Elon Musk & Gwynne Shotwell on AI Risks and Peer Review, Starship, Terafab, SpaceX/Tesla Merger

David Friedberg (0:03)

Quick question, what's our latest timeline on getting to Mars?

Gwynne Shotwell (0:06)

Getting to Mars? Oh, I think we'll put people down within a decade.

SPEAKER_3 (0:08)

Welcome Gwynne Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX. She's an instrumental, a really crucial person to the success of SpaceX.

David Sacks (0:17)

She's really the glue.

Jason Calacanis (0:19)

She's the glue to the tornado.

Gwynne Shotwell (0:21)

Fail fast, learn fast, make your design robust.

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:23)

I would be disappointed if we didn't have a settlement on the moon.

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:27)

The space and AI firm has officially made history on its $75 billion IPO, debuting with a market value of $1.7 trillion.

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:36)

The most efficient place to put it for its compute is on orbit.

Gwynne Shotwell (0:40)

Manage risk, don't avoid it.

Jason Calacanis (0:43)

Please welcome Gwynne Shotwell. Thank you so much for coming.

David Friedberg (0:59)

You're right here.

Jason Calacanis (1:00)

Right there.

Chamath Palihapitiya (1:00)

Right in this couch.

David Friedberg (1:02)

Welcome.

Jason Calacanis (1:02)

Thank you.

David Friedberg (1:03)

Thanks for being here. It's good to be here.

Chamath Palihapitiya (1:04)

Nice to see you.

Gwynne Shotwell (1:05)

Nice to see you.

David Friedberg (1:07)

Well, we really appreciate you coming out. How's it going at SpaceX?

Gwynne Shotwell (1:13)

You know, we're bored. There's nothing going on.

David Friedberg (1:16)

Not a lot happening.

Gwynne Shotwell (1:17)

I've got all the time in the world. So by the way, Elon has more time, by the way. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (1:21)

I mean, you've been at SpaceX forever. Are you the longest tenured employee after Elon?

Gwynne Shotwell (1:28)

After Elon? Yeah. In fact, my 24th anniversary was the 9th of September last week. Sometime.

Jason Calacanis (1:35)

Wow.

Gwynne Shotwell (1:35)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (1:36)

It's extraordinary.

Chamath Palihapitiya (1:37)

Gwynne, can you take us back to the day where you initially get this call and you're like, hey, there's this thing.

What is the arc of the decision look like? How did you get convinced to underwrite this business? Just walk us through that.

Gwynne Shotwell (1:54)

Well, Elon underwrote it. I just worked there. But the story is a little crazy actually. So I was going out to lunch. One of my best friends who I was working with was going to work for Elon. And I took him out to lunch, kind of going away lunch. And he's like, oh, when I dropped him back off, he said, oh, come on in and meet Elon. Like, he's busy. You know, we don't need to do that. But we did it anyhow. And I met him. And I said, hey, I think you really need, I think you need a full time person to run your business development shop. You know, you've got kind of a part timer. He's a contractor. You know, it's not a great look. And he looked at me very thoughtfully and, you know, kind of scratched his head. And then we say goodbye, chatted a little bit, say goodbye. And then I got back to my office, and I got a call from Elon's assistant, Mary Bess. And she said, Elon wants you to apply for the new vice president of business development position. Can you come interview? I'm like, now?

No, I have a job. I can't go now. Tomorrow?

Okay, sure, tomorrow.

And then it took me like four weeks to decide, yes, I was being a total idiot.

Chamath Palihapitiya (3:03)

But at the time, like, what was the scale of that business? Like, what did you think it needed that it didn't have? Because it was still very much an R&D.

Gwynne Shotwell (3:09)

It was very R&D, but, you know, Elon had an investment and he wanted some return. He wanted cash, right? He wanted customers. And I was doing that work anyhow in the space industry.

Turned out I was pretty good at it.

But, yeah, so what did it look like? I was the seventh employee to sign my contract. I gave two weeks notice and took a week off to remodel a bathroom. Because I knew I would never have time to do it once I started working for Elon. Came three weeks later, employee number 11, and we just got to it. And we sold a rocket about 12 months later.

Chamath Palihapitiya (3:47)

And that's it. And that's it.

Gwynne Shotwell (3:48)

Without a rocket. There wasn't a rocket.

Chamath Palihapitiya (3:50)

There wasn't a rocket.

Gwynne Shotwell (3:50)

Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya (3:51)

So what does that sales cycle look like? How do you convince somebody that they can actually take that risk and maybe give you the deposit you need to start the cycle to build the thing?