I'd put it even simpler. He's betting on uncertain future technologies, where it's completely unclear if the technology he is pursuing will work out.
Ten years ago nobody was particularly certain electric cars could ever be feasible, and currently nobody is sure that hyperloop will ever be feasible either.
In other words, is that next fitness peak even there? Or is it a mirage?
I don't think the current major players are lazily sitting on their hands, they just tend to focus more on the march of incremental improvement than blue sky research. Which can be incredibly valuable- the last hundred years of automobiles and fifty years of semiconductor manufacturing has been mostly the march of incremental improvement.
> Ten years ago nobody was particularly certain electric cars could ever be feasible
This really isn't true. The "mainstream" media and other fools said it wasn't viable. I lived in a place where an electric golf cart was an option for primary means of transportation. The city had "cart" paths through out most of it. Electric cars certainly have been more than possible for several decades.
Of course with all things context matters. This was a designed/planned city that built itself from scratch in the mid to late 80s. So driving a few dozen miles a day was very possible, but no one was driving NY -> DC in a golf cart :)
The question wasn't cost, as I recall it was basically power-density, longevity, & recharge rates. Ten or fifteen years ago, you couldn't fit enough battery in a car to get a useful range at any cost. That's why the supercharger network was a bigger deal years ago, and why fuel cells were in focus back then, and have dwindled as batteries gained ground (IMO)
> I don't think the current major players are lazily sitting on their hands, they just tend to focus more on the march of incremental improvement than blue sky research.
I see the incumbents somewhere between those two sides: They have well-staffed R&D depts, but the margin of ICEs is just to sweet for them. Like how Kodak invented digital cameras, then utterly failed to monetize that invention because the profitable analog film business dominated the internal politics.
No, I think the parent has the right of it. I'm not equipped to analyse Tesla as well as I am for SpaceX, but I can say that the latter was not a bet on uncertain future technologies. While they have certainly deployed some pretty nifty technologies along the way, those have been in service of comparatively marginal improvements (improving payload margins). The more fundamental innovations in cost-reduction and reusability have not been particularly technology-driven, and could have been accomplished in the 1980s if not earlier.[1]
For example: putting most of your operations under the same roof, with engineering right next to manufacturing, and employing common fuel, engines, and tank manufacturing techniques for all stages. Nothing about that was at all technologically risky -- but SpaceX was able to get maybe the first 50% of its cost-savings simply by doing that.
What prevented this from happening in the past wasn't technology, but a Nash equilibrium, as the parent rightly says. Existing rocket makers couldn't put all their operations in one place because that would mean eliminating jobs in scores of congressional districts while only creating jobs in one or two. Would make too many enemies in congress that way, and because the government is the primary customer, you'd never get another launch contract again. And there isn't enough private demand demand to make up the difference, because the cost of spaceflight is so high. The cost of spaceflight is too high, because rocket R&D and manufacturing is split up over hundreds of facilities in dozens of states, creating insane inefficiencies. (Back in the 90s, one fellow I met who worked on the Atlas program told me that they had 7 managers for every engineer). And you can't reduce those inefficiencies because that would mean eliminating jobs in scores of congressional districts, etc...
See, the logic of the industry was self-supporting and entirely circular. Elon Musk's genius was in simply breaking this logic, and aiming for a new equilibrium where rockets are cheap, there's a strong market for private launch services, and contracts aren't awarded on the basis of how many jobs they'll create. Cool technology wasn't the key to this.
Like I say, I'm less well-equipped to analyze Tesla, but I can already detect a similar pattern of equilibrium-disrupting innovation with how he's approaching The Boring Company.
1: The Delta Clipper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X) demonstrated all the critical tech that you need for a reusable Falcon 9, in the early 1990s. It was preceded by some classified programs that accomplished broadly similar feats as much as a decade earlier.
Overall I agree with your SpaceX comments, but I don't think the Delta Clipper demonstrated supersonic retropropulsion, which was never done before and is cited by the CNES director of launches as being a key technology.
> An engine is relit while going against the aerodynamic flow, which is actually quite complicated to achieve. We worked on that with ONERA, the French national aerospace lab, and realized it’s pretty complicated.
Ah, you're quite right, very fair point. Supersonic retropropulsion was indeed a novel technology that ended up in their critical path. Interesting to speculate on what they might've done if that hadn't worked out! Are there more off-the-shelf techniques that might've been good enough? (Eg. nose-first re-entry with a deployable heat shield.)
Anyhow, obviously SpaceX has done many other very technologically innovative things as well. But this would all have been a moot point if they'd operated per the rules of the existing industry, on cost-plus contracts with a wildly distributed workforce with each department or subcontractor focused on optimising its own particular subsystem without consideration of the whole. Breaking that paradigm was far and away the most important innovation of SpaceX today.
It's worth noting that they've now gotten the gains from escaping the industry's old local maxima, and that going forward (with the BFR) they're going to be more reliant on novel technologies than they have been to date. But they'll also be reliant on the emergence of new markets for spaceflight at the much-lower price point. I suspect that StarLink is part of this effort -- apart from being a good idea in its own right, it's a way of Musk saying to the world: "See guys? This kind of thing is what you can do with really cheap and reliable spaceflight! Start thinking on this scale, people!!!"
Are you aware of a way to buy Boring Company stock, for instance on a second market anywhere? I'm assuming accredited investor status would be required regardless, but would this currently be possible for _any_ private, relatively wealthy (e.g. 1-2 million net worth) individual?
Thanks for the feedback and the offer. Obviously hoping to be in a position to make these kinds of speculative investments at some point, but unfortunately not rich enough today, in the SOX/accredited investor sense. (In that sense it is probably premature to scope out the possibilities, but both curiosity and the speculative sense of knowing the terrain got to me).
[Edit: Hm, I just googled some details on a lark, and it seems there might be a clause that applies to non-US-persons that is relevant in my case. Don't be too surprised if I send you an e-mail at some point, for information if nothing else :)]
Ten years ago nobody was particularly certain electric cars could ever be feasible, and currently nobody is sure that hyperloop will ever be feasible either.
In other words, is that next fitness peak even there? Or is it a mirage?
I don't think the current major players are lazily sitting on their hands, they just tend to focus more on the march of incremental improvement than blue sky research. Which can be incredibly valuable- the last hundred years of automobiles and fifty years of semiconductor manufacturing has been mostly the march of incremental improvement.