so so dragon spacex com track ground stitches we got to see iss out the window which was pretty neat the largest window ever flown in spain we have liftoff gwen welcome to stanford thank you very much i'm really excited to be here actually i love
this school um i've been looking forward to this interview for a very long time as i know have many of my classmates a bit of a space nerd i as a kid would read all the space books over the 60s apollo 14 was my favorite movie i think still is my favorite movie
clean crayons the mythical flight director was a childhood hero so it's really great to have you to me space has always been about the next frontier and testing the limits of what is possible and today nobody embodies that better than spacex and your story so with that let's get started
one of the defining characteristics of spacex uh is is risk-taking but the same can be said about you joining the company 20 years ago this year after stable career in aerospace what led you to join spacex and take that risk at that time well first of all i want to start out by
saying thank goodness i took that risk because i almost didn't in fact and when elon asked me to be president in 2008 i almost didn't say yes what a mistake that would have been um yeah so i was in the aerospace industry i started i started my engineering career when was it
in 86 went to chrysler motors went back to school because i was unsatisfied with the level of technology that i was working on there um went back to university thought i'd get my phd wacky so that i can't be in school again i'm gonna go back to work and so i went to aerospace and i
think i started in 88. interestingly i started on halloween in 1988 at the aerospace corporation and my boss um wasn't there when i started but came back a week later he was on vacation and he said something about flying in on my broom in 1988 which you can't say now but he could say it
then so the world is changing even if we feel like it's too slow um yeah so okay so started my career in 88 um in the aerospace industry and thought had been there for roughly 15 years roughly
and i thought look it's it wasn't a an industry that was vibrant it wasn't innovative we weren't moving quickly we hadn't gotten back to the moon and i thought you know this is my last job in the aerospace industry working for elon if we can't do it at spacex then i'd rather sell real estate
or be a barista or you know something else i did i wouldn't i didn't want to work in the industry and so um i knew this would be my last job in the aerospace industry and it will turn out to be the
case so that's super cool all right about risk yeah you guys are about risk and i'm blabbing around sorry okay um so it seemed risky actually i had a very stable job i owned three percent share of the company that i was working for which is large for um for for for a for an employee
and uh it was a pretty safe job so this was not a safe job and i didn't know elon well at all in fact at that time um but i i really kind of jumped off the cliff i was dithering around he said he wanted me to join the company and i said oh you know i'm fine i don't need a job and
kind of dithered for about a month and finally like i'm such an idiot i was driving on the freeway in l.a like what an idiot say yes so i called him on the phone and i said bleep an idiot
and he laughed and he said welcome to the team so you got sold on the idea right yeah had a lot of confidence if you thought it was going to be your last job um last job on the industry fair enough um but your first job was vice president of business development so now you had
to sell that idea to customers yes and spacex was little more than a pipe dream at the time right you were many years away from launch what was that selling process like you know it's interesting when you when you don't have a product we had an ideal to sell
and it came at probably the best possible time um you know we had the events of 911 and rapid launch low cost access to space be it was obvious that it was going to be very critical and so it was great engineers i am not going to take away in fact spacex is
the great company and does the great things that we do because of our extraordinary staff it's not because me it's not because of elon and and so i was selling the team i was selling the ideal i was selling the promise and the hope of reason reasonably priced launch i
i still don't think launch is reasonably priced but if you go by comparison it's much less than it was before we're getting there yeah so let's talk about launch and about the first rocket right
um the first rocket was called the falcon one uh you had three unsuccessful launches it was 2008 the company was running out of money it was the financial crisis you were promoted to present ceo because of promises you had made customers at this point so you'd already been promoted
and the company bet the entire company in this one launch on the fourth launch of the falcon one so let's watch that launch five four three two one zero print stage one liftoff indication one launch vehicle falcon has cleared the tower
plus 12. curious thank goodness right so uh it's a life or death moment for the company right um is a little more dramatic about that launch than i am actually i figured we could pull a fifth launch off but that was it right yeah i thought we could get to five he thought four was it
i'm glad we didn't have to test who was right on that one but uh yeah it was quite a relief and what were the moms leading up to it like what was the well this is a really this is i think it's a hilarious story i was in scotland glasgow the iac was having a show in glasgow so i was in scotland
to apologize discuss explain to the customers that were on the third falcon one launch that we failed kind of basically do a paper about that launch and it was the night before my talk i was in the hotel room with my husband and this is not gonna get inappropriate um my husband was sleeping
i'm in the bathroom with the shower on typing up a proposal for the 1.6 billion dollar con nasa resupply to the international space station we're literally writing the proposal i'm on the phone
with my team back in the us because we had to update our pricing and so i had the shower running so that my you know poor husband could sleep i'm like punching away talking and then it's like oh shoot we're we're about ready to launch right and so i turned away from my proposal on my laptop to
to the launch and uh was watching it as we lift it off i ran out to the hotel room and i didn't care if i woke him up at this point at this stage we lifted off and we were climbing in altitude and
um and we watched us get to orbit and then in my like yoga pants and jammy top ran down the hall that's probably the most inappropriate thing i'm going to say here today but ran down the hall knocked on all the doors from my team that was there and we
hugged and kissed and cried and then kind of broke into the bar in the hotel because it was like two in the morning and they they they let us have the champagne but it was warm but it was it was extraordinary it was extraordinary i've always loved how emotional a business this is right yeah
these are just incredible emotional moments right in fact by the way to future entrepreneurs i think it's really important to have these big moments figure out what the big moments where you can bring your teams together it cures a lot of ills it really helps with morale and
it's incredible for team building so launches are easy it's an easy spectacle to do that with but i think it's really important to find those kinds of moments in the development for your future businesses so let's actually move forward a few years your first big kind of commercial
product was the falcon 9. it was designed in part of nasa's needs in mind to replace the internet the space shuttle to go to the national space station you had done a number of launches already including seven resupply missions to the international space station with nasa right
and the eighth one was also supposed to take critical food supplies medical equipment international space station but that one didn't go as well let's watch that video that's this is two minutes into flight daddy coming back show us vehicle on course on track
poof yeah you had made it seem routine almost at this point right um and then this happens you're in crisis management mode what's the first thing you do yeah so i was actually at my ranch in texas on this launch it was the first launch that uh i was not um that therefore yeah
um by the way it was also the first and only launch that i didn't do my pre-launch um little routine which we could chat about later but because i was in my slippers and uh so um i think the most important thing when you suffer something like that is you focus everybody on the
job the task at hand right we had failure in front of us on elon's birthday by the way that was his birthday um which is why we don't like to launch on his birthday it just feels like bad karma actually um so uh you get to work i had to do a press conference doing it remotely of course
um and we started digging through data of course we obviously i've i flew back to hawthorne and pulled teams together and we figured it out was it was a weird one that one and then so this was in
on june 28 2015 and then we suffered another failure was not a launch failure on september 1st 2016 not a little over a year later right um and we basically blew up a satellite that was sitting on the pad as we were going through a pre-launch test so two failures not back to back
we had had an extraordinary success in december of 2015 and we can come back to that as well but this is a this is a point that i try to make with students for sure so i think after the
crs-7 that first failure that failure that you saw there i i felt very comfortable leading the team through the investigation leading the team through the physics and getting to the answer the business wasn't really at risk i mean failures are incredibly impactful i think
every failure we've had has either cost us or delayed us about half a billion dollars but i felt like i did a pretty good job in that time frame i did not do a good job after the failure uh when we blew up on the pet i was much more worried about the business this particular
event um was much harder to figure out what it was and i i definitely showed my not despair that's probably too much but my concern i definitely wore it on my sleeve or as my husband says i have a billboard on my forehead and i i wore that badly in fact so my lesson there is you
know you certainly don't want to be disingenuous with your team and with your customers but it's not really helpful to show your anxiety when you know when you're suffering because your employees are suffering worse than you are so it's really better to keep people focused on the business
keep focused on doing great things and they had demonstrated that they could do great work until then too so um yeah so that's a nice little nugget yeah thanks for sharing that so one of the things
in particular for this first failure that i find incredible is you had six months without launches which i'm sure you had a bunch scheduled that were delayed right but six months later you're launching a rocket again uh but instead of simply focusing on getting that rocket and the
customer's payload up into space successfully you take a huge risk as well and try to land the booster right do you have that video and i have that video and i know it's your favorite yes the crown goes wild
it was a mosh pit out there was so fun why was this so exciting okay so what's key about that is the last launch or the launch just prior to that one we failed you know and it's disappointing for the employees it's disappointing for the company but we failed our customer
this launch so we stood down we discovered what the problem was we redesigned the rocket to be able to land because the previous rockets really couldn't land in that way so we complete we did a complete upgrade on the system while figuring out what we did to fail
and then like in complete view of the public you go out there and you show are you are you meant for greatness or you need to go back to the drawing board a little bit so that was a great a great day it was a great night we had a lot of champagne at my house that night probably more
than i've ever drank ever i did not feel great the next day but i did go to work i went to work um yeah so that was an extraordinary moment for the company just share with us a little bit why it's
so important to the whole business model yeah sorry um well first of all no one had ever landed a rocket before right that was the start and the key piece of the technology necessary to reuse rockets so some i know there are some space nerds out there but there are many of you that are not
by the way if you are a space nerd you should wear that proudly i certainly do um but rockets before spacex and to some extent the shuttle did it but but there was there's no fully reusable launch system rockets launch and then they either disintegrate in the
atmosphere the second stage does or they just get dumped into the ocean right now and so imagine what air travel would be like if you took an airplane from san francisco to new york and you had to toss the aircraft after that flight like life and society in the
world would be so different if you couldn't reuse your aircraft and so we take that same approach with space travel that you have to be able to reuse your rockets in order to facilitate human access to space which i think is incredibly important so that was the start and we had
tried many times before um we tried parachutes but they rip off in this as speeding through the atmosphere so that was just an extraordinary piece of technology guidance navigation and control you
know hyper retroactive propulsion crazy hypersonic retroactive propulsion was just amazing so that was great and it started our ability to refly rockets we didn't refly that one that one is sitting outside the front of our building in hawthorne california
you can drive by it and see it in fact it's kind of a neat monument but we have i don't want to say perfected because we have not perfected but we have operationalized the ability to land rockets refurbish them and re-fly them our goal is to be able to do that like an airplane like
i was saying in the back room you know they said something someone asked something about you know rocket efficiency and we're not very efficient we we actually aspire to be as efficient as the
airline industry and that's probably horrifying to many of you in the audience because you probably don't think the airline industry is particularly efficient but it's way better than we are um so it's still a nice model to use right yeah so after this in 2015 this really became routine
spacex was launching dozens and dozens of trips up into space every year um in may 2020 the beginning of the pandemic you took another huge leap and it involved humans right you launched two astronauts to the national space station the first astronauts to launch on a private vehicle and the first to
do so from american soil on any vehicle in nine years right we were doing it with the russians um how did you carry that responsibility and how do you prepare the team for it so first of all keep your head high don't show your anxiety but i honestly hate crew launch days
i just don't like them uh it's nerve-racking it's one thing to you know to have a have a failure when you've got a satellite even a billion dollar three billion dollar satellite on top you can't put a price tag on the two to four people that are sitting on top of that rocket and it's hurtling
through the atmosphere so it's quite anxiety producing um it's always a huge relief to get get dragged into orbit get dragged into the international space station and then say okay nasa they're yours now until we have to bring them back downhill
six months later um so keep people focused on the work for sure don't let them show your ex you know don't let them see my anxiety even though i've talked about this enough they all know i'm like
scared to death during launch days on this follow your routine be keenly aware make sure you've got employees that feel very comfortable talking about hey i might have screwed this up can we go back and look at the data and make sure that i didn't screw this up on the rocket or the spaceship so
um yeah keep them focused on the business don't show how nervous you are and pray so even this has become routine now i think you've launched four trips to the national space station something like that so we did bob and doug and then we just flew crs4
and then we also flew axiom yeah and then we did jared and his team that's true okay so so seven so let's talk about the future then because you know um and let's talk about starship which is the
big bet you have as a future or this rocket was previously called the big falcon rocket bfr bfr um who who chose to rename it well elon named it the first time and elon named it the second time got it um there was one in between two its i think interstellar
or something yeah yeah exactly yeah um starship is better what's so different about this bet and what does it mean for humanity so the difference here for those of you that are not space geeks this first stage goes up delivers the second stage to carry on its way to orbit comes back so we
reuse the first stage but the second stage is now reusable it goes to orbit it drops off the payload takes people around the moon takes people to mars whatever it is and then it comes back and lands our second stage right now is not reusable on the falcon program our third stage if you look
at a dragon is reusable not very operationally right it lands in the ocean get helicopters and ships to go get it out of the water take it back clean off the salt water refurbish it and refly it but a dragon takes currently like 90 days we're trying to get it down to 45 and then even
faster but that's not very operationally efficient starship is meant to launch land on the pad on the pad the arms come and pick up another another starship pick it up put it back on the pad and launch within an hour so like an airplane that's the plan
and it's supposed to take us either to shanghai or to mars right yeah right hopefully some version of this would take us to another star system right which would be so great um so i want to talk about the development of this because there's something remarkable about
that as you mentioned it's supposed to be fully reusable i saw many estimates online but each one of these costs somewhere around 200 million to build that might be a wild guess um but your product development strategy seems to be to blow one of these up every few months
right so let's take a look at starship number nine we're prepared by preparing to restart two engines flip the vehicle vertical then transition to one engine for the landing burn so that seems expensive and completely different to how traditional rocket technology where it's
like they make the whole rocket as perfectly as possible they wind test it and they say once it's perfect we try to you know flight test it these are prototypes that you just keep going
um what's behind that way of thinking about rocket technology so and this isn't very well understood publicly i'm a little surprised we don't talk more about it we are much more focused for the starship program on production building the system that will build the system
than we are on the rocket technology itself i didn't touch anything no you did all right i break hardware by walking by so this makes me nervous um so we know how to get rockets to orbit we know how to do that this is a completely different one but we we're
very confident in our ability to figure out how to do that we were much more focused on can we produce a rocket that can get to orb like really produce falcon we produce you know between seven and eleven falcon first stages per year we're producing a second stage every week right now
but what we want to be able to do is produce a rocket a day or come much closer to automotive because if you are going to take people to mars you're going to go in a flotilla or a swarm i don't even know yet right what the right term is yet for a group of starships to head to mars
you're going to need a bunch of them and producing five a year isn't going to get you there you really want to launch hundreds on that cyanotic period with mars when you're taking people there
um so we need to have a production system build rockets much like a production system to build cars maybe not quite so many i don't think we need a million a year but uh we need more than a couple hundred so it's all about the production system so we will get this to orbit
i'm not saying that it's easy because it's very different you'll see the way well not the orbital part but the the landing part is very different you know we belly flop to dissipate the heat and then come vertical right at the last second it's different from the way we're doing it on
falcon but we i mean we and we did it we stuck a landing bringing it back no it wasn't from orbit it was just from altitude it was not from orbit so you're trying to do really hard things and i want
to talk about what that a little bit right spacex has the most ambitious goals on the tightest of timelines and actually quick question what's our latest timeline on getting to mars getting to mars oh i think we'll put people down within a decade right so you're in charge of i know i'm crazy
you're in charge of executing on that goal to get human beings to mars within a decade right that's more elon than me but i'm here to help right but how do you balance those ambitious goals right which like maybe elon comes out and says and getting the team comfortable that is possible
so there's a couple of strategies to do that first of all you always aim high we have achieved everything we have wanted to never in the timeline we fail on timeline but that feels like the right fail to make as opposed to not achieving what you're trying to achieve technically um
so you demonstrate that you've been able to do these crazy insane absurdly ambitious things in the past you can continue you know pump people up to do it again and you try to pull apart these the seemingly impossible situation and how are we going to design and develop this and you pull it
into smaller pieces you build a prototype you test it you put prototypes you know subsystems together and you test that and you kind of use a building block approach to reach your goals and the team
they're very enthusiastic about it like it's the biggest of goals rockets are super cool yeah so you've been at spacex for over 20 years now this year yeah and now you lead a team basically 12 000 people um what have you learned about your leadership style
over the years what do you wish you knew now that and you knew then that you know now oh let me answer the other stuff first um i'm not a regretter so it's really hard for me to kind of go back and say oh i wish i did this thing um i'm a very collaborative
leader actually i've got some employees here you can tell me if i'm a bs artist here or not i like to get to solicit people's opinions but i'm not afraid to make a decision i need more data than elon does to make a decision in fact and i don't know whether that's experience
or or risk taking i don't know what it is but i like a little bit more data but i definitely like making decisions i like to hear the conversation until you're done and you have to make a decision and it's rare that you get people to agree on any topic
right so you collect the best data that you can you listen as hard as you can you ask questions you bring more data back and then you gotta go yeah um so a slightly different question your job is to run the business right sometimes things come up in the organization that are core to the
culture uh that are according to who you are as an organization um the sexual misconduct allegations against elon last week are just maybe one example of that i'm wondering how you think about those
moments those moments of truth and how you think about responding to different stakeholders so i think leaders in any business face adversity and really hard challenges and i what's most important is that you first of all you think hard about what happened what the response is going to
be and i think you just have to be really honest with yourself about what the right approach is i did send a letter i came out last night very exciting for this particular discussion here i did send a letter to employees they were screaming to hear from me
and i was advised to not send that letter not by legal but by my press team and i said you know what i first i have to speak to the people i have to speak to my employees they're you know the reason why spacex is what it is and i care deeply
about them but i knew i would no matter which way i played that someone was going to be unhappy with me but i i had to say it i have worked for elon for 20 years i don't believe he could have done what was what he was accused of but he is imperfect right he's imperfect i'm imperfect
and i thought being honest about that was the right approach regardless of what my team told me to write or not what was left out of that letter by the way is the end where i basically say we are spacex is who we are because of you and if you ever feel uncomfortable at work please call me
right so that part's always left off right um at any rate so you face adversity and i think the only way to get through it is to make sure you understand the situation to the greatest extent you can and then be honest with yourself and pick a path and and do it and don't be afraid
to say you made a mistake if you make a mistake right yeah i'm irish that's very irish by the way to admit you were dummy and i'm not admitting that in this case by the way i'm just saying one should be willing to do that speaking of mistakes i've heard that spacex has a culture of feedback that's
something we take very seriously here at the gsb as well we have a whole class where we learn how to give feedback feedback is a gift as a continuous motto of the school almost i'm wondering how spacex operationalizes that in the day-to-day
so critically important feed 360 feedback and immediate the sooner you get feedback the better off you are that's a golden nugget of data on how you are impacting your co-workers your company the
project so that feedback is so critical so give feedback as quickly as you can and we always try to tell people to do it our review system we require that you get reviewed 360 feedback from at least three you know sometimes in you know if you've got employees that have
you know that are really great in some areas and really not great in other areas you try to solicit more feedback to figure out what's going on in those areas and try to work with them to figure out how you can get people to this place where it's all contribution all the time
so so it's in our review system uh we talk about it at the first day of work please you know give feedback um but engineers and well you know it's not really human nature to be willing to look someone in the eye and say hey that was not helpful not super helpful could you do it this
way you know be objective try to not personalize it in almost every case and it feedback could be technical it doesn't have to be like hey you were a total jerk to me and i'm really mad about it
um but in almost every case the person at least in my experience person is not malinten not intending to do bad things they either made a mistake they were unaware um so i think approaching it as not part taking it not personal but just talk about how this situation impacted you or how this
person's work caused your work to not be great you couldn't finish your project or whatever it's just really important that's exactly what we we preached here as well yep um before we go to q a and i know that a lot of great questions in the audience two questions
again about the future first and you already made a reference to this what comes after mars yeah so um we are not working on a ship that yet has the propulsion technology to take us to other star
systems but i certainly hope that mars is that example that shows that humans can live beyond planet earth and that we will focus on propulsion technologies or some way of getting to a place that would otherwise take four thousand or five thousand years so i'm very excited about that it
will not happen in my lifetime but i hope that some of the work that we're doing will kick off the aspiration to go do that like the shows that you watch you know we we can't and they're always about war by the way star wars like what is that i don't
star trek is not necessarily about war but it's still military i don't know why it is that way but um hopefully we can go there in a civilian way and meet other sentient beings and that would be
great yeah that would be quite something so for uh for this for the second question i actually want to bring us back to earth to this auditorium because many of us are thinking about our very immediate futures i checked this morning i graduate in two and a half weeks as do many of
my classmates here you're our last view from the top speaker of the year you have the stage what advice would you have for us as we embark on the next chapter of our lives so it's a very simple statement and i'll follow it up with a couple of examples you want to take risks in your career
you absolutely want to take risks yeah maybe in your life too although you have to balance right you got to balance it um i almost said no to elon when he asked me to join spacex would have been so
i would look back i'm not a regretter that is the one thing that i would go back and regret i almost said no when elon asked me to be president because i really loved my job my colleagues my brother and sister vps were great compatriots and i thought it might be weird to
be the boss so i almost said no um and i'm so glad that i didn't but it felt like a risk to to to say yes there and then this is a more personal risk um so when i first met my current husband husband number two sorry um we had our first date and i thought he was roughly my age roughly my age
and then he said something about the gulf war and you know wanting to have been a pilot i was like go form like help and i were in the car and i looked over i'm like how old are you and he he was about eight years younger than me and i was like
not interested why would i go out with this infant no way and and luckily luckily i i didn't take that little voice in my head and i took the risk and dated a much younger man and happily married so it's not really silly but a little personal but
i almost said i am not going to date someone that's 8 years younger than me that is weird anyhow took the risk paid off what uh what a great note to end on so with that um yeah before we close and we are almost out of time i want to do a traditional view
from the top lightning round oh okay ready i'm very terrible at these okay would you rather live in the univer universe or the metaverse i'm not sure what the metaverse is by the way but i think i'm all universe all the time there's a lot of students here
who know what the better verse i don't yeah um what are your favorite pre-launch rituals which you mentioned before oh i put uh the inside of my shoes with sticky notes that say scotland on them so i am in scotland for every launch because we got to orbit for the first time when i
was in scotland yep and the only gross thing about that is there if i don't take them out right away you like stepping on paper and it kind of disintegrates and then you get like feet paper all over the place and you really have to vacuum it up it's pretty gross
toast lunch rituals i don't have a post launch ritual actually favorite celebration champagne every time no every launch well we're launching a lot maybe not every time maybe not every time certainly not during the day at work that's an at-home thing
favorite space movie firefly and that's the show but there also was a movie firefly hands down and you have a starship at your disposal it's yours you can go anywhere on earth or into space where would you take it i go to the moon orbit or land i would like to land
successfully yeah i love the moon and why the moon and not mars mars is six months um it's further uh i don't like to camp so you're you're you're traveling for six months to really camp in the most extreme way humans have ever camped whereas camping on the moon
it feels like ah if you hate it you just just come home or you can you can put up with it for a couple of days and then you just get home mars you're kind of stuck for two years please welcome me in thanking grandchildren you