01:18:44 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[01:18:44] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [01:18:45] S0: This is in fact a full engine. Yeah. If something is easily measurable, Elon seems to try to expand the vision and expand the mission and create new things until it's almost impossible. It's like this option, like option value. If you think about the car business, right, first it's we sell cars, and then that becomes easily measurable. But having access to more capital and cheaper capital and having a higher share value may be useful. And other things like having, talent that wants to come join you because your vision is bigger. Suddenly he creates full self driving as a narrative. So suddenly, you can't really price it as a, you know, it's not actually a car company, it's a technology company. It's like a full self driving company. And then at some point, even that doesn't become, you know, people aren't gonna buy cars. They're just gonna rent them for an hour or thirty minutes or something as they're driving them. But then suddenly it's like, actually, Tesla's not even a car company. We're gonna build robots, and we're gonna be, like, the biggest robot producer in the world. We're gonna make a billion robots a year. Again, you just can't really measure it. It's, you know, fairy dust almost. And, you know, but he's got this track record to prove that he can make the fairy dust real. And then eventually he's just like, Tesla's an AI company, actually. And it's the same thing with SpaceX.
01:20:03 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[01:20:03] S1: Yeah. And along the way become, you know, one of the biggest grid battery providers integrate backwards into, you know, refining their own lithium because that was the bottleneck for battery production. And, yeah, it's a really... [01:20:16] S0: What role does that like resetting what people's expectations are to just increase the size and scope so that it's impossible to pin down here is the value, here's how you should value it?
01:20:28 · Eric Jorgenson
[01:20:28] S1: Most companies seem to have one innovation. Right? They ride one s curve. Eugene Wei has a great story about Amazon sort of mapping those s curves and stacking them. And I think Tesla, Elon is referred to as a series of startups. Tesla and SpaceX both are this unprecedented stack of s curves. And so there's always some where it's like, you know, that happened a few years ago, and now, you know, the technology level has plateaued, and it's in a sort of a cash flowing state. And that's where, know, Falcon one, Falcon nine are now. Starship is sort of on its way up that. It's not an operating cash flowing thing, but we're, you know, rounding the corner into... But Starlink is really in that like, alright, we have a good sense of what that business is. We have the numbers. It's a good business. We don't know yet quite what data centers in space are gonna be. That's a little hand wavy, but that's kind of always how a new s curve feels. And it's not always clear that the math or math are exactly how it'll work out in reality, but there's also pretty good reason to believe, you know, given the series of s curves that have happened before that it'll work out. I I feel like we always have this funny dysmorphia of the present with regards to Elon where, like, we look at the things that were impossible that were achieved in the past that... And be like, oh my god. He... He's so good at this. I can't believe, you know, it's so fantastic that Starlink worked out. What a genius. And then we look at, to your point, the next s curve, the the pixie dust, the hand waves, and say, like, but that'll never work. We'll never have a mass driver on the moon. That's crazy. We'll never have, you know, data centers in space. That doesn't work. All the experts say that doesn't work. And even after twenty five years of him achieving the impossible, in this moment, we still feel qualified to sort of judge and dismiss, you know, what he's saying is gonna happen next. And, of course, he's not always right in the in the micro, but as he points out, he's like, I've lost many battles, I've never lost a war.
01:22:14 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[01:22:14] S0: And I'm generally right on the outcome and wrong on the timeline. The only two things that I really remember him saying this is what the future is going to be, and then they didn't really pan out, was Hyperloop and the full battery pack swapping, where you would just drive up... The thing would take off your old battery pack, give you a full new one, and you just drive away. Those are the only two technologies that just never really worked. [01:22:39] S1: And the bad... The battery pack, think you could totally imagine, like, that could absolutely work, but it just... There was different design trade offs that made it impractical. I think there's a Chinese automaker that that might... [01:22:50] S0: Yeah. They do. Yeah. It's also interesting to think about his... I think Elon's real only competition in most of his industries is China. [01:22:59] S1: Yeah. Which most people in America are just not aware of, know, where the Tesla... Where the Chinese automakers are. [01:23:05] S0: There's this knife fight analogy where the best CEOs basically just wake up, grab the knife, and goes [01:23:09] S1: Yeah. [01:23:10] S0: Start stabbing. Yeah. [01:23:11] S1: I got that from Brett Brett Beshore. Yeah. Operating a business like living in a knife fight, you know. [01:23:15] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I think I think China is playing the game on hard mode. And so you're basically just in a knife fight with a bunch of other, like, incredible assassins.
01:23:15 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[01:23:15] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I think I think China is playing the game on hard mode. And so you're basically just in a knife fight with a bunch of other, like, incredible assassins. [01:23:23] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's a very difficult, a very difficult environment, but it's also really cool. Like, the the innovation that is coming out of China is cool and inspiring, and frankly, like, we should take a close look at it because there's... It again is showing us kind of [01:23:37] S0: where we could or should be, but haven't been yet. When shit goes horribly wrong, Elon kind of internalizes it and then forces... I think he almost drive... Even tries to find the humor in things. And then once he's... There was this, famous one where I think the third ship blew up, before the fourth launch where it actually succeeded and went to orbit. And at first, he was incredibly, like, dismayed, but they went out there, just saw the wreckage, saw what didn't work, figured it out. And then I think, like, that night or even, like, the next night, he was laughing about it and just moved on and, like, let's go get to the next thing. How does he internalize pain and and deal with setbacks, in an unusual way?
01:24:19 · Eric Jorgenson
[01:24:19] S1: Yeah. It's funny that I think there's a couple different potential modes there. I think, you know, he has this, like, hardcore mode where he's like, you know, he wrote an email to that company. Was like, come hell or high water. Like, we will make this company work. I'll spend every dollar I have. Like, I will not I will not quit. You'll have to kill me. Like, we'll just keep keep going. I'd I'd never give up. I'd to be dead or incapacitated. Right? Like, there's that hardcore mode. And then as you point out is, like, that sense of humor and lightness that comes from kind of like playing life like a game and being like, it's all a sim. Like, we're just gonna do the best we can to play this game as hard as we can, like, and get as far as we can and take the next chance and, like, YOLO. Right? Like, there's a lightheartedness in that that helps when you're going after these incredibly big challenges with such high stakes. And, you know, I think we talk a lot about the financial risks he took, but we don't... People underestimate, I think, the reputational risk, like the ability to charge into something with a high likelihood of failure and proving that, you know, all your haters were right when they said, like, oh, an Internet guy's gonna start a rocket company. You're gonna fail. You're gonna lose all your money. Like, there was high odds that he went down as a cautionary tale of like hubris of, you know, burning a fortune, at least in the medium term, but also, you know, knowing how willful and determined he is. Maybe he would have just kept trying to start versions of these companies until they were eventually successful. So even if he did multiply by zero at some point along the line, I'm sure he would have gotten up and kept trying. And for some people, was probably even harder to risk reputation or publishing public embarrassment than it is to risk, you know, capital and effort on an outcome.