, And and we gave we get to give it back and so we've not lost one of your satellites.
So so from a SpaceX perspective, a partial mission success.
It's like, well it's it's not lost. I'm just saying.
It's a little the worse for there's a little bit worse for were of it, you know, but material. But then we subsequently launched future Falcons that's the actual orbit that was great. So so so I think I think there's I think we can go a long way towards making star Fleet reel and making.
These uh sort of.
Utopian or semi semi utopian future is real, but it will definitely require radical innovation. One can't get there by incrementally innovating expendable boosters. There's just no way. So the I think we need to push for radical breakthroughs. And if you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes. And that that does mean taking risks, and common sense that the if you take a big risk in order to have a bigger reward, there must
be a big risk. It's most of the time you cannot find bigger reward for small risk. That's those are rare, so you're going to have some proportionality of the risk
and reward. But if if the goal is important enough, and I think increasingly the goal is important for for many reasons, the goal of having the best technology in space, that that is I think going to become increasingly important, and it'll be increasingly increasingly important for the United States to use what I think is its greatest attribute, which is invention and innovation two to create space technology that
is the best in the world. And in fact, I think if the United States does not use breakthrough innovation, it will fulbind. Yeah, so I think this is that this is not something that was a risk in times past, but I think is a risk now.
Okay, so.
Yeah, do you characterize that risk in terms of pure adversary competition around the planet?
Are you are you?
Are you suggesting that it's our adversaries that require us to be that those radical innovators or is it just we can't become complacent and stay.
Incrementally improving our systems.
We must take those giant leaps forward as a nation regardless of the competition.
I think there's there's little I have zero doubt that if the United States does not take does not seek great innovations in space, it will be second in space with as sure as nightfall is day. So it is a big deal. But this, this, this is a I mean a very innovative that you know, there's no country more innovative an eventive than the United States.
So it's just important to use that attributes. That's that's the ace card. Okay.
Yeah, And since so since it seems like we're going down the geopolitical path here on the on the questions, how does the United States as a nation maintain that innovative edge, that that ability to invest in things and take those risks. What kind of of governmental policies or process as do we have to encourage the right kinds of behavior In your view.
Well, I think having outcome based procurement is actually very important. So you say, like, this is the outcome that is sought, and whoever can achieve this outcome or achieve this outcome to a greater degree that that company will that that's who the Air Force will do business with and will procure the thing that is that is radically innovative as
measured by what is important for leadership in space. So I mean, I do think it's it's absolutely fundamental to achieve full reusability in access to space.
This is this is the holy grail of space.
At the point of which you have full reusability for orbital rockets, then you have a profound advantage over anyone else's profound. It would be like if in the Air Force, if if you if you had planes that could be used once and or if you if you had if you had multi use planes that can be flown over and over again like normal, and all your adversaries had single use planes, that would be no contest. It's the same thing as space. Okay, Yeah, this is extremely fundamental.
So the the cost of a propellant is typically on the order of one of the cost of the of the vehicle or less. So if you have a vehicle that is say locks kerosene like Falcon I or something like that, it's the oxygen and the fuel are yeah, maybe half million dollars or something like that. But then depending upon the mission, the mission price can be anywhere from like sixty to one hundred million dollars. So no, Falcon nine is a partially reusable vehicle, but not fully.
The vehicle we're working on right now, quite difficult, is a starship, and yeah, that has the potential for full reusability, but I think it would be great to have other companies as well that are doing full reusability. I think competition is a good thing. It may seem at times that, you know, shouldn't we focus all our efforts on one system and brought.
Rather than divide them and have two.
Competing systems, like, you know, not to cause controversy, but like in my opinion, like Joint Strike Fighter, should this should be a competitor to JS that that's uh as a controversial subject, but you know, I think it's it's not it's not good to have one one provider. It's good to have competition where that competition is meaningful and somebody can actually lose.
That's like you know, so then then.
So yeah, okay, yeah, So in radical innovation, obviously the workforce is a really key component of that. I mean, as I mean during your PayPal days, you were actually doing coding, right, But in SpaceX and Tesla they are so large that Elon can't do everything. What sort of things do you think about in terms of motivating a workforce like we have in the Department of the Air Force,
that will help them become more radically innovative. What sort of things do you look for in people or in processes that make the workforce better?
Sure?
Well, I think the massive thing that can be done is to make sure your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished. They've got to be a characteristic So if somebody is innovating and making good progress, then they should be promoted sooner. And if somebody is completely failing to innovate. Not every role requires innovation, but if they're in a role where innovation is should be happening, and it's not happening, then
they should either not be promoted or exited. And let me tell you, you'll get promote, you'll get you, you'll get innovation real fast.
Okay, let's stick. Yeah, it's like how much do you want?
H So?
Does that does that carrot and stick approach help? Do you think people be more risk averse or less risk averse?
Well?
Poor when you when when trying different things, you've got to have some acceptance of failure. As you're alluding to earlier, failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may not may get something even worse than lack of innovation.
Things may go backwards. So, if what you really want is.
A risk risk, you wann't reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek. So if if what you're seeking is innovation, then should reward success and innovation and only there should be minor consequences for lack of minor consequences for for.
Trying and failing. Should that there should be minor.
Significant rewards for trying and succeeding, minor consequences for trying and not succeeding, and big and and major negative consequences for not trying.
Okay, So.
If you have that incentive structure, you will get innovation like you can't believe.
Okay, So you've you've talked at Tesla's shareholder meetings and in various interviews that you consider the machine that builds the machine to be just as important, if not more important, than the machine itself.
Yeah.
So we talked about the workforce aspects. Are there processes that you use within your company that are parts of that machine that you think are particularly valuable for innovative radical change?
Well, what I mean by the machine that builds the machine is that the production Designing the production system of a new product is I think at least an order of magnitude or too ards magnitude hotter than designing the initial prototype.
Yeah.
I think like in America, there's been less, less of a less importance in modern times placed on manufacturing, and I think this is a mistake, Like at this point, really classify And in fact I sent an email to the to SpaceX just saying this, like, at this point, I think designing a rocket is trivial, just trivial, there's like tons of books that will you read them? You know, you can understand equations. You can design a rocket. It's
really really easy. Yeah, if you say like two stage two and two percent of your lift off master orbit from it just to design something like that piece case. Uh, Now I say you want to go into production with that, or if you want you want to actually make Let's say, the next step is you want to make even one of those things. Okay, Now, making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard, but the designing of it is not hard. The making of it
is even one is hard. The making of a production line that builds and launches many is a extremely hard. And then the next level beyond that would be, uh, are creating a fully reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch. That's the that's super super hard.
So that's so yeah.
But but by building the machine and bolt machine, I mean, I mean creating the production system, and I keep emphasizing to SpaceX, the hard part is making it and making lots of them and launching frequently, because reuse must not just be it can't be reused like the shuttle. It's got to be rapid and complete reuse. So the shuttle was a case where the reuse was very slow and it was not complete. The main tag was lost every time,
and ref the shuttle between flights was extremely expensive. It's not even clear whether it was worth recovering the booster shells from the ocean. So so just like an aircraft, the rocket must be rapidly and completely reasonable, and then you need lots of them. And then I've been sort of just doing back, kind of back of the envelope of what's needed to establish a self sustaining city on Mars.
And these are like big numbers, but like you.
Need on the order of a million tons to the surface of Mars useful payload something like that, because we sit on the top of a massive base of infrastructure, or you know, the economy is you think of all the things that are mined and then refined and then and then the many steps in the refinement, and in order to produce like your phone or your host or even there's there's a vast base of industry that was required to produce even a simple household item. It's very difficult.
So so you've got to recreate that on Mars, some million tons on Mars means we're just talking to orders of magnitude here, and hopefully it's not ten million tons, and hopefully maybe it's less than a million tons, but probably not one hundred thousand tons. So that that means you need to get about about five million tons to Earth orbit of useful failureed. So you're talking in like
the like. So essentially, unless you have a launch system that is somewhere in the mega ton per year range to orbit, it's not it's not relevant.
Okay. Yeah, So.
Starlink, as you're scaling to build more and more Starlink satellites to go on more and more reusable rockets, what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome in Starlink production so that you can perfect that machine, machine that builds the machine.
Yeah, stalling production is going well. Actually, the that's the that was a hard that's a hard thing to get right. We made many we had many iterations on the stalling prototypes, and then, as I said, the building the stalling production line was I don't know thousand percent harder than designing the satellite to begin with.
But but it is important to have like a.
To design full manufacturing and have a tight feedback loop between the design of the object and may acturing system, so as when people when when you design the object at first, you you don't realize all the parts that are really difficult to manufacture. Uh, And so having the manufacturing system and the design bring those up at the same time, so that you're actually in the beginning making a thing that you know is wrong, but you're actually figuring out what's hard to manufacture.
That's the real problem.
So we brought up the Starlink production line before we actually had the design finalized, which which is actually the right thing to do. And then we discover, oh, there's all there's all these things that in the design that are very difficult to make, and so therefore we must change the design, and the satellite ended up having the same capability, but just was very easy to make and launch, So say, very easy.
It's sort of.
Hard, but but but but it's being done, and we're the satellites are being produced at a rate now faster than we can order them. So and and the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit, even when taking the Falcon nine in the most reused configuration, which is to get the booster back and you get the fairings back. The cost of the of transporting the satellite to orbit exceeds the cost
of the satellite. So the satellite is in a good, good situation, and the cost that satellite will keep coming down as we ramp up rates and make design improvements. But so we really need Starship to carry Starlink in order to get the total delivered cost to orbit to be much better than it is today.
Still pretty good.
When you when you so in terms of deciding what to build, you can take feedback from customers and let customers pull to you what they want, or you can be radically innovative within your company, or you know a small set of individuals and develop something and push it into the industrial base. So customer poll would be Tesla
Tesla owners wanting new features on the existing fleet. Push would be you know, a company push would be something like when Apple pushed the iPad to everybody and nobody knew what an iPad was until they touched it and went wow, and everybody wants an iPad. Now, what do you all think about in terms of that balance between customer poll and company push.
Well, in the beginning nobody wanted a Tesla.
Let can tell you that that made the original sort of roasters car.
Uh.
People were like, why would I want an electric car? That's my casting car works fine, Like, no electric car is better?
I should try it.
And it was hard, you know, hard to get people to do a test drive first. Nobody knew who we were. Heard of this company and like, yeah, we're named after Nicola Tesla, the you know that guy. Nope, So for sure we were doing push in the beginning because people said there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car, so it was not it was not out of like you know, it's like lots of people coming after me saying, hey, I really want an electric car.
I heard that zero times.
So people like it's like, man, we're going to make an electric car and shure that these things can be good and then people want them.
You know.
It's like because like Henry Ford said that, like the you know, we're talking about the Model T. It's like, if you ask the public what they wanted, that's say a faster horse. So if you did like a big survey and say what, hey, public before automobiles, what would you like, It's like, well, I'd like my horse to go three miles an hour faster and eat less food and uh, you know, be stronger and live longer and that kind of thing. There'll be a basically a bunch
of incremental improvements on horse. Because you want to say, like, what about an automobile like cart drives yourself, Like, what are you talking about? That's that's not that's not crazy. But when you actually make an automobile and give it to people and say, okay, now this is a horse where you can keep it in the bond and if you leave for a month it's still alive. Yeah, to carry more more weight than a horse and go further
and that kind of thing. So anyway, the it's like when when it's a radically a new product, people don't know that they wanted because it's just not in their in their scope. I think when they first started making TVs, they did a nationwide survey. I think this might have been like forty six or forty eight. It was like famous nationwide survey will you ever buy a TV? I was like ninety six percent of respondent said no, hmm, some crazy number. Like basically everyone's like would you buy
a TV? And maybe they put a price in there or something. I don't know, but it was famously almost everyone said they would not buy a TV, but they didn't know what they're talking about.
So the big game changing stuff at the beginning is a company push kind of a thing most of the time, but then changes to the product over time can be a lot more customer pull kind of a focus.
Yeah, changes to the product of a time can be incremental changes.
Then the customers can certainly tell you it's good to becustom feedback to say how can we improve the product, And once they're using it, they can say, Okay, I like this thing about it, I don't like this other thing, and then we can improve the product of a time. Customer feedback after they have the fundamental thing is great.
Okay, Okay.
So in the audience here, we have a lot of air and space warfighters, We have so people who use systems, We have a lot of developmental teams on both the government and the industry side, and we have the air and space leadership of the nation. So I got a little lightning round here for you to try and influence maybe some of those younger folks in the back who
are looking for the next big thing. So, in terms of different kinds of technology, whether it's artificial intelligence or medical or batteries or whatever, in the next five years, what technology do you think will see the most advancement.
Well, it's difficult to assess most in those context because they're very different. But I think the part of the most transformative, most fundamentally transformative, will be AI AI Okay.
And if you were recommending to some of the young officers and enlisted troops in the room, what sort of degrees to pursue at college or what sort of education that they should prioritize for themselves in the modern era, what would you recommend?
Computer science and physics?
Computer science and physics okay? How many computer science people do we have out there? How many physics people?
Okay?
We need more apparently, Okay.
It's essentially information theory and physical theory.
If you want to understand the nature of the universe and have these have a very good predictive power.
Physics and pure science okay, yeah, okay.
As a nation that is interested in radical innovation to maintain its competitive edge, what are the things that the Department of the Air Force should be investing more in other than reusable rockets from your perspective.
Again, I can't emphasize enough how important reasonable rockets are. Yeah, I love it.
It's great.
So and I think that you could actually do point to point on Earth with you know, to go a long distances and be much better than aircraft because I mean basically just think of like ICBM minus the nuke Adalande, you know, so it's just sort of in the option package, just you know, unchecked nuke and then add landing system check and and that's definitely gonna get you where you want to go the fastest, because that's why they made ICBMs. They get there the fastest. So you know, I think
that that's that's gonna be pretty exciting. Yeah, I think, uh.
Yeah.
I mean once you have dramatically lower cost access to space, then then many things are enabled. You can think of like once you got the Union Pacific Railroad, then you know, getting to the West coast was.
Much faster and much less dangerous.
You're not likely to sort of end up eating your compatriots in a snowy situation, you know, so.
You can just take the train.
So so you know, at the beginning, they thought, why are the heck they're building out stupid.
Railway and there's nobody.
There's nobody there, and they're like, but once you build the railway, they're like, Okay, now it's easy to get to the West Coast. And now a huge portion of the US population is on the West Coast. And actually California is the most popular state in the nation, but it used to be well least populist.
I suppose we're pretty low.
So many things are possible once you once the transport uh problem is solved. So that that's why I think it's a fundamental you can't but if you can't get there or getting there is takes a long time and you can't risk and every mission has got to work, then it's very hard to innovate. It's got to be that Okay, some missions would work, and the cost of running the experiment is low. That's why I'm harping so much on the cost of transport, so.
You know, once you're there.
I think, like say establishing a base on the moon or based on Mars, there's just a tremendous amount of work work that's needed to create a self sustaining base on the moon of Mars, and it opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity, just as the Union Pacific Railroad did by making access to the West Coast not much easier.
Yeah, I mean outside of the.
Space space realm, I think there's there's still a lot of opportunity in tunnels. I keep I've been saying that for a long time, and tunnels are great.
They're really great.
And Boring Company is about to finish its first tunnel in Vegas. I encourage I encourage people to copy, Please copy the Boring Company or do better.
That'd be great.
There's so in terms of domains. You have subterranean obviously Tesla. Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities. You've got the space domain covered with SpaceX and starlink capabilities. I think this is this is the air warfare symposium. Folks might not in the audience might be interested in if you have any ideas for the air domain specifically.
Well, for the air domain, I think things things are very definitely going to go into kind of autonomous locally autonomous drone warfare. This is where it's at, where the future will be. I'm just saying it's not I want the future to be this. It's just this is what the future will be is autonomous drone warfare and at at a local, local level. The you know, I can't believe I'm saying this because this is this is dangerous, but simply what will occur is sort of a drones
locally being autonomous. And but I think we still want to retain sort of the you know, authority to damage or destroy a you know, anything that that isn't an autonomous drone. Keep that authority back here with a person in the loop. Okay, but it's it's the fighter jet era has passed. That is It's just yeah, fighter jet era has passed. Okay, so it's strong.
Let's go back to failure for a minute. And and and the mindset that that you have, you and your leadership team at Tesla and SpaceX have on failure. I mean the SpaceX blooper reel that you guys did and I think it was twenty seventeen timeframe was definitely Hey, we embraced this learning that occurs more recently with the Tesla truck and the and the ball through the window.
Also, uh, that mind.
Thret that that that mindset that embraces failure, how do you personally, I mean that those kinds of failures would drive a lot of us in this room nuts, but doesn't seem to drive you nuts.
Seems like you're very comfortable with it.
Can you talk about the mindset that requires for you to be that accepting of that kind of failure?
Should should we roll the video? No?
No, we should not roll the video?
Not yet? Okay, okay, okay.
Well I think of these things is just there's a certain amount of time, and within that time, you want the.
Best net outcome. So for.
You know, all the set of actions that you can do, there's going to be some which will fail, some which will succeed, and you want the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest. So I have to, like you use like a baseball analogy, Like you know, baseball do unless you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until you get a real easy one that you can't give you three shots and the third one they say okay, they get off, they go back to the put somebody else with there.
So your three strikes on on the baseball.
You know, not on bat anymore. So so you're what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average?
You know how you're doing.
On on score and and just there's gonna be some amount of failure, but you want your net output net useful output to maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.
Okay, okay.
Intellectual property, obviously, Tesla, SpaceX Solar City have amazing capabilities that they're bringing to the to the public and to the government every day. How do you protect your intellectual property in a world where it seems like the cloud and servers and things are constantly under attack from people wishing to free you of your intellectual property.
Yeah.
Well, actually at Tesla, we just open source style patents some years ago, so anyone can use our patents. So we really have not been tried to protect intellectual property in that sense. We've we've tried to actually smooth the path because the the overacching goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. And so if we created a pattern portfolio that discouraged other companies from making
electric cars, they will be inconsistent without mission. So we open source all the patterns in order to help the other. Anyone else wants to make an electric car, so I guess that's the opposite of protecting the I P.
Now, the real way I thank you.
You actually achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don't need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying something that you did years ago, and that's fine, you know, just make sure you're your rate of innovation is fast.
Speed is really speed of innovation? Is what is what matters?
And I do I do say this to my teams like quite a lot that innovation per unit times I go innovation per year if you want to say it, like is what matters? Not innovation absent time, because if you want to fake it one hundred percent improvement in something and that took one hundred years or one year, that's radically different. So it's like, what is your rate of innovation that that matters? And is the rate of
innovation is that accelerating or decelerating? And a weird thing happens when companies get big is that most companies or organizations, the bigger they get, they tend to get less innovative, not just less innovative on a per person basis, but less innovative in the absolute and I think this is probably because the incentive structure is not It's not there for innovation. It's not enough to use words to encourage innovation.
The incentive structure must be aligned with that. That's fundamental.
So taking that from a business level to a national level in terms of obviously the United States largest economy in the world, China the second largest economy in the world currently and gaining fast. What sort of things that could you share with the audience here that are your thoughts on the competition economic or military between the United States and China.
Sure. Well, I think China is a really interesting country. I have to say.
The things to appreciate about China is just that there's a lot of really smart, really hard working people there and they're going to do a lot of great things.
This is sort of, you know, independentive of Chinese going policy.
They're just going to do a lot of interesting things. The thing that will be it will feel pretty strange, is that the Chinese economy is going to be probably at least twice as big as the US economy, maybe three times, but at least twice, So that assumes a GDP per capita still less than the US, But since they have about four or five times of population, then it would only require getting to a per capita of half the United States for their economy to twice the
size of ours. And as I'm sure people in this room know, the foundation of war is economics.
And so if you.
Have half the resources of the counterparty, then you better be real innovative. If you're not innovative, you're going to lose.
I'm not sure whether that's a cyber attack that's ongoing or not here. So, yeah, the clock says I have eleven minutes left.
Is that not true?
It's got so smooth all right, so smooth jazz elon. Yeah, it's coming through the house system. We're working to get it shut off.
Thank you. Yes, well.
Anyway, so so yeah, with with with respect of China, China's economy is going to be two to three times this size, the US economy at least double.
Therefore, in order for the US to.
Be competitive on military level, the innovation has to overcome a gigantic gap in economic output. Okay, So in the absence of radical innovation, the US will be militarily second.
Okay, basic, basic, Now.
What from the standpoint of radical innovation.
We already talked about workforce, we talked about processes, we talked about protecting intellectual property rights. Let's talk about overall culture, that culture that you try and push into your companies that makes them successful any of us. And I sat right next to one of your SpaceX employees on the plane here yesterday, a young engineer. It was motivating for me just to talk to her about what she was
doing every day and how important her job was. And I just felt like the only other place I've seen that kind of culture is frankly, in the department of the Air Force with some of our young folks that are sprinkled around the back of the room. How do you create that culture at SpaceX and Tesla to make employees like that?
Well, wow, this smooth jazz is just honest with a vengeance. I feel like we're in a big elevator.
So first post, when we interview people, we do ask for some evidence of exceptional ability, which in most cases includes innovation. This is not said everyone needs to be innovatives, but we certainly need those that are doing it's engineering to be innovative, and ideally everyone is at least to some degree in innovative. So at the interviewpoint, we select for people who want to create new technology, and then the intentive structure is set up that such that.
Innovation is rewarded.
Making mistakes along the way does not come with a big penalty. And but but but failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty.
You'll be fired. Okay, yeah, all.
Right, the carrot and stick, Yes, the stick.
If you don't even try, or or somebody doesn't even try to innovate, or their innovation aspirations are are very are not not very good, then yeah, they will no longer be at the company.
Okay, okay, all.
Right, So we got about five minutes left, and what I'd like to do is just turn it over to you, Elon, to talk about whatever you'd like to talk about.
If you have a.
Message for the audience here, you have, you know, a thousand plus air and space professionals and the greatest air and space force on the planet. So what do you want to tell them?
I think we got to make Starfleet happen.
Like so, so we were like, oh, real big space shifts that can go far places, and that's probably get me to the most trouble of able. I think this should be in new uniform that's.
That.
That's like, I don't know, cool uniforms, cool spaceships, you know. I think that's what when the when the public here's space force, that's what they think. It's like, Okay, we're gonna have like some sweet space shifts and like pretty good uniforms and stuff, and that'll be that's what the poblague wants. So yeah, when we went the sci fi futures, the the good sci fi futures to be real, and ideally to become real while we're still alive, you know,
and every want to see it happen. And so I think we really need to drive the rate of innovation to be such that we would see a big, big breakthroughs, big improvements in space technology and you know, in the years to come. So yeah, it's like just trying to make stuffleet happen as soon as humanly possible and definitely.
Why we're while we're still alive. Yeah, So.
I'm not sure about wolf drive, but we can other stuff I think can be done. Wolf drive in tailportation, probably not, but big space ships that can go far places, definitely that.
Can be done.
Understood all right, Ladies and gentlemen, Elon musk mm hmm