Modern Space Race + State of Elon Musk — With Ashlee Vance

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29:09And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ashley Vance, author of the terrific new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, also author of Elon Musk. He also hosts the show, Hello World, and he is a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. Ashley, I feel like I got to tee you up for a story where you end up in an ICBM factory, effectively, and craziness ensues. Why don't you tell it? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to give people the impression that this... I mean, yes, there are things in this book that are about business and space, but I mean, this is really meant to be more of a narrative, a story more than anything else.

29:50It's kind of written for a mainstream audience, sort of like the right stuff, if I can, not that I'm trying to say I'm Tom Wolf, but for the modern age, giving people insight into this world. And one of my favorite characters in the book is this guy named Max Plyakov. He was born in Ukraine. His parents worked on the Soviet space program. He was an OBGYN coming out of university and then made a ton of money in software. And then lo and behold, a rocket company in Texas called Firefly went bankrupt. And Max decided he wanted a rocket company, so he bought it. And Max, you know, he had this great vision that Ukraine, for people who don't know, was a major part of the Soviet space program.

30:41They built a ton of the ICBMs and then the rocket bodies and had this just incredible expertise in engines, all kinds of stuff tied to aerospace. And so Max's great vision was that he was going to unite the Ukrainian aerospace industry, which was kind of declining with the American space industry that was on the rise and create this thing that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, this like union of Soviet and American space technology. So I went with Max to Ukraine, to the city that's a little sort of in central Ukraine, not too far from Crimea, actually called Dnepro, which is where a lot of this stuff was housed.

31:19And I think I'm the second Western journalist and the first because I had a video camera with me to go into the, it was the mega center of the Soviet ICBM line with the camera, got a tour, got to see where these things were made. And then also got to see, you know, the remnants of Ukraine's space program. And I'm just curious, is any of that technology being, I mean, if they have this missile technology sitting into Nipro, is any of that being used in the war? Well, the Russians went after it pretty quick. I mean, one of the reasons Max wanted to bring the Ukrainian technology to the US as sort of like a patriotic gesture was because there have been rumors circulating for years, which are sort of backed up by photos that places like North Korea have been getting Ukrainian expertise and smarts kind of on the black market.

32:16And in Ukraine, obviously, the salaries for these people have dropped off dramatically. There wasn't a lot for them to do. And so it was sort of like the highest bidder for their brains. I actually think the US made just a horrendous mistake. I mean, they left Ukraine in this tough spot. They said, give up your nuclear weapons as the Cold War ended, and we're going to protect you from Russia. And you can hold on to some of this other stuff. but the business was never big enough. And so these scientists have been up for grabs. And kind of shockingly, you'll find out in the book, it's on the internet, so I don't mind saying it, Max puts$250 million into Firefly and then tries to create this merger of technology.

33:06And the US government basically accuses him of being a Russian spy and throws him out of the country. and then a few months later, the war in Ukraine breaks out and all those assets and factories, you know, go up for grabs. Wait, so when you say go, oh, I could go up for grabs in the US. No, no. I mean, the Russians moved in very quickly. So they've taken over. It's unclear, you know, like Dinepro hasn't fallen yet. It was bombed very early in the war, but this is like one of the things the Russians have gone after. All the engineers, as you can imagine are either in the military or have fled the country.

33:45Right. And so then what's going on with the company in Austin? Well, so Bax got tossed out. They brought in, you know, some, they were sort of, he was forced to sell it to some, some venture capitalists and hedge funds. And so now it's run by, by money people. It's done okay. You know, they, Firefly has launched twice. They haven't reached orbit yet, but the second launch got very close. And that's pretty good for a rocket startup. I mean, it sounds bad to other people, but this is like normal operating procedure. And so after Elon and Jeff Bezos, Vax had put the most money into a private rocket company and just never really got to enjoy it.

34:30And he's in Ukraine now. He's in Ukraine part of the time and then in Scotland. He actually has British citizenship as well. Okay. I see. All right. So we've talked about Firefly. We've talked about Rocket Lab and Planet Labs. What about Astra, which is the fourth company that you cover? Yeah. I mean, this was, you know, like when I wrote the book on Elon, some of my favorite stuff was like the early days of SpaceX, which I didn't get to live through myself. I just had to hear all these stories. And right as I was kind of getting into this world, this company called Astra. I heard rumors about it.

35:04Somebody said, look, there's these crazy people. They've got a, they're setting up a rocket factory like in Alameda, which is this city near San Francisco. It's like right by a neighborhood. They're going to build this, you know, equivalent of a missile without anybody knowing. Um, and I talked my way in and I, this was my, I was there pretty much like the very first day they started. And so I got to like follow a rocket company from day one to launching their first rocket, which is something I always wanted to do. But Astra is the, they're the most extreme end of this whole enterprise, you know, so they, SpaceX charges like$60 million a launch.

35:47Astra wants to make a$1 million rocket that you can build every day and launch every day. And you could think of it as like, you know, the, the model T of rocketry, like, like sort turning this into a proper mass manufacturing assembly line type industry. They've had a tough go of it. It's been lots of ups and downs, but that's really, that's the part of the book. It's one of my favorite parts because it's like this, it shows people the struggle and why this is still hard and like what it takes to engineer these things and sort of the chaos that ensues. Yeah. It's such an interesting business because you effectively get a handful of very expensive shots at the very beginning.

36:28And if you mess those up, the company could be done. Like one of the things that I found interesting in your introduction was that SpaceX was effectively maybe one or two launches away from folding. I mean, Elon had to borrow money in order to get, and they sort of, you sort of cross your fingers and hope that it works. And it's not a very high success, you know, rate, at least in the beginning. No. And like, you know, traditionally, these companies are private and you, yes, people can see your rocket launch, but you're kind of operating behind closed doors. But most of the startups that we're looking at now, they made this Faustian bargain during COVID when the SPAC money was flying around.

37:10And it was like, oh, well, okay, let's go public and let's take all this money on the speculative business. and now they're all getting judged. You can watch their stock prices go up and down every launch because someone like me who's followed this for a long time, I know sort of the struggle is real and what goes into it. If you're an investor in Astra and you see their rocket blow up, you start hitting sell really quick. And so it's like this thing where you take a little bit of the pressure off because you've raised a ton of money, But, you know, now you've got all this pressure of doing all this right in front of the public eye.

37:48Like SpaceX probably would not. SpaceX is still private today, partly for some of this reason. It's like, you know, the math and the rationality on some of these businesses doesn't really check out. You know, to continue with our Wild West theme, there's kind of a cowboy feel to a lot of this, which was surprising to me. because I would imagine that the rocket scientists are kind of buttoned up, I quote people sitting behind computers. But you talk about as people without college degrees that are pushing this forward. Of course, Elon Musk is an interesting character himself. And the launch sites are just kind of - Amazing.

38:27They're wild, like deep inside India or on islands in the Pacific. So I'm kind of curious why you think, this very important business has taken on this kind of renegade feel? Well, I think in some ways it's normal. I mean, this is another, you were asking at the beginning, why not the billionaires? I mean, this is kind of why I wanted to write the book. Is that every space story anyone listening to this has ever seen on TV or read in a book is like, our best and bravest pilots are the ones we're going to send up. and like, oh God, something's going wrong on Apollo 13. Like we have to use their courage combined with like the genius of these lab-coded MIT engineers to figure this out.

39:16And the point here is like, this is not what commercial space looks like at all anymore. It is like welders from Texas and people who worked on like racing teams and people from the military. And like there's dropouts all over the place. I mean, it's similar to kind of like any tech business that combines hardware and software, but just with these like sort of added explosions and bizarre locations. But that's what this just this is just the point is like whatever image people have of space in their head is like not what exists anymore. Yeah. So just trying to put a exclamation point in this discussion.

40:00let's just focus a little bit more on the implications for heavens and earth. So let's start with earth. I mean, one of the things that runs through your book and has run through this conversation is this theme that, oh my goodness, building an ICBM is something that's becoming way more accessible. Aren't you kind of worried about like what's going to happen to all of us if this is so? So, I mean, you mentioned North Korea more than once in under 40 minutes. So that, to me, sounds pretty concerning. You know, there's this law called ITAR in the U.S. It governs the export of prized technology, especially in the defense and military realm, and it governs all the space stuff.

40:53And yeah, I think it's largely pointless now. You know, like Peter Beck, the guy in New Zealand, he hopped on NASA's website and like made his own propellants in a shed by his apartment and learned how to do all of this like off the internet. I mean, you still have to, okay, you know, you still have to be pretty frigging smart and have a bit of money, but not that much, surprisingly. And so, yeah, it's scary. You know, the scarier part obviously is there's a lot of room in space, but the odds of a collision when you go from 2 ,500 satellites to like 100 ,000 obviously increases dramatically. and there's a thing called the Kessler effect, which is if one of these things runs into another one and you create this field of debris, it's sort of like a cascading exponential disaster.

41:49Which I mean, we could end up seeing that. Like we could end up having this huge space junk proliferate and make it impossible to get stuff into orbit. Like absolutely. And not only impossible to get stuff into orbit, But, you know, we take things like GPS for granted, but GPS is like the fabric of your cell phone in modern life. And that would be over. That all happens in space. You know, so there are governments that are tracking this stuff. But the leading company tracking everything in space is called Leo Labs, which is a very cool and awesome company. But people should know that it's like a 50-person outfit.

42:30it, you know, that's a startup that's kind of like in charge of this at the moment. So like interesting times. Yeah. I don't know how all this plays out, but it is, it is that's sort of the point of why I wanted to write this now. Yeah. Cause I don't think, I don't think the average person on the street has any idea that this is happening. Yeah. So, okay. We covered heavens and earth in one question, which is good. So that's good. So that saves me, save some time. but no i i want to ask you also um well can you give us something optimistic i mean i know i've like spent a lot of time about this concerning but like holy crap like the human rate human civilization is um starting to be able to harness the harness space and in a way that we haven't before and enabling amazing capabilities and you know i don't want to get too too down on it Even though there's real risks, this is amazing in many ways.

43:27It's pretty exciting. When we talk about planets and what they can do, it's almost like having a Google search engine for Earth above us. And they can literally count every tree on the planet. They can tell using AI software what kind of tree, how much biomass it has, how much carbon dioxide it sucks down. We can put numbers behind this stuff. I think when we think about climate change, this technology is going to be key, not just to understanding what's going on, but if you're talking about any kind of carbon credit program or taxing a business for how much methane is coming out of their oil fields, this is the only way we can actually count this and put numbers behind it.

44:14And we're like, we are doing that now and on the cusp of this sort of exploding. And the space internet thing is fascinating. Like the downside is that you'll never escape your internet connection again, no matter what high mountain you climb. But, you know, half the world's population cannot access fiber optic cables and high speed internet. And they can because of this space internet. And, you know, it's like obvious that once you plug in to the modern economy, your opportunities just increase so dramatically. And so, you know, this puts people on a much more level playing field. Yeah, let's just one follow up about the space internet.

45:01How far away are we from that being readily accessible to the whole world and affordable? It's pretty, it's close in some ways now. I mean, you can hop on and order Starlink or you can hop on and order OneWeb, which is just a bit less consumer facing. And, you know, I think Starlink costs something like$90 a month or$60, and it's a few hundred dollars for the terminal. The limit on that is they're like a fraction of the way to putting all the satellites they need up. And so it's regional depending where you live. But within the next, call it three to five years, there should be at least two rival systems that people could tap into.

45:44But already, Starlink is surprisingly widespread. I have it at my parents' house in Mexico. Okay, cool. All right, so we have 10 minutes left. I'm not going to let you go without making you answer some questions about Elon. um you wrote the book elon musk what is your take on the state of elon right now you know i find it all pretty funny man i mean i've had a like a real up and down relationship with elon over these many years some little ptsd along the way um i think it's funny maybe as somebody who's like kind of studied him i guess for lack of a better term. The world seems, in my impression, to have chalked him up to this binary proposition.

46:31You're either for Elon or against him. Obviously, he brings an incredible amount of this on himself through the things he says and does on Twitter in particular. But after a period when he would not talk to me at all for years, we talk a lot more now, and I've seen him in person. And he's, he's, I just think he's like so much more nuanced and complicated and interesting than like most people give him credit for. And I generally think he's like sort of, I mean, he's pretty upfront that he's like a troll, but I think, I think a lot more than people expect is him just sort of trolling the world and, and having, you know, sort of sport about all of this.

47:13Like when you talk to him in person, he's actually, I wouldn't say he's like down to earth. He's Elon Musk, but he's, he's like really easy to talk to. He's interesting. And yeah, anyway, I just think he's a much more nuanced character than the rest of the world seems to see. Right. And yeah, I mean, there were like nuances in the tagline and I have to say like, I'm a little conflicted about him. I don't think he's done a good job with Twitter, but I'm glad that SpaceX exists and glad, well, glad that Tesla exists. So So if SpaceX and Tesla were to go away tomorrow, you cannot question that he changed the world.

47:52I mean, electric cars would still be a reality. Commercial space would be a reality. The US, which had this dwindling, depressing, sad space program, would still be at the forefront of space. So the band did a lot in 20 years. I think the Twitter stuff is like he clearly – he's never really been a guy that is like super savvy about reading consumer tastes and sort of like human, you know, wants and needs. I mean, that was like – this is like this kind of Steve Jobs thing, you know. This is not Elon's specialty, and I think he's getting like horrendous advice on how to run it. But the dude is relentless and he's persistent.

48:41And who knows where it actually ends up when all is said and done. Yeah. You think there's a chance that it's going to end up well? It's not looking great at the moment, but I know he will not give up. It's kind of funny, you know, like in every other thing. I mean, like Tesla and SpaceX were like days from dying. Like he's kind of been through. Yes. He's been through this before. So I don't think it's like really that horrifying to him and the prospect that this could just, he'd lose$42 billion and this would go away. But, you know, he also, if, if the lights are like still on, he will be there trying to fix it.

49:21And so I don't know, man, somebody has got to kind of think of something, you know, it was always like a flawed business to begin with. I mean, somebody's got to think of like a new idea with this thing that makes it bigger and more useful than it has been. historically. It was not a well-run company before. No, I do think that he's doing one thing useful, which is proving that it's probably not wise to run your business on the advice of podcasters. And I say this as a podcaster myself, but my advice to him, which would be like circusous because I am a podcaster, but maybe turn off the all in podcast and start speaking to people in the advertising world and consumer tech world, that might help.

50:02Like I know David Sachs and I, I don't know if we're friends, but we're friendly and I respect him. I, he, when I see him tweet some stuff, like I, he like does not seem to understand why most people use Twitter. No, don't get me wrong. I enjoy listening to the show. I think the ideas are fun to think about, but I wouldn't put them into action inside a company. Like, you know, he was saying something about journalists should, they should be so happy. the organizations would pay for their Twitter is like, you know, from day one, it was the journalists were like, Oh, I'm free from the brand that I work for.

50:35And this is like my, my little fiefdom, you know? Yeah. When you speak with Elon, what do you talk about? I've been going, I spent most of my time actually at Neuralink, which is his brain computer interface company. And it's an area I've been into for years and years and years. So we spent a lot of time talking about monkeys with chips in their head at the moment. But yeah, I'm curious, what is going on there? Well, I would love to tell you everything. I got a big story coming, so I will be a little reserved. I would say people, something like equally fascinating has happened in that space, which is this thing that was a very academic pursuit for like 20 or 30 years, almost like just because Elon showed up and put a bunch of money into it has become like Silicon Valley again, for better or worse, is now going after our brains.

51:31But there's like 20 or 30 brain-computer interface startups now. And I would say Neuralink is the most – some of them are certainly farther along with human trials of bits and pieces. but Neuralink is the most ambitious. And if it works, has the most advanced technology by about like a hundred to a thousand X. It's just, can we get it into a human safely anytime soon? Could you see yourself within five years putting a chip, one of those chips, attaching it to your brain? No. And I want to give people the right perspective. I mean, the coolest thing about this, and I just went to Switzerland for my TV show, Hello World, and saw paralyzed people walking again thanks to a spinal implant is that people should get their heads sorted in the right space.

52:19You know, the obvious beneficiaries of this technology will be people who've suffered from like horrendous diseases where they can't talk, they can't move and they will be able to talk and move again. And I do think that will happen within the next five to 10 years. I will not be signing off for like the general purpose Neuralink chip anytime soon at all. And I also don't think that'll be available. Within your lifetime? Whoa, that's a good question. I think that the technology will be there and it might be safe, but we still don't even know if it's possible to send information from a computer into your brain.

53:07We know you can read stuff out and you can like command a computer with your thoughts. We don't know about like the going in and at all what that would look like. Like, like brain research hasn't got that far. So, um, so it's like, it's like, what does it even mean if we can do this? I don't think that's clear yet. Yeah. Okay. One more Elon question for you. SpaceX does do a lot of business with the government. Um, curious, I guess I think about it like a lot from like the twitter perspective right like it does seem like elon actually let me let me put it this way two questions one elon is is doing all you know all this work with the government um he's become way more political recently is that a risk for him and then two like tesla depends on china and i'm curious how you think that will like sort of influence his operation of twitter sorry i know are we we're going over do you have five more minutes or i'm I'm here for it, man.

54:02This is fun. Okay, cool, cool. You know, I think it's more of a risk. There was a time when Elon was dependent on the U.S. government to sort of help fill some gaps with SpaceX. Now the tables have turned on that one. You know, I think the U.S. government is completely dependent on Elon when it comes to SpaceX. We have no other – we've got no other way to get humans to the ISS. They send up the bulk of our military assets in the space. There are a couple other rockets that are incredibly expensive. I know people dig on SpaceX getting what they call subsidies from NASA or other parts of the government.

54:46SpaceX is the biggest saver of taxpayer money you can imagine when it comes to space. So anyway, I think Elon's actually – I think the stuff that happened in Ukraine with Starlink was probably horrifying. for the US government to realize that they are at the whims of a person they do not control and who does not have a deep track record of predictable decision-making. Yeah, exactly. To put it lightly. I think there were probably some very interesting conversations that happened during that period. The Tesla question, man, I mean, that one, it's like, what can you say? I mean, Tesla has a huge business in China.

55:29I noticed Elon doesn't tweet a lot about China, you know, or jump on any anti-China big wagons. In the beginning, the people who are associated with like Chinese state media were tweeting at Elon, take off my label. And I don't know if you saw this. No, I didn't. He put the label on NPR and NPR complained. He took the label off of NPR and the China state media. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, that one's tricky and I'm sure that probably raises some more like, like Elon's a nation state. You like, think about Tesla even for a second, you know, beyond the cars, think about like the charging network.

56:10I mean, that is like real infrastructure that nobody else has anything close to. And it's like this global, you know, he's, he's like done things on this scale that, that only nations did in the past. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. interesting well i'm not i'm kind of curious now because you're a journalist that he speaks with why do you think he hates journalists so much maybe that's an unfair blanket statement but there's many that yeah maybe not all right go ahead he seems to say that yeah yeah you know he just he's he's always had elon's kind of got his version of the truth um you know it's it's it's kind of changed over the years i mean i think in the early days when i started covering him somebody would write something and he would disagree with it and he's got this like very literal kind of brain you know and and to him it was like this this like deep um affront against that which is like true and right and like integrity um even though like probably reasonable people could sort of, you could make a case for either side.

57:24As time has gone on, it's just really clear. It just is sort of, I think he's said as much. It gets to him. And he's due to the things he says on Twitter. He's become way more polarizing than he used to be. And so he gets dragged through the press in ways he used to not. I mean, it used to be like, oh, this Tesla car doesn't do this or that. the mileage isn't what you said it was. A totally different ballgame. Yeah. And I don't think this plays to his strengths. And then I think he realized, you could see, he used to be a moderate Twitter user. And then somewhere roughly around 2017, 2018, obviously, he just shifted.

58:11And it was like, oh, I don't have to talk to the media anymore. I can just talk through this thing. And then he was kind of like, oh, well, I'm going to talk to the Tesla fan club to put out news instead of the New York Times Tesla journalist because why would I not do that? And so we've been on this path. And it's pretty interesting. It's funny to me because he did that BBC interview. You know, he grew up in South Africa and he, he still has these little, like this like soft spot for like British media. Oh my God, that BBC interview. It would have been nice if the BBC prepared for that interview.

58:52That, that gentleman was not, he was not up to the task at hand. Yeah, that was painful. Yes. So I don't know, man, he's got a weird relationship with journos. Like I said, we had a real up and down sort of thing. And it's just, you know, I think it's not unusual probably. If you think back to Steve Jobs, he had his little handpicked reporters and hated everybody else. It's just that Elon is the first richest person in the world, business titan, to just have his life play out on Twitter. We've never seen anyone do this before. So you just know everything he's thinking. Well, yeah, it's his own doing.

59:38You mentioned that you had a falling out with him. You know, I guess like I'm pretty curious, like when in your position, right? Like, I guess like being able to speak with Elon is amazing because you have insight into all like four, really four or five really important businesses. And, you know, I feel like the biggest tech story of the year is always an Elon story. At least it has been recently. And then like, so I'm curious, like, how do you balance like the, the sort of need to stay in touch with him, but also like, you know, the understanding that if you write something that he's not going to like, he might ice you out.

1:00:12Like, I know you, you know, I'm sure it's not like, oh God, I have to compromise the truth here, but like, it is this sort of balance beam that you have to walk. Right. Yeah. Some of it was solved for me because after the book, I was just so tired of thinking about him. It's weird when you do a biography. You start to – Right. It's like you just – things I didn't know before I did a biography, you just get way too into this person's life to the point where you're dreaming about them. Give me a break. Yeah. You just have to think about them all the time. And then he was threatening legal action against me and things like that.

1:00:48So I was kind of like, okay, I'll just, I'll put that Elon stuff down for a while. That's okay. And then, and then I really stayed away for a long time. And then like in that interim period, Bloomberg, like many other publications seem to like develop, you know, five Elon Musk reporters who were either like doing SpaceX or Tesla or just Elon himself. And, and I was like, oh, okay. He does command an army. Yeah, this is like quite the crowded field now. I don't know. And so I would write kind of essays and I would say what I wanted. I mean, he didn't talk to me for a lot of that period. And then for a couple of the latter ones he did.

1:01:30Then I was still, anyway, Neuralink is like kind of the first thing that I really had like that same fresh enthusiasm for and wanted to dig into. It's just like I felt like I had done so much SpaceX and Tesla stuff and was doing the new book. And so, I don't know. I got my first big Neuralink piece coming here soon. We'll see what happens. You did the Bloomberg cover and the headline was, not Elon's rocket. Oh, that's about Peter Beck. Yeah, yeah. And Rocket Lab. And well, he hasn't berated me for that. I'm sure by the time this comes out, there'll be some tweets. So looking forward to reading.

1:02:13Okay. Last question for you. You spent, you know, years looking at space. Are you going to go? I mean, and do you have a desire? I actually do. I kind of. I bet, I bet that depending how the Neuralink story comes out, Elon will send you. That was always, that's always what I always like. I imagine he was just going to hover a Falcon 9 over my house. It's just like the stuff that's existed so far with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic where you do this six minutes barely on the edge of space is not really what I would want to do. And I was hoping to use my connections as a well-sourced space reporter to be the first journalist out there.

1:03:01I would love to do like, oh, you know, SpaceX looks like they're going to do a thing where you can do two laps around the moon as part of this like multi-day sort of mission. I don't think I could afford that. But if I could go, you know, as a messenger for the good people of Earth, I would actually do that. SpaceX has flown a lot of rockets successfully. I actually would feel pretty confident on that one. The book is titled When the Heavens Went on Sale. You can pick it up today. Ashley Vance, thanks so much for joining. This was super fun. Thank you. I really had fun. Thanks. I appreciate it.

1:03:36Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nate Guatney, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. We will be back on Friday with an interview. Well, recapping the week's news with myself and Ranjan Raya, as always. And Ben Smith, author of Traffic. He's been doing the circuit, but we'll have some fresh stuff for you. So we hope to see you there. All right. That'll do it for us here. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcasts.

1:04:05We'll see you next week. And now I have no idea where people are going. Like a episode ofилиcral�.com.