(patriotic orchestral music)
- [Announcer] Please welcome
AFA's central Florida
Martin H. Harris Chapter
President Todd Freece.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
Thirty-six years ago,
our chapter established
this great symposium
and has been working closing with AFA
to keep it one of the premiere
professional development
events for airmen.
Today, it's our honor to participate
in continuing that great tradition
by hosting this session.
I am pleased to introduce
our keynote event
to conclude our symposium.
Lieutenant General John Thompson
is responsible for approximately
6,000 airmen worldwide.
He commands an annual
budget of over $7 billion
to support the research,
design, development, launch,
acquisition, and sustainment of satellites
and their associated
command and control systems.
Accompanying General Thompson
is global innovator Elon Musk.
In 1980--
(crowd cheering and applauding)
In 1983, he taught himself
computer programming
at the age of 12,
sold the code for a Basic-based
video game called "Blaster"
for approximately $500.
And in 1990,
in 1995, he started Zip2,
a web software company later
renamed PayPal in 2001.
But more recently, you might know him for
for revolutionizing electric cars
as CEO and product
architect of Tesla Motors.
Development--
(crowd cheering and applauding)
That's all the Tesla owners. (chuckles)
Development and manufacturing
advanced rockets
and spacecraft for missions
to and beyond Earth orbit
as founder of Space Exploration
Technologies, SpaceX.
(audience cheering and applauding)
And conceptualizing
high-speed transportation
known as Hyperloop.
(audience cheering and applauding)
And if you haven't heard
some of these quotes by
Elon Musk, or Muskisms,
let me introduce you to one.
Here's my first one and
when I first read it,
I thought, "Well, it
applies to innovation,
"it's also written into the contract
"of every airman in this room,
"and every man and woman who has served."
The quote is,
"If something is important enough,
"even if the odds are against you,
"you should still do it."
Now, looking back to
our speech this morning
by Dr. Roper when he
talked about innovation,
one of the Muskism quotes is
"Failure is an option here.
"If things are not failing,
you are not innovating enough."
But my favorite quote,
"I would like to die on
Mars, just not on impact."
(audience laughing and applauding)
General Thompson, Mr. Musk, over to you.
Thank you and welcome.
(chuckling)
- Well, Elon, thanks so
much for being here today.
As you know, and many
people in the audience know,
we're reprising
a fireless fireside chat
that we did at Air Force Space Pitch Day
back in November.
I ran into General Goldfein,
the Chief of Staff of the
United States Air Force,
this morning and maybe I was being
a little bit too confident but I said,
"Hey, I think that we did
such a good job together
"at Space Pitch Day that
Elon and I got invited back
"for a much bigger
audience, higher stakes,
"and everything like that."
And General Goldfein
looked at me and went,
"No, J.T., you guys are gonna
do it until you get it right."
(audience laughing)
So we're gonna 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 II"
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.
- Yeah.
- 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, just for grins,
this fastest-growing auto company
on the planet,
most amazing capability,
and when Elon pulled up,
he pulled up, he and his entourage,
in three different Teslas this morning.
How many Tesla owners do
we have in the audience?
(audience cheering)
Stand up, stand up if
you're a Tesla owner.
(Elon laughing)
All right.
(audience applauding)
Very nice.
- (chuckling)
(applause drowns out Elon)
- 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 just the Air Force.
Now we're the Air Force
and the Space Force,
that's 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.
(audience laughing)
Who knows?
Okay, so, again, 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 weapons
system, or a product,
into production,
and you start delivering
it to your customers,
very, very frequently there is a push-back
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 everyone else
from the Space/Air Force.
(laughs)
(audience laughing)
And, we've obviously
had a long relationship
with the Air Force and
very much appreciate
the support over the years,
so I just wanna make sure I say that.
And look forward to doing
a lot of interesting things in the future.
I think it's actually,
it's cool that there is,
the creation of the
Space Force is happening.
I think it makes sense that there's
a major branch for every domain, you know?
And so the domain of space,
the domain of air, are both important.
I think space-based is
certainly a medium of its own.
(laughs)
- [General Thompson] Sure.
- And
I think there's some very
exciting things that are possible.
If I may just say it,
like what the public wants, I think,
and I'm actually pretty confident
that the public does want this,
is a Starfleet Academy.
You know with like (laughs)
(audience laughing)
Yeah, like how do we make
"Star Trek" real, you know?
That'd be pretty amazing.
I'd love that. (laughs)
(audience laughing)
You know?
And so I think the fastest we can make
sort of Starfleet real, then,
we should try to do that.
(chuckles)
(audience whoops)
- [General Thompson]
Well, so, Elon, speaking--
(audience applauding)
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.
(audience cheering and applauding
- Sure.
I've been there, I've given a talk,
and, you know, the first
launch of Falcon 1,
we had a Falcon sat from
the Air Force Academy.
That rocket blew up.
(audience laughing)
But then the funny thing is, it blew up,
the thing is truth is
stranger than fiction,
the satellite
was shot through the fairing,
arced through the air a
couple hundred meters,
and then plunged through
the roof of a tool shed
and then landed on the floor.
And which was actually
in reasonably good shape.
I mean, for crashing through the ceiling,
but, you know, like, recognizable.
(audience chuckling)
And we gave it back and said,
"We've not lost one of
your satellites." (laughs)
(audience laughing)
- So, from a SpaceX perspective,
- Just buff it out.
- A partial mission success?
- Well, it's like, it's
not lost, I'm just saying.
(both men laughing)
It's a little worse for
wear, but, you know, here.
But then we subsequently
launched a future Falcon sat
to actual orbit, that was great.
So,
I think there's,
I think we can go a
long way towards making
Starfleet real and making these, sort of,
semi-utopian futures real
but it will definitely
require radical innovation.
One can't get there by
incrementally innovating
expendable boosters, there's just no way.
- Yeah.
- So,
the,
I think
we 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 does mean taking risks.
And, common sense, that
if you take a big risk,
in order to have a big reward,
there must be a big risk.
It's, most of the time, you cannot find
big reward for small risk, those are rare.
So you're gonna have some proportionality
to the risk and reward.
But if the goal is important enough,
and I think increasingly
the goal is important
for many reasons,
the goal of having the
best technology in space,
that is, I think, gonna
become increasingly important.
And it'll be increasingly important
for the United States to use
what I think is its greatest attribute
which is invention
and innovation
to create space technology
that is the best in the world.
And in fact, I think
that if the United States
does not use breakthrough innovation,
it will fall behind.
So, I think 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 peer-adversary competition
around the planet?
Are you suggesting that
it's our adversaries
that require us to be
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 little,
I have zero doubt that
if the United States
does not seek great innovations in space,
it will be second in space.
- Okay.
- With, as sure as night follows day.
So it is a big deal.
But this is
a very innovative,
there's no country more
innovative and inventive
than the United States.
So it's just important
to use that attribute.
That's the ace card.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
And since it seems like we're going down
the geopolitical path
here on the questions,
how does the United States as a nation
maintain that innovative edge?
That
ability to invest in things
and take those risks?
What kind of governmental
policies or processes
do we have to encourage the right kinds
of behavior in your view?
- Well, I think having
outcome-based procurement
is actually very important.
- Okay.
- To say like, this is
the outcome that is sought
and who can achieve this outcome?
Or achieve this outcome
to a greater degree?
That company will,
that's who the Air Force
will do business with.
And will procure the thing
that is radically innovative
as measured by what is important
for leadership in space.
So,
I mean I do think it's
absolutely fundamental
to achieve full reusability
in access to space.
This is the Holy Grail of space.
At the point at which
you have full reusability
for orbital rockets,
then you have
a profound
advantage over anyone else.
Profound.
It will be like, if, in the Air Force,
if you have planes that
could be used once,
or if you had multi-use planes,
that could be flown over
and over again, like normal,
and all your adversaries
had single-use planes.
That would be no contest.
It's the same thing in space.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- Yeah, this is extremely fundamental.
So, the cost of propellant
is typically on the order of
1% of the cost of the
of the vehicle.
Or less.
So, if you have a vehicle that is, say,
I dunno, LOX kerosine, like
Falcon 9 or something like that,
you know, it's,
the oxygen and the fuel are, yeah,
maybe a half-million dollars
or something like that.
But then, depending upon the mission,
the mission price can be anywhere from
60 to $100 million.
So,
the Falcon 9 is a partially-reusable
vehicle but not fully.
The vehicle we're working on right now,
quite difficult,
is Starship.
And
yeah, that has the potential
for full reusability.
But I think it'd 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 shouldn't we
focus all our efforts on one system
and rather than divide them and have
two competing systems.
Like, not to cause controversy, (moans)
but like, in my opinion,
Joint Strike Fighter,
there should be a competitor to JSF.
I know that's a controversial subject but
you know, I think it's not
good to have one provider.
It's good to have competition
where that competition is meaningful
and somebody can actually lose.
Like, so, then,
(audience chuckling)
so, yeah.
- [General Thompson] 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
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.
There's gotta be a carrot and a stick.
So if somebody is innovating
and doing, making great 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 innovation real fast.
(audience laughing)
- [General Thompson] Okay.
The stick.
- Yeah.
It's like, how much do you want it?
- Yeah.
(audience cheering and applauding)
So, does that carrot
and stick approach help,
do you think, people be more
risk averse
or less risk averse?
- Well,
when trying different things,
you've gotta have some
acceptance of failure,
as you were 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 get something even worse
than lack of innovation,
things may go backwards.
So, if,
what you really want is
you want reward and punishment to be
proportionate to the
actions that you seek.
So, if what you're seeking is innovation,
then you should reward
success and innovation
and
only,
there should be minor
consequences for lack of,
minor consequences for trying and failing.
Those should be minor.
Significant rewards for
trying and succeeding.
Minor consequences for
trying and not succeeding.
And major negative
consequences for not trying.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- So, if you have that
incentive structure,
you will get innovation
like you can't believe.
- Okay,
- Yeah.
- So, you've talked at
Tesla shareholder meetings
and in various interviews
that you consider
the machine that builds the machine
- [Elon] Yes.
- To be
just as important if not more important
than the machine itself.
- [Elon] Yep.
- 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
the production,
designing the production
system of a new product is
I think at least an order of magnitude
or two orders of magnitude harder
than designing the initial prototype.
- [General Thompson] Yeah.
- I think like, in America,
there's been less
less importance in modern times
placed on manufacturing.
And I think this is a mistake.
At this point, I would really classify,
in fact I sent an email to
SpaceX just saying this,
at this point, I think
designing a rocket is trivial.
Just trivial.
There's like tons of books
that'll, you read them,
you know,
if you can understand equations,
you can design a rocket.
Real easy.
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
If you say, like, two-stage,
and 2% of your liftoff mass to orbit,
to design something like
that, piece of cake.
Now say you wanna go into
production with that.
Let's say the next step is
you wanna make even one of those things.
Okay, now making even one of those things
and getting it to orbit is hard.
But the designing of it is not hard.
The making of it, of even one, is hard.
The making of a production line
that builds and launches
many is extremely hard.
And then the next level
beyond that would be
creating a fully-reusable system
and having that be in volume production
and volume launch.
That's super, super hard.
So, that's,
but by building the machine
that builds the machine,
I mean creating the production system
and
I keep emphasizing to SpaceX
the hard part is making it
and making lots of them
- [General Thompson] Yeah.
- and launching frequently.
'Cause reuse must not just be,
it can't be reuse like the shuttle.
It's gotta be rapid and complete reuse.
So the shuttle was a case where
the reuse was very slow
and it was not complete.
The main tank was lost every time.
And refurbing the shuttle between flights
was extremely expensive.
It's not even clear whether it was worth
recovering the booster
shells from the ocean.
So,
just like an aircraft,
the rocket must be rapidly
and completely reusable.
And then you need lots of them.
So, just doing kind of
back of the envelope,
what's needed to establish a
self-sustaining city on Mars,
these are big numbers,
but I think 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.
The economy is,
you think of all the things
that are mined and then refined,
and then just the many
steps in the refinement,
and in order to produce, like, your phone,
or your toaster, even,
there's a vast base of
industry that is required
to produce even a simple household item.
- Yeah.
- It's very difficult.
So,
so you've gotta recreate that on Mars.
So a million tons on Mars means,
and we're just talking
orders of magnitude here,
and hopefully it's not 10 million tons,
and hopefully, maybe it's
less than a million tons,
but probably not 100,000 tons.
So, that means you need to
get about
about 5 million tons to Earth
orbit, of useful payload.
So we're talking like,
so essentially, unless
you have a launch system
that is somewhere in the megaton
per year range, to orbit,
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 that builds the machine?
- Yeah, Starlink production
is going well, actually.
That's the,
that was a hard thing to get right.
We made many iterations on
the Starlink prototypes.
And then, as I said,
then building the Starlink
production line was,
I dunno, 1000% harder than designing
the satellite to begin with.
But it is important to have like, a,
to design for manufacturing
and have a type-B backloop
between the design of the object
and the manufacturing system.
So, when you design the object at first,
you don't realize all the parts
that are really difficult to manufacture.
And so having the manufacturing
system and the design,
bringing those up at the same time,
so that you're actually in the beginning
making a thing that you know is wrong
but you're actually figuring
out what's hard to manufacture.
That's the real problem.
So, we brought up the
Starlink production line
before we actually had
the design finalized.
Which is actually the right thing to do.
And then we discovered, oh,
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, I say very easy,
it's sort of hard, but,
(laughing)
but it's being done
and the satellites are
being produced at a rate now
faster than we can launch them.
So, and the cost of the
satellite has dropped below
the cost of transporting it to orbit.
Even when taking a Falcon 9
in the most reused configuration,
which is to get the booster back
and you get the fairings back.
The cost of transporting
the satellite to orbit
exceeds the cost of the satellite.
So the satellite's in a good situation.
- Okay.
- And the cost of that satellite
will keep coming down as we ramp up rate
and make design improvements.
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.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- Which is still pretty good.
- 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 pull would
be Tesla owners wanting
new features on the existing fleet.
Push would be, 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."
- [Elon] Sure.
- And everybody wants an iPad now.
What do you wall think about
in terms of that balance
between customer pull and company push?
- Well, in the beginning,
nobody wanted a Tesla.
I can tell you that.
(audience laughing)
When we made the original
Roaster sports car,
people were like, "Why would
I want an electric car?
"My gasoline car works fine."
I'm like, "No, an electric car's
better, you should try it."
(audience laughing)
And it was hard to get
people to do a test drive.
First of all, nobody knew who we were,
they never heard of this company.
I'm like, "Yeah, we're
named after Nikola Tesla.
"You know that guy?
"Nope." (laughs)
(audience laughing)
So, for sure we were doing
push in the beginning
'cause there was no one telling us
that they wanted an electric car.
So it was not out of, like,
you know, lots of people
coming up to me saying,
"Hey, I really want an electric car."
I heard that zero times.
(audience laughing)
So we were like, "It's
like, man, we better
"make an electric car
"and show that these things can be good."
And then people would want them.
I think it was Henry Ford said,
when we was talking about the Model T,
if you asked the public what they wanted,
they'd say "a faster horse."
So, if you did a big survey and said,
"Hey, public," before automobiles,
"what would you like?"
It's like, "Well, I'd like my horse
"to go three miles per hour faster
"and eat less food and
"you know, be stronger
"and live longer and that kind of thing."
There will be basically
a bunch of incremental
improvements on a horse.
'Cause when you say,
"What about an automobile?
"Like a car that drives itself?"
Like, "What are you talking about?
"That sounds crazy."
But when you actually make an automobile
and give it to people and say,
"Okay, now, this is a horse where
"you can keep it in the barn
"and if you leave for a month,
it's still alive." (laughs)
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
So, carry more weight than a horse,
and go further and that kind of thing.
So,
it's like when it's a
radically new product,
people don't know that they want it
because it's just not in their scope.
I think when they first
started making TV's,
they did a nationwide survey,
I think this may have in like '46 or '48,
it was like a famous nationwide survey,
"Will you ever buy a TV?"
And it was like 96% of
respondents said "No."
Some crazy number.
Like basically everyone's like,
"Would you buy a TV?"
And maybe they put a price in
there or something, I dunno.
But it was famously almost everyone said
they would not buy a TV
but they didn't know what
they were talking about.
- So the big game-changing
stuff at the beginning
is a company push kind of
a thing most of the time.
- [Elon] Yeah.
- But then,
changes to the product over time
can be a lot more customer
pull kind of a focus?
- Yeah, changes to the
product over time can be,
incremental changes,
then customers can certainly tell you,
it's good to get customer 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 over time.
Customer feedback after they
have the fundamental thing,
is great.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- Okay, so,
in the audience here,
we have a lot of air
and space warfighters,
we have 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've got a little
Lightning Round here for ya.
- Great.
- 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 contexts
'cause they're very different.
But I think the probably
most transformative,
most fundamentally
transformative will be A.I.
- [General Thompson] A.I.?
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.
- [General Thompson] Computer
Science and Physics, okay.
How many Computer Science
people do we have out there?
(a few members of the audience whooping)
How many Physics people?
(a few members of the audience whooping)
Okay.
We need more, apparently.
(audience laughing)
Okay--
- Wait, essentially,
Information Theory and Physical Theory
if you want to understand
the nature of the universe,
and these have
very good predictive power,
Physics and Computer Science.
- [General Thompson] 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?
- Right.
- From your perspective.
- Again, I can't emphasize
enough how important
reusable rockets are. (laughs)
(audience laughing)
You know?
You'll love it.
(audience laughing)
It's great.
So,
and I think you could actually do
point to point on Earth,
to go long distances and be
much better than aircraft.
Because basically just
think of like an ICBM
minus the nuke, add a land, you know?
So, just sort of in the option package.
Just, you know,
(audience laughing)
uncheck "Nuke" and then add
"Landing System". (laughs)
(laughing)
And that's definitely going to get you
wherever you want to go the fastest.
'Cause that's why they made ICBM's,
they get there the fastest.
So, I think that's going
to be pretty exciting.
Yeah, I think, uh,
yeah,
once you have dramatically lower cost
access to space,
then many things are enabled.
You could think of like,
once you got the Union Pacific Railroad,
then getting to the west
coast was much faster
and much less dangerous.
- [General Thompson] Yeah.
- You're not likely to sort of
end up eating your compatriots
in a snowy situation.
(audience laughing)
So, you can just take the train.
(audience laughing)
(Elon laughing)
So at the beginning, they thought,
"Why the heck are they
building that stupid railway?
"There's nobody there." (laughs)
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 Earth's population
is on the west coast.
Actually, California is
the most populous state
in the nation.
But it used to be least populous,
I suppose, or pretty low.
So,
many things are possible
once the transport
problem is solved.
So that's why I think it's so fundamental.
If you can't get there or
getting there takes a long time
and you can't risk, every
mission's gotta work,
then it's very hard to innovate.
- [General Thompson] Yeah.
- It's gotta be that, okay,
some missions won't work
and the cost of running
the experiment is low,
that's why I'm harping so
much on the cost of transport.
So,
you know, once you're
there, I think, like,
say establishing a base on
the Moon or a base on Mars,
there's just a tremendous amount of work
that's needed to create
a self-sustaining base
on the Moon or Mars.
And it opens up a tremendous
amount of opportunity
just as the Union Pacific Railroad did
by making access to the west coast
much easier.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- Yeah.
Outside of the space realm,
I think there's still a lot
of opportunity in tunnels.
I've been saying that for a long time.
Tunnels are great. (chuckles)
They're really great.
And The Boring Company is about to finish
its first tunnel in Vegas.
I encourage people to copy,
please copy The Boring Company
or do better, that'd be great.
There's
- So in terms of domains,
you have subterranean.
- Yeah.
- Obviously, Tesla covers
the ground domain as capabilities.
You've got the space
domain covered with SpaceX
and Starlink capabilities.
I think that since this is
the Air Warfare Symposium,
folks 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 are definitely going to go
into kind of autonomous
or locally autonomous drone warfare,
that's 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.
- Okay.
- It's autonomous drone warfare.
And at a local level,
the,
I can't believe I'm saying this
because this is dangerous,
but it's simply what will occur,
is sort of
drones locally
being autonomous
and
but I think we still want to retain
sort of like, you know,
authority to damage or destroy
anything that isn't an
autonomous drone. (chuckles)
We'll keep that authority back here
with a person in the loop.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- The fighter jet era has passed.
That is,
it's just, yeah, the
fighter jet era has passed.
- Okay.
- So, it's drones, yeah.
- [General Thompson] Um,
let's go back to failure
for a minute.
(audience laughing)
And the mindset that you have,
you and your leadership
team at Tesla and SpaceX,
have on failure.
I mean, the SpaceX blooper reel
that you guys did in
- Sure.
- I think it was 2017 timeframe.
Was definitely, "Hey, we embrace
this learning that occurs."
More recently with the Tesla truck
and the ball through the window.
- [Elon] Yeah.
- Also, that mindset of--
- Didn't go through the window.
(audience laughs)
- That mindset that embraces failure,
how do you personally, I
mean, those kinds of failures
would drive a lot of us in this room nuts.
It 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?
- Uh, sure, shall we roll the video?
(laughing)
Should we not?
- No, we should not
roll the video, not yet.
- Okay, okay. (chuckles)
Well, I think of these things as just,
there's a certain amount of time,
and within that time,
you want the best net outcome.
So,
for all the set of
actions that you can do,
there's going to be,
and some of which will fail,
some of which will succeed,
and you want the net useful
output of your set of actions
to be the highest.
So,
I'd have to use a baseball analogy.
You know, in baseball, they don't let you
just sit there and wait
for the perfect pitch
until you get a real easy one.
They're gonna give you three shots.
And then the third one,
they say, okay, get off the,
go back to the,
put somebody else up there.
So, you have three strikes on baseball.
Look, you're not on bat anymore.
So, what you're really looking for
is like what's the batting average?
You know, how you're doing on
on score
and there's gonna be
some amount of failure.
But you want your net output,
that useful output to be maximized.
Failure is essentially irrelevant
unless it is catastrophic.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
Intellectual property.
Obviously, Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City
have amazing capabilities
that they're bringing
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, actually, at
Tesla, we just open-sourced
our 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 tried to actually smooth the path
because the overarching goal of Tesla
is to accelerate the advent
of sustainable energy.
And so if we
created a patent portfolio
that discouraged other companies
from making electric cars,
that would be inconsistent
with our mission.
So we open-sourced all the patents.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- In order to help the other,
anyone else who wants
to make an electric car.
So, I guess that's the
opposite of protecting the IP.
Now, the real way I think
you actually achieve
intellectual property protection
is by innovating fast enough.
If your rate of innovation is high,
then you don't need to worry
about protecting the IP
because other companies will be copying
something that you did years ago.
And that's fine, you know.
Just make sure your rate
of innovation is fast.
Speed of innovation is what matters.
And I do say this to my teams quite a lot.
That innovation-per-unit time,
it's like innovation per year
if you wanna say it like that
is what matters, not
innovation absent time.
Because if you're wanting to make, say,
a 100% improvement in something,
and that took 100 years or one year,
that's radically different.
So, it's like what is
your rate of innovation?
That matters.
And is the rate of innovation,
is that accelerating or decelerating?
A weird thing happens when
companies get big is that,
most companies, or organizations,
the bigger they get,
they tend to get less innovative.
Not just less innovative
on a per-person basis
but less innovative in the absolute.
And I think this is probably because
the incentive structure is not
is not 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.
- So, taking that from a business
level to a national level,
in terms of, obviously, United States,
largest economy in the world,
China, the second-largest
economy in the world
currently and gaining fast,
what sort of things 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's a
real interesting country,
I have to say.
The thing to appreciate about China
is just that there's
a lot of really smart,
really hard-working people there.
And they're gonna do
a lot of great things.
This is sort of independent
of Chinese government policy,
they're just gonna do a
lot of interesting things.
The thing that will feel pretty strange
is that the Chinese economy is going to be
probably at least twice as
big as the U.S. economy.
Maybe three times, but at least twice.
Yeah, so, that assumes a GDP per capita
still less than the U.S.
But since they have about four
or five times the population,
then it would only require
getting to a GDP per capita
of half the United
States for their economy
to be twice the size of ours.
And as I'm sure people in this room know,
the foundation of war is economics.
And so if you
if you have half the resources,
of the counterparty, then you
better be real innovative.
If you're not innovative,
you're gonna lose.
(trumpet music blaring)
- I'm not sure whether
that's a cyber attack
that's ongoing or not here, so.
(string music blaring)
(audience laughing)
The clock says I have 11
minutes left, is that not true?
- I guess it's moot.
- All right, so Smooth Jazz Elon,
- Now the smooth jazz.
(audience laughing)
- [Announcer] It's coming
through the house system,
we're working to get it shut off.
- Thank you.
(audience laughing)
- Um, yes, well, um, at any rate, (laughs)
so with respect to China,
China's economy is gonna be
two to three times the
size of the U.S. economy,
at least double.
Therefore, in order for
the U.S. to be competitive
on a military level,
the innovation has to
overcome a gigantic gap
in economic output.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- So in the absence of radical innovation,
the U.S. will be militarily second.
- Okay.
- Basic, basic math.
- 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
- Yep.
- 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 on us
(laughing)
with a vengeance.
I feel like we're in a
big elevator. (laughs)
(audience laughing and applauding)
So, first of all, when
we interview people,
we do ask for some evidence
of exceptional ability
which in most cases includes innovation.
That's not to say that everyone
needs to be innovative.
But we certainly need those that are doing
advanced engineering to be innovative.
And ideally everyone is at
least to some degree innovative.
So, at the interview point,
we select for people who want
to create new technology.
And then the incentive structure is set up
such that
innovation is rewarded,
making mistakes along the way
does not come with a big penalty.
And but failure to try to innovate
at all comes with a big penalty.
You'll be fired.
- [General Thompson] Okay.
- Yeah.
- The carrot and stick, that's the stick.
- If you don't even try,
or if somebody doesn't
even try to innovate
or their innovation aspirations are very,
are not very good,
then, yeah, they will no
longer be at the company.
- Okay, okay.
- Yeah.
- All right, so, we've 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 a thousand-plus
air and space professionals
in the greatest Air and
Space Force on the planet.
So whaddya wanna tell 'em?
- We've gotta make Starfleet happen.
(General Thompson laughing)
(audience laughing)
Like, you know?
So we want real big spaceships
that can go real far places,
and this will probably get me
into the most trouble of all,
I think there should be a new uniform.
(audience laughing)
That's like, I dunno,
cool uniforms, cool spaceships, you know?
(audience laughing)
I think when the public
hears "Space Force"
that's what they think.
It's like, okay, we're gonna
have some sweet spaceships
and, like, pretty good uniforms and stuff.
And that'll be, that's
what they'll probably want.
So, we want the sci-fi futures,
the good sci-fi futures,
to be real and ideally to become real
while we're still alive.
You know, and we want to see it happen.
And so I think we really need to drive
the rate of innovation to be such that
we would see
big, big breakthroughs, big
improvements in space technology
in the years to come.
So, yeah.
Just, like, try to make Starfleet happen
as soon as humanly possible
and definitely while we're still alive.
Yeah, so.
I'm not sure about warp drive,
but other stuff I think can be done.
- [General Thompson] Gotcha.
- Warp drive and
teleportation, probably not.
But big space ships
that can go far places,
definitely, that can be done.
- [General Thompson] Understood.
- All right.
- Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.
(audience cheering and applauding)
(patriotic orchestral music)
- [General Thompson] Thanks
very much, that was great.
- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome back to the stage,
AFA's Chairman of the
Board, Gerald Murray.
- All right, wasn't this exciting?
Just absolutely incredible.
So I see a lot of you exiting,
probably if you've gotta go some place,
I would ask that if you could,
that you might wanna hold on, I mean,
it's not completely at the end right now.
But I recognize people have
flights and everything.
All right, listen, as
we close out this year's
Air Warfare Symposium,
I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize
our great Air Force leaders,
again, that are here.
And especially for a couple that are here
for their last time in that capacity.
And so for that reason,
I'd like to ask Orville,
and if you would, and General Goldfein,
and Chief Master Sergeant
of the Air Force Wright.
If you would please join me onstage.
(triumphant patriotic music)
(audience applauding)
(upbeat acoustic guitar rock music)
(audience cheering and applauding)
(triumphant patriotic music)
- Chief,
sir, we've had no two greater leaders
to lead our force as a team together.
Sir, you came into the Air Force in 1983.
And so to remember your Air Force
and our Air Force Association,
Orville has a book for you that
was the Air Force magazines
all put together in this book from 1983.
Chief Master Sergeant
of the Air Force Wright,
you came in in 1989 and
it is my great pleasure
to be able to present
you also the almanacs
of our and magazines of 1989 for you.
(audience applauding)
(triumphant patriotic music)
Well, what a great two
days of rich discussion
of the challenges and issues
that are facing our Air Force.
I hope you have enjoyed
this time as much as I.
The excitement, the lessons
that we have learned,
the messages that have been
brought by the senior leadership
of our Air Force and today the Spark Tank.
Just the innovation
that is coming from you,
our airmen across this Air Force.
The future of our force is here,
one of my former colleagues,
a Master Sergeant,
that is now in Junior ROTC has his class
back here in the back.
They got to witness all of this
and every one of them said
that they plan to join the
United States Air Force
when they graduate from high school,
either through goin' on to
college and to commission
or directly into our Air Force.
Our future that is here
and we couldn't be happier
and prouder for the opportunity
to be supporting you.
We also want to thank the cadets
of the University of Central
Florida for their assistance.
Our industry partners,
I thank all of you for joining us as well.
As always, we appreciate
your continued support.
We hope you've learned a lot
at this professional education program
sponsored by your association.
If you like what you've seen here,
I invite you again to be a
member of this great association.
So we may continue to
support our Air Force
and be the force behind the
Force now and into the future.
Again, thank you for joining us,
we hope to see you in September
the 14th through the 16th,
put that on your calendar,
in the National Harbor in Washington D.C.
For the AFA's Air, Space,
and Cyberspace Conference.
Safe travels to all of you.
God bless you.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this includes AFA's 36th
Air Warfare Symposium.
(triumphant patriotic music)
(audience applauding)
