Elon Musk and Lt Gen John F. Thompson

foreigner foreigner welcome back please take this opportunity to move to your seats so we can start the program on time foreigner foreigner foreigner foreigner thank you please welcome Afa Central Florida Martin hap Harris chapter president Todd frozen thank you thank you 36 years ago our chapter was established this great Symposium and we have been working closely with the AFA to maintain it as one of the premier professional development events for Airmen. Today it is our honor to participate in continuing that great tradition by hosting this session. I am pleased to present our main event to include and conclude our symposium.

Lieutenant General John Thompson is responsible for approximately six thousand Airmen worldwide. He has an annual budget of more than seven billion dollars to support the research, design, development, acquisition and maintenance of satellites and their associated command and control systems. General Thompson is the global innovator Elon Musk in 1980 in 1983 taught himself computer programming at the age of 12. He solved the code for a basic video game called blaster for about five hundred dollars and in 1990 in 1995 he founded zip2, a web software company that was later renamed PayPal in 2001. But more recently, you may know him for revolutionizing electric cars like CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors development, which is all Tesla owners' development and manufacturing of advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth's orbit, as founder of Exploration Technologies SpaceX space and for the conceptualization of high-speed transportation. known as Hyperloop and if you haven't heard some of these Elon Musk quotes or Muskisms, let me introduce you to this one.

Here is the first one. When I first read it, I thought that while it applies to innovation, it is also written into every airman's contract. In this room and in every man and woman served, the quote is: if something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it now, remembering our speech this morning by Dr. Roper when spoke about innovation, one of the

musk

s. 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 but not on impact General Thompson Mr.

Musk, thank you, welcome, well, Elon, thank you very much for to be here. Today, as you know, and many people in the audience know, we are repeating a fire-free chat we had on Air Force Space launch day in November. I met with General Goldfein, the chief of staff of the United States Air Force. this morning and uh um maybe I was being overconfident but I said hey, I think we did such a good job together on space launch day that uh Elon and I were invited back for a much larger audience, higher stakes and everything. that. that and General Goldfein looked at me and said, no, JT, you guys are going to do it until you get it right, so today we're going to talk a little bit about innovation for those of you in the audience who were none of that.

You were introduced to Elon, uh, uh, it got to the prefrontal cortex and you're like, I still don't know who this guy is. You may remember him from the movie role in Iron Man 2. or from the TV show, uh, The Big Bang Theory. You might remember if you're old like me when you used to have to use dial-up modems. You may remember how PayPal actually worked via a dial-up modem. Yeah, um, and if, just in case, you've had your head stuck in it for the last decade, it's absolutely necessary to know about it for space exploration.

SpaceX Technologies, a tremendous partner to the United States Air Force in the space business and to Tesla, so just to smile, this fastest growing automotive company on the planet. incredible capacity and when Elon pulled up, he and his Entourage pulled up in three different Teslas this morning. Tesla owners, do we have in the audience, stand up, stand up, if you're a test loner? Very good, very kind, thank you, secretary, so, um, 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 are the Air Force and space. force as part of the Department of the Air Force, most of the people who stood up were in the front row, we have a lot of early adopters, huh, here in front of the audience apparently or maybe those are the people who make the most money and that You know good, 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 in the entire United States government , so Elon question number one when you put a weapons system, uh, or a product into production and start delivering it to your customers very, very often, there is a pushback within the production organization that you know we don't want to change too much That product is successful, we have a lot of legacy. systems that we are responsible for in the Air Force department, sometimes there is a lot of reluctance to incrementally improve or add new capabilities to those systems from the context of Tesla and SpaceX, how do you motivate your workforce? how does this work? with your customers, how do you work with the technologists in your ecosystems, your various ecosystems, to try to make sure that products don't stagnate and continue to be deployed, gradually improve over time?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me here, it's an honor. I'll be here with you and everyone else from the Air Force uh space slash um and um. I've already had a long relationship with the Air Force and I really appreciate the support over the year, so I just want to make sure I say that and I look forward to doing a lot of cool things in the future. I think it's actually cool that the creation of space forces is happening. I think you know that it makes sense that there is a major branch for each domain.

You know, with that, uh and uh, so the domain of space and the domain of error are both important, but I think that space is certainly a medium in itself, for sure um and um, I think there are some very interesting things that They are possible if I can only say it like you know what the audience wants, I think, and Perfection is pretty sure the audience doesn't want it. This is uh, the staff runs the Academy in order, like, yeah, how we make stock, how we make Star Trek real, you know. That would be quite surprising.

I'd love for you to know, so I think the quickest we can make some sort of Starfleet real is they're just trying to get it right, so Elon speaks for the United States Space Force. There is already a Starfleet Academy, it is the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I'm sure I was there. I gave him a token. You know, the first Falcon launch. We had a hawk sitting from the air. Force Academy but that rocket exploded but but but the funny thing is that it exploded like it was this truth is stranger than fiction um, the satellite uh was shot through the fairing um through the air a couple hundred meters and then it was It went through the roof of a tool shed, uh, and then it landed on the ground, um, and it was actually in reasonably good condition, I mean, from crashing through the roof, but you know you're recognizable, you know, um, and we have to return it, so I haven't lost one of their satellites, so from SpaceX's perspective, polishing it is a partial mission success.

Well, it's not lost. I'm just saying it's a little bit worse, it's a little bit worse for wear and tear, but you know, but then we launch a future. Falcons, that's in real orbit, that was cool, so I think we can go a long way toward making Starfleet real and making these utopian or semi-autotopian six-year futures real, but it's definitely going to require radical innovation. um you can't get there by innovating incrementally um Expendable drivers there's just no way yeah, so I think we have to drive radical advances um and if you don't drive radical advances you're not going to get radical results um and that means taking risks um and the sense common that if you take a big risk to have a big reward there must be a big risk, it is most of the time that you can't find something big reward for small risks, those are rare, so it will have some proportionality between the risk and the 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 I think will be increasingly important and it will 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. um and I actually think that if the United States doesn't use a breakthrough innovation, it will provide it, so I think this is this is not something that was a risk in the past, but I think it's a risk now, okay, um.

So, yeah, you characterize that risk in terms of peer adversary? Comfort competition all over the planet. Are you suggesting that it is our adversaries that require us to be those radical innovators or we simply cannot become complacent and continue to incrementally improve our systems we must take those giant steps forward as a nation regardless of the competition I believe there are those small ones I have no doubt that if the United States doesn't give them it doesn't seek major innovations in space it will be second in space okay, as sure as dusk is day, so it's a big deal, but this is, uh, I mean, an event very innovative that you know there is no more innovative country and an event than the United States, so it is important to use that attribute. that's the ace card, okay, yeah, and since we seem to be going down the geopolitical path here in the questions, how does the United States as a nation maintain that innovative advantage, that ability to invest in things and take those risks, what What kind of government policies or processes do we have to encourage the right kinds of behavior?

In your opinion, I think that having results-based procurement is really very important, so you say this is the result that is sought and whoever can To achieve this result or achieve this result to a greater extent, that company will be the one with whom the Air Force will do business and we will acquire what is radically innovative, as measured by what is important to leadership in space. So, I mean, I think it's absolutely critical to achieve full reuse and access to space. This is the Holy Grail of space. At the point where you have full reusability for orbital rockets, then you have a profound advantage over anyone else. it was profound um it would be like um in the Air Force if you had airplanes that could be used once and or if you were in multi-purpose airplanes that could be flown over and over again like normal. um and all of your adversaries had single use aircraft that would be no match, it's the same in space, okay, yeah, this is extremely critical, um, so the cost of a booster is usually on the order of one percent. of the cost of the vehicle or less, so if you have a vehicle, let's say I don't know, it blocks kerosene like Falcon Eye or something, it's oxygen and fuel, yeah, maybe half a million dollars or something, but So Depending on the mission, the entry price can range between 60 and 100 million dollars, so I thought that Falcon 9 is a partially reusable vehicle, but not completely.

The vehicle we're working on right now, which is quite difficult, is Starship and uh. Yes, that has the potential for full reuse, but I think it would be great to have other companies also doing full reuse. I think competition is a good thing, sometimes it can feel like you know, shouldn't we focus on everyone? our efforts on one system and instead of splitting them up and having two competing systems, as you know, it should not cause controversy or a bit like, in my opinion, Joint Strike Fighter, this should be a competitor of JSO, that is a controversial topic , but, um, I know, I think it's not good to have a single supplier, it's good to have competition where that competition is significant and someone can lose, so, then, yes, okay, yes, in radical innovation, obviously, the labor force. is a really key component of that, I mean, during your PayPal days you were actually coding well, but at SpaceX and Tesla they are so big that Elon can't do everything, what kind of things do you think about in terms of motivation? a workforce like the one we have in the department of the Air Force that will help them be more radically innovative.

What kinds of things does he look for in people or processes that will improve the workforce? Well, I think it's a huge thing that can be done. What you have to do is make sure that your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished, it has to be a feature,intercontinental ones that they get, they're the fastest um so I think that's going to be pretty exciting um yeah, I think uh Yeah, I mean, once you have dramatically lower cost access to space, then a lot of things are enabled. You might think that once you have the Union Pacific Railroad then you know that getting to the West Coast was much faster and much less dangerous, yes.

You're not likely to end up eating your compatriots in a snow situation, you know, so you can take the train, so you know, at first they thought why the hell are they building that stupid railroad. There's no one, there's no one there. and they say, um, but once you build the railroad, they're fine, now it's easy to get to the west coast, uh, and now a large portion of the US population is on the west coast, um, and of In fact, California is the most popular state. in the nation, um, but it used to be the least populated, I guess at a fairly low level, a lot of things are possible once you solve the transportation problem, which is why I think it's so critical if you can't believe you can.

Not getting there or getting there takes a long time and you can't risk it and every mission will be so it's very difficult to innovate, it has to be right, some missions don't work and the cost of running the experiment is low, that's why I'm so excited. I'm harping so much on the cost of transportation, so, then, you. You know, once you're there, I think, for example, establishing a base on the moon or a base on Mars, uh, it takes an enormous amount of work to create a self-sustaining base on the moon on Mars and it opens up a number of opportunity command just like the Union Pacific Railroad did by making access to the West Coast not much easier, okay, um, yeah, I mean outside of the space realm, I think there's a lot of opportunity in the tunnels.

I think I've been saying that for a long time. a long time um so our tunnels are great um they are really cool um and uh the boring company is about to finish their first tunnel in Las Vegas I encourage I encourage people to copy please copy the boring company or do it better, that would be great . um so in terms of domains, you have Subterranean, yeah, um, obviously Tesla, Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities, you have the space domain covered with SpaceX and Starlink capabilities, uh, I think this is the War Symposium Air, people might not be in the The audience might be interested in if you have any ideas for the air domain specifically for the air domain.

I think things like they're definitely going to get into some kind of locally autonomous autonomous drone. War is where the future will be now. I'm just saying I don't want the future to be this, it's just that this is what the future is going to be, okay like autonomous drone warfare, um and at the local level, uh, you know, um, okay, I can't believe I'm saying this because this is dangerous, but it's just what's going to happen, it's sort of drones that are locally autonomous, um and um, but I think we still want to retain something like, you know, that's the authority to damage or destroy. you know anything other than an autonomous drone, keep that authority here with the person in the know, okay, but it's just that the era of fighter jets has passed, I mean, yeah, why did your mistakes pass?

Okay, so they're drawings, um, come on. Let's go back to failure for a minute and the mentality that you and your leadership team at Tesla and SpaceX have about failure, I mean the SpaceX bug reel, uh, that you guys did in I think it was in the 2017 time period. , it was definitely, hey, us. Embrace this learning that happens most recently with the Tesla truck and the ball through the window too uh that mental crew that foreign mentality that mentality that Embrace failure, how do you say it personally? I mean, those kinds of failures would drive a lot of us into this.

You're crazy about the room, but it doesn't seem to drive you crazy. It sounds like you're very comfortable with that. Can you talk about the mindset that requires you to accept that type of failure? No, no, we shouldn't record a video yet. It's not okay, it's okay, it's okay. I think of these things as there's just a certain amount of time and within that time you want to get the best net result, so you know the whole set of actions. that you can do, there will be uh and some that will fail, some of which will succeed and you want the useful net result of your set of actions to be the highest um, so um, it's like a baseball analogy, like you know the baseball.

They don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect throw until you get a really easy one, they'll give you three throws, the third one and they're like, okay, go out and put someone else back up there, um. so these three strikes in baseball um look yeah not on that anymore so what you're really looking for is what's the batting average you know how you're doing in scoring um and there's only going to be a certain amount. of failure, um, but you want your net production, um, that useful production to be maximized, failure is essentially relevant unless it's catastrophic, okay, yeah, okay, um, intellectual property, obviously, uh, Tesla SpaceX Solar City has amazing capabilities that they are presenting 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, servers and things are constantly under attack from people who want to free you of your intellectual property?

Yeah, well, actually at Tesla we just opened up We got our patents a few years ago so anyone can use our patents, so we haven't really been tried to protect the intellectual property. In that sense, we have tried to pave the way, because Tesla's overall goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, so if we create a portfolio of patterns that would discourage other companies from making electric cars, they will be inconsistent with our mission. , so we open all the patterns to help anyone else who wants to make an electric car. So I guess that's the opposite of protecting intellectual property.

The real way I think the right to intellectual property protection is really achieved is by innovating fast enough. If your innovation rate is high, then you don't need to worry about protecting intellectual property because other companies will be copying something you did years ago and that's fine, you know, just make sure your innovation rate is fast. Speed ​​is really the speed of innovation is what matters and I say this to my teams as many times. Innovation per unit of time as I go Innovation per year, if you want to say that's what matters, there is no innovation in time because if you wanted to make, let's say 100 improvements in something and that took 100 years or one year, that's radically different, so um. it's like what your rate of innovation is that matters and it's the rate of innovation um is it accelerates or slows down um and a strange thing happens when companies grow is that most companies um or organizations the bigger they get they tend to become less innovative um not just less innovative per person but less innovative at all um and I think this is probably because the structure data set is not there for innovation it's not enough to use words to encourage innovation the incentive structure it needs to be aligned with that, that's critical, so, um, um, taking that from a business level to a national level in terms of obviously the United States, the largest economy in the world, China, the second largest economy in the world today. and earning quickly, what kind of things could they share? with the audience here, what are your thoughts on economic or military competition between the United States and China, sure, well, I think China is a really interesting country.

I have to say that what you have to appreciate about China is that there are many intelligent people, very hardworking and they are going to do many wonderful things. This is kind of like, regardless of the Chinese government's policy, they are going to do a lot of interesting things. What that will be. What will feel quite strange is that the Chinese economy will probably be at least twice as big as the US economy, maybe three times, but at least twice as large, and that assumes that GDP per capita is still less than that of the United States.

United, but since they have about four. or five times the population, then it would only require reaching a GDP per capita of half that of the United States for its economy to be twice ours and, as I'm sure people in this room know, the basis of the war is the economy and So if you have half the resources of the counterpart, you better be really innovative. If you are not innovative, you are going to lose. I'm not sure if this is a cyberattack that's ongoing here or not, so, uh, watch. says I have 11 minutes left that's not true foreigner is coming through the internal system we are working on shutting it down okay thank you um yeah well um anyway um so yeah regarding China China's economy is going to be two to three times the size of the American economy at least doubled, therefore, for the United States to be competitive on a military level, innovation has to overcome a gigantic gap in economic output.

Well, in the absence of radical innovation, the United States will voluntarily, second, okay, basic basic mathematics, what, from the point of view of radical innovation, we already talked about the workforce, we talked about the processes, we talked about protection of intellectual property rights, let's talk about the general culture, that culture that you try to introduce into your companies. that makes any of us successful and yesterday I sat next to one of your SpaceX employees on the plane here, a young engineer. It was motivating for me to just talk to her about what she did 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 Air Force department with some of our young people who are scattered in the back of the room, how is that culture created at SpaceX and Tesla?

To make employees like this, wow, this smooth jazz is just honest with a vengeance, uh, I feel like we're in a big elevator, so in first person, when we interview people, we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability , which in most cases. includes innovation, this is not saying that everyone should be innovative, but we certainly need those who are doing advanced engineering to be innovative and ideally everyone is at least somewhat innovative, so at the interview point we select people who You want to create new technology and then you set up the incentive structure so that innovation is rewarded.

Making mistakes along the way doesn't carry a big penalty, um, but not trying to innovate at all carries a big penalty. I'll be fired, yes, okay, the carrot and the stick, yes, the stick, if you don't even try, or someone doesn't even try to invade or their innovation aspirations are very no, they're not very good, then yes, I don't. they will. be in the company, okay, okay, so we have about five minutes left and what I would like to do is hand it over to you, Elon, so we can talk about whatever you want to talk about if you have a message for the audience, here you go, now You know, over a thousand air and space professionals and the largest air and space force on the planet, so what do you want to tell them?

We have to make Starfleet happen like this, so we were like, I don't know. really big spaceships that can go to faraway places and uh, those probably give me the biggest problem of all. I think this should be a new uniform, that's what you know, um, that's like, uh, I don't know cool uniforms, cool spaceships, yeah, I think that's what when the public hears space force, that's What you think, okay, we're going to have some cute spaceships and really nice uniforms and stuff, and that's going to be what the public wants, so yeah, we want the sci-fi futures. that good sci-fi futures are real and ideally become real while we're still alive, you know, and everyone wants it to happen, so I think we really need to push the rate of innovation to be such that we would see big breakthroughs, big ones. improvements in space technology and you know, in the years to come, so yeah, so just trying to make things happen is as soon as humanly possible and definitely while we're while we're still alive, yeah, so I.

I'm not sure about driving the wolf, but I think other things can be done, like driving teleportation, probably not, but big spaceships that can go to far away places, definitely can be done, got it, very good, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage. AFA Board Chairman Gerald Murray OK, isn't that exciting? It's just absolutely amazing. I see many of you coming out. We probably have to go somewhere. I would ask you, if you could, to wait. I mean. It's not completely at the end right now, butI recognize that people have flights and everything, listen as we close this year's Air Warfare Symposium.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge again our great Air Force leaders who are here and especially for a couple who are here for the last time in their capacity and for that reason I would like to ask Orville and if you could be the general golfer and the Chief Master of the Air Force, could you join me on stage? thank you sir, we have not had two better leaders to lead our Force as a team, sir, you came to the air force in 1983. And to remember your Air Force and our Air Force Association, Orville has a book for you that was All the magazines of the Air Force collected in this book from 1983.

She ruined it with the Air Force, you arrived in 1989 and it is a great pleasure for me to also be able to present to you the almanacs of our magazines from 1989, well, what excellent two days of rich discussion about the challenges and problems facing our Air Force. I hope you have enjoyed this time as much as I have, the excitement, the lessons we have learned, the messages that the senior leaders of our Air Force have brought. air force and today the flintlock tank just the innovation that comes from you, our airmen in this Air Force, the future of our forces here, one of my former colleagues, a master sergeant who is now in Junior ROTC, has his class here back, I was able to witness all of this and each of them said that they plan to join the United States Air Force when they graduate from high school, either through their commission to college or directly into our Force.

Aerial, our future, that is. here and we couldn't be happier and prouder for the opportunity to support you, we also want to thank the cadets at the University of Central Florida for their help, our industry partners and I thank all of you for joining us as always. I appreciate your continued support. We hope you learned a lot about this press in this professional education program sponsored by your Association. If you like what you've seen here, I invite you again to become a member of this great Association so we can continue to support our air. strength and be the force behind the strength now and in the future again thank you for joining us we hope to see you September 14-16 put that on your calendar and the National Harbor in Washington D.C for the afa conference airspace and cyber space bon voyage to all of you god bless you ladies and gentlemen this includes the 36th afa overseas air warfare symposium