SpaceX

“So to start, think about this, to start a new electric car company... Simultaneously to start the first new private rocketry company in the United States in probably 40 years... And then to go through the 2008 crash... And have both come out the other side, li…”

“We ended up investing in SpaceX as Founders Fund in oh eight, sort of six years into the process, and people thought we were crazy to invest six years after they'd gotten started.”

“Both Tesla and SpaceX were stories that involved complex coordination, where you needed to get a lot of different pieces to fit together in just the right way. And so if you ask, you know, what was the real breakthrough with Tesla, or the real breakthrough wit…”

“We actually have heard from people that places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, I think, stocks the food for the ISS.”

“This is exactly what Elon Musk did with SpaceX. He didn't recruit his team by saying, let's go to Mars. He said, let's see if we can get a rocket into orbit, and then back.”

“They have not yet discovered an upper limit on how many launches they can do with the same rocket.”

“You don't need a hardware or manufacturing background to come into a business like Hadrian or SpaceX or Anduril to be able to, you know, be a competitive candidate or create value, you know, with your software skills.”

“And I think we're probably the only factory on the planet outside of SpaceX that is giving everyone in these roles, you know, the same tier of equity as the best software engineers have, you know every technician in Hadrian, whether you're packing boxes or whe…”

“And if you look at the last 30 years that preceded Andrel, there were only two unicorns doing business with the DoD, Palantir and SpaceX that were able to become unicorns.”

“They were very wary of companies that had to go through the long procurement cycle to work with government, and so there was sort of this meme in Silicon Valley that you can't build a big government business, and if we've seen anything over the last 10 years t…”

“We're seeing people from a lot of the other American dynamism companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Andrel, they're taking their learnings and experiences and bringing them over to the ocean.”

“Arc boats has done a great job of encapsulating what the future of maritime looks like in that, you know, from a process and team perspective, Mitch and Ryan delivered the Tesla and SpaceX vision and mission to maritime. They're not just creating Consumer boat…”

“There's definitely a spectrum, and I would frankly really credit Elon Musk, both from the SpaceX and Tesla perspective, with a lot for really training up engineers that have fluency in hardware and software.”

“I think SpaceX had a third the amount of money that Boeing was given to make Starliner work.”

“If you look at the top 100 venture backed companies that are doing business with the Department of Defense, and you take SpaceX and Palantir, put it aside, so now the top 98 that's ten billion dollars a year of business going to those 98. That's only one aircr…”

“I think it's, it helps to go to somewhere and see what right looks like. For me, personally, you know, especially at Android, Palantir, you know, I could go to SpaceX, You know, and then Tesla, just some companies that are producing these founders. I think it …”

“Three years ago for very young talent or software engineers, it was like convincing them that manufacturing or national security was incredibly important. And now I think if you're starting a startup, I think if you're a software engineer, actually most of wha…”

“SpaceX, like Starlink is like, uses it to move money from one country to another”

“Yeah, I believe they were using Bridge, which Stripe now acquired.”

“And stable coins are actually, like, apparently companies like SpaceX are already using Stablecoins for treasury management to move money from one country to another in a way that's much more efficient than using the.”

“SpaceX's network, NASA's state. Uber is the network. Taxi medallions are the state. Bitcoin is the network. The Fed is the state and so on and so forth, right?”

“We do not have enough ground stations to get data back to Earth as quickly as we need to. And given that low Earth orbit has just been, I would say, you know, saturated by payloads in the last several years, particularly because the cost of launch has come dow…”

“I do think that the legacy of SpaceX, yes, everything they've built and done is important, but the manufacturing processes that people have learned at SpaceX is going to be carrying America forward for generations. When you think how tens of thousands of peopl…”

“SpaceX and Palantir walked so that everyone else could run, and I, it's maybe unfair to say that they walked, but both of them had to sue the government.”

“In many ways, they're vertically integrating by necessity, not strategy. There just isn't an ecosystem of companies that can scale with them.”

“There, I think the overwhelming population of folks that are doing so much of the critical work on Starship, Dragon, Falcon even are intern conversions.”

“The, like the key part of the hiring process at, you know, Tesla at least, and I'm sure it's SpaceX is the like technical evaluation, it goes quite deep. And so there, you know, you're going to talk to six engineers. If you're applying for an engineering role,…”

“The reality is, is in, in, in my case, there's so much talent that's living at SpaceX. There's so much talent living in Rock Lab, Firefly, and Relativity that need to come work this problem set too.”

“Question every requirement, because what that does is it enables your requirements set whenever, you know, an engineer steps in to go actually design the hardware to be, you know, enabled to design a very simple solution and simple as fast, simple as cheap.”

“A lot of this comes back to the, to how mission aligned the company is, or how strong the mission of the company is. It's, it doesn't feel like working if it's fun. And particularly for folks who are so aligned with the mission of the company obviously in Spac…”

“With my background being purely in liquid propulsion across SpaceX, and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets, there's a very real way to apply this technology to the missile system, and we're gonna go do it.”

“Booster was a little bit ahead of ship, the ship team in terms of their V three design. They kind of skipped V two for Booster. They went from V one to V three.”

“Now, both SpaceX and Blue had to do uncrewed tests of their vehicle. It was already part of the plan. So they were planning to launch these you know, these spacecraft in in twenty-twenty-seven.”

“If somebody can't come out of somebody who's building a car for Ford or General Motors or an airplane at Boeing or a rocket ship for SpaceX, And we can't get them highly effective building ships quickly. That's our fault. That means our design isn't simple eno…”

“And so I looked into solar power on Mars and found that was really challenging, and then I looked into nuclear power on Mars and found that was the only way.”

“Like, listen, we're gonna create a whole generation of, you know, founders that come from these new companies that will know how to do this, and, you know, they'll be hired in much more junior. Like, I would say, actually, one of the greatest legacies of Elon …”

“Elon said that he and Jensen have co-designed a Reuben rack. And there, it's gonna launch in the fourth quarter of 27.”

“And then SpaceX, because they build these really big clusters, and I think a really important point is they bring them on fast. They have an even faster payback, and they can monetize it, you know, higher”

“What you have to compare it to is the cost of launch, and with Starship reusability, that goes to under a billion, so the economics just instantly flip.”