Elon Musk’s Keynote at SATELLITE 2020: A Reflection

Elon Musk is perhaps the world’s most polarizing person. Most people are not polarizing. Most polarizing people, you either love them, or you hate them. Elon Musk is one of very few people who is so polarizing that not only can you love him, but you can also hate him, at the same time. He can at once be the most brilliant person you have ever seen while also appearing to not have a firm grasp of reality. He is likely the most arrogant person you have ever seen. His answers can provide such an incredible amount of engineering depth, while also lacking any real strategy or plan. For all of these reasons, I was very much looking forward to watching the Elon Musk keynote at SATELLITE 2020. What would it be like to watch Elon Musk speak? It was, in a word, mind-blowing. Incredible. Thought-provoking. Inspiring. Annoying. But, at the end, Elon Musk certainly did not disappoint. What were the takeaways?

During the interview, it was clear that Elon Musk is probably the most naturally gifted engineer I have ever seen. Throughout the speech, there were several topics that involved Musk going fairly in-depth about some element of a project. This included rocketry, satellite manufacturing, materials science, aerospace engineering, and physics. A few examples:

A member of the audience asked why SpaceX was going to use stainless steel on its Starship, instead of paint. Musk’s answer was around 5 minutes long, and included the following:

• First, stainless steel can withstand very, very high temperatures. Originally, they had considered using special composite materials, which were essentially “strings and glue”. But with these special composite materials, in order to allow the composites to withstand very high temperatures (more than 1000 degrees Celsius), they would need to use special resins, which added cost, complexity, weight, etc., and even then, it would only be able to withstand probably 400 degrees Celsius. Conversely, stainless steel loves high temperatures. According to Musk, you could have stainless steel at 500 degrees Celsius all day, and 1000 degrees for short while, and it would be totally fine.
• Second, stainless steel does not need to be painted. Paint would add weight to the rocket, and also add complexity, and so, in Musk’s mind, why not just not use paint, and make it out of stainless steel.
• Third, stainless steel is a lot more malleable than other metals, with Musk going into some discussion about metallurgy and malleability relative to other metals which they had tried.

In a single answer, Elon Musk demonstrated an in-depth knowledge and understanding of so many different fields of science, and such an ability to apply this knowledge and understanding to the real world. The most impressive thing, though, was how very obvious this all seemed to Musk, as though you or I would be saying something like “salad is healthy”.

Later, Musk went into an in-depth answer on the challenges of satellite manufacturing, rocket manufacturing, and the difference between the difficulty of manufacturing a handful of these things, compared to the difficulty of building an assembly line for them (according to Musk, building an assembly line is at least 1000% more difficult than just designing the satellite). Throughout the speech, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to see the world from his perspective—it would presumably involve a lot of looking at things in terms of vectors, physical forces, and math in general. It would be, presumably, a fascinating perspective.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

In spite of Musk’s engineering gifts, or perhaps partly because of them, he seems to not think through the concepts very thoroughly from a business perspective. At a minimum, he certainly does not think about them as clearly from a business perspective as he does from an engineering perspective.

For example, when asked about Starlink, and its impact on existing mobile network operators like Verizon, he basically said that he guesses that Starlink would not be serving any more than 30 million customers, and that the terminal would look like a UFO on a stick. Musk claimed that Starlink would be serving the customers that mobile network operators currently cannot reach, such as people in remote areas. However, people in such places are, most likely, earning much less than the average American consumer. It seems that Musk was saying that the mobile network operators can keep all the good customers that can already pay for services, and Starlink’s business would be built on trying to get all the customers that don’t actually have enough money to justify having fiber built in their area. In short, it’s like taking all the worst customers from the telcos, making a company with only those customers, and saying that it’s a competitive company. Maybe it’s true, but at first glance, it does not make much sense.

From a product perspective, Musk only said that they would provide latency of around 20ms, and that the speed would be good enough to “allow people to watch HD movies, and do anything else that they would want to do”. He was not clear on the price of the service, nor was he clear on how they would sell the service. In short, Musk’s business plan seems to be that there is an infinite and always-increasing amount of bandwidth demand, and that if he can get enough bandwidth in the sky, he can make money selling bandwidth. When asked about the total market size, Musk roughly estimated $30 billion for Starlink, compared to around $3 billion for Mars missions and launch vehicles.

On the topic of an IPO for Starlink, Musk disagreed with his CEO Gwynne Shotwell’s comments that were made earlier this year, with Musk saying that they are giving zero thought to an IPO for Starlink. The point now, said Musk, is making it work. “You know how many constellation companies there are that haven’t gone bankrupt? Zero. Iridium? Now they are okay, but they went bankrupt before. Orbcomm? Bankrupt. Globalstar? Bankrupt. Teledesic? Bankrupt. Then a whole bunch of other ones that never even made it that far…..and then went bankrupt. So, our goal with Starlink, first, is, do not go bankrupt. After that, we can think about an IPO”.

Finally, when asked about possible interference that reflection from Starlink satellites could cause to astronomers, Musk basically gave a non-answer answer, saying that the satellites will become less reflective when they reach their orbits, and that no one can tell where all the satellites are. It was just one example of Musk being asked a tough question, and simply not answering.

Simple Can be Better

Musk’s interview also made it clear that his leadership style, project management style, and general vision is in many ways quite simple, and very “from the ground up”. Among other things, Elon Musk said that his approach to management is a rhyming approach—“if the schedule is long, your design is wrong”. From the perspective of disruptive innovation, Musk said that within his companies, the starting point should be that your design is wrong, and your job is to make it less wrong. This is clear when looking at most of SpaceX’s designs—they basically start from a blank sheet of paper, and build everything from scratch, with a huge emphasis on iteration.

When asked about formal education, Musk was also very dismissive, saying that college is a great place to learn how to do your chores, and to have fun, but that colleges are not great places for learning. When recruiting people for Tesla, Musk was clear that he looks for people with exceptional talent, more so than people with an exceptional educational background.

What is the Takeaway after Watching Elon Musk Speak?

I have never seen the Pope speak to a crowd, and I am not a religious person. Watching the Elon Musk show was like watching a religious event. I have never in my life seen such a large audience feel so strangely *close* to such a high-level speaker. Several of the audience questioners casually referred to him as “Elon”. 15 minutes after the scheduled starting time, the conference organizers made an announcement—“we just heard from Elon, he will be about 15 more minutes late. Don’t worry, we are sure he will be great, but if you want, let him know how you feel when he gets here” (i.e., the crowd could yell at him for being late). It became very clear at that point that we are all living in Elon’s world, and this entire room was functioning on Elon Time. In a weird way, it felt like we were waiting for our Leader.

On a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2,000 points—the worst single-day point drop in the history of the United States—I was lucky enough to see Elon Musk speak. These may be two totally unrelated things, but I see it as, in some ways, it’s a poetic coincidence. The United States over the past several years has been, arguably, worshipping at the false altar of stock prices always going up. To see someone as polarizing, as completely insane, but also as god damned undeniably inspiring as Elon Musk get up in front of the room and tell us all how he’s going to get us to Mars within his lifetime, then later that day possibly violating securities laws by tweeting about how the market was a “bit high anyway, due for a correction”, it makes you think that no matter what this crazy world throws at us, things will be okay. If we take nothing else away from Musk’s keynote, let it be this lesson—the world is fascinating and complex and unpredictable, and humans are uniquely positioned to understand it. No matter how much noise is coming from all the distractions of life, all you can do is learn, compete, and do your best to be god damned exceptional. And remember, if you ever have a meeting with Elon Musk, expect him to be about 30 minutes late, especially if he’s coming in from Boca Chica.