Musk vs. Bezos: The Battle to Control Space — with Josh Tyrangiel

We’re a Signal Finalist! Vote for us ⁠here⁠. Josh Tyrangiel, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Scott Galloway to discuss the rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—and what their ambitions in space mean for the rest of us. He explains why SpaceX pulled ahead of Blue Origin, how satellites and proposed data centers in space could reshape the AI race, and why America’s dependence on Musk poses a national security risk. Plus, what Washington can do to encourage innovation without handing billionaires control of the next frontier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:21Scott Galloway?

  Episode 417, 417 to 0, covering southwest of Missouri. In 2017, the first fire festival imploded. My partner often says I'm not installing enough grid. And our boys, I get a lot of parenting advice from my partner. So do I give them chores? Do I force them to play competitive sports? Nope. Daddy sends them to the fire festival.

• 1:47Scott Galloway?

  Go, go, go!

• 1:57Scott Galloway?

  All right, what's happening? The Prop G Pod is a Signal Awards finalist, and today is the last day to vote. Please do us a favor and help us win the Listener's Choice Award and vote using the link in our show notes. We have a small team, means a lot to us, mostly them. They go to the dinner. I stay at home, and it's nice for them. So if you would, please go to the link, vote for the Prop G Pod for the Signal Awards. Moving on, in today's episode, we speak with Josh Tierandow, staff writer for The Atlantic and author of AI for Good. We discuss with Josh the rivalry between Bezos and Musk and their ambition to build space empires. Plus, Bezos shifting policies and the risk of putting America's future in space in the hands of just two billionaires.

• 2:49Scott Galloway?

  Josh, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:51Speaker 04

  I'm in the Atlantic office in Soho. It's delightful.

• 2:54Scott Galloway?

  And what's the weather like in New York? I'm not there right now.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  It is perfection. It's like one of those 14 days a year where you're like, fucking fantastic.

• 3:03Scott Galloway?

  It's where they film all the movies in New York. They film them all typically on their Upper East during the fall. But let's bust right into it. We wanted to spend more time with you after the release of your latest cover story in The Atlantic, Choose Your Overlord: Musk vs. Bezos. You cover Musk and Bezos, their ongoing space race, the drama that follows both of them, and what it means for two corporations to lead the push toward the next frontier of humanity. Just to start, give us, set the table, give us some context on the article.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this really started with a sort of baseline question, which is what has Jeff Bezos actually been doing these last sort of 10 to 12 years? Meaning, you know, the memification of Bezos, in which it's about his girlfriend and his yacht and his muscles and the Met Gala, has all been fun for a lot of people. But what's it actually, like, what has his decision-making actually been about? And so I started just reporting that. And almost immediately, you know, I had known that he invested a lot of money and ran Blue Origin. What I didn't know is that it was really where his heart is. Like, not where his head is. His head is very clearly with Amazon

• 4:17Speaker 04

  and lots of other sort of rational decisions he makes. But so much of his decision-making over the last decade plus, including The Washington Post, including his change in partner, has been driven by this desire to get to space in a very specific way. And so as I was beginning to report it, it was very clear that this was not a one-man story, that there is another person who's essentially racing to get the same thing, albeit in very different ways, and that's Elon. And the ways in which they're clashing with each other, competing with each other, but genuinely becoming as powerful as many nation-states and beginning to determine what our future is in space, became very clearly the story.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  It's a complicated story to tell for all the reasons I'm sure you know. But that was the genesis. It's just like, what is, what has this all been about? And when we found the answer, then it became about what it could be in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. And that is a story about, you know, interstellar domination.

• 5:19Scott Galloway?

  It really is a new space race. I love the way you framed it. It's not Russia versus the US, it's Musk versus Bezos. And one, let me ask if you agree with this characterization. Bezos is the better operator, Musk is the better fundraiser. And I'm not sure which is more important in something like this.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  You know, I, I thought that was the case. And then when I dove back into the history of Blue Origin and SpaceX and how they were really created, there are a couple of things that surprised me. Okay? So the first is that, you know, Bezos famously was a consultant at D E Shaw when he had this idea about the internet, which is that it was growing at about 2,300% per year. And very rationally, he was like, okay, so how do you take advantage of that? Well, you take advantage of it by stocking stuff that an ordinary physical store can't stock. There were roughly 3 million book titles in print in 1993 or '94, when he was making these decisions. So it's books. That's not a heart decision.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  He may like books, but ultimately, he was making a decision to create Amazon from his head. When it came to Blue Origin, this was what he loved more than anything his whole life. And if you go back to the reporting, when Amazon was first becoming a thing, his high school girlfriend said, you know, the reason he's trying to get rich is to get to space. And that got buried for about 20 years, until it became very obvious that was true. But, but he founded Blue Origin in a way that was completely antithetical to how he founded Amazon. So he basically, for three years, kept Blue Origin a secret. He had very few employees. He put all of his money, you know, a lot of spare money into it. The first employee was a guy named Neil Stephenson, who's a very famous science fiction writer.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  And Stephenson wrote this blog post about most of his job was trying to figure out if there was a different way to get to space than the way Robert Goddard and Wernher Von Braun and all, you know, a century of rocket science had considered. And so for three years, they were in Kent, Washington. Blue Origin was basically an experiment. It was a science fiction startup. Whereas two years later, when SpaceX was launched, it was ruthless. Elon had come back from this sort of wacky adventure where he was trying to get ICBMs essentially to launch a science fiction, a scientific sort of publicity stunt. He wanted to send rockets to Mars with robots to scoop up some soil and grow a plant. That was his whole idea.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  And what he learned, when the Russians tried to charge him $8 million, literally on a flight back, he learned, no, I can do this cheaper. There's a problem with space. It's a cartel. I'm going to approach it basically like a deregulator in the 1970s would approach telephony. And so from the very beginning, his operating principle was, I don't need a different way to get to space. I need a cheaper way to get to space. And so operationally, he staffed up incredibly quickly. He had just enough funding to keep his team really hungry and really moving. He also did something that great leaders do, which is he delegated. And so even though he knew he, he wanted, he had a particular vision of how to get to space, you know, he hired Gwynne Shotwell, who's among the best number twos

• 8:32Speaker 04

  in the history of American business. They divide and conquer. And meanwhile, Bezos took, you know, roughly 15 years to get serious about space. And there are all sorts of reasons for that. But I think you could argue that Elon was the better operator for a very long time.

• 8:48Scott Galloway?

  And it feels as if, well, I'll just say, it feels as if Bezos is more disciplined. It feels like Musk with his, you know, I just saw a tweet yesterday that enraged me. He said Zelensky has gone too far. Or his latest baby mama publishing texts of how he's broken up with her. And I guess there are three children. You know, Bezos definitely, he's having the mother of all midlife crises, but I feel like it's a Hallmark Channel movie compared to Musk and the drug abuse or the alleged drug abuse.

• 9:32Scott Galloway?

  I guess if I were still betting on a horse, over the next 36 months, I would bet on Musk because I think he's just way out ahead and is putting more into space and has more data points than the Falcon Heavy. Just extraordinary. I don't think, as much as I dislike the man, and I, I don't think, I can't stand it when people say, oh, he's not a genius. He copied other people's stuff and just taking credit. Bullshit. I mean, the guy, the guy's an extraordinary thinker and innovator and risk taker. So I'd pick Musk in the short term, but I would pick Bezos in the long run. I think Bezos is just more disciplined and will likely live at least another 20 years.

• 10:14Scott Galloway?

  I'm not sure the same can be said of a guy who's addicted to ketamine and, you know, churning through wives and sleeps, supposedly sleeps with a loaded gun next to his bed. That is not a good idea for a drug addict. Anyways, your thoughts?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, listen, the way I describe Musk in the piece is that he, his life is a browser with too many tabs, right? He is constantly moving between things that distract him, that interest him, personal crises, professional crises, random statements that compromise his time. And obviously X is the tab that's always open, right? I mean, he is always sounding off about one thing or another. What I would say is that people are many things, as you know. He's incredibly weird and complicated. And one of the reasons that SpaceX is so successful is not only delegation, but the groundwork he put in between really 2003 and 2012 to get a very skilled team.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  That's not a huge team, but very skilled. They know exactly what they do every day. They have really clear business goals and business leadership. You can't give him all the credit for their accomplishments, but you can give him credit for delegation, right? And the way in which he's delegated has made SpaceX very, very successful. I'll talk in a minute about the ways in which that coheres into a future business plan. But I do think both things can be true is that personally, he's, he's a mess. And professionally, particularly when it comes to SpaceX, that team is really, really good. And what I'd say about Jeff is I think you're right. Like he is incredibly disciplined, so disciplined that when he was starting Blue Origin, he

• 11:54Speaker 04

  really kept a pretty hard cap on staffing and on the expenses that he was willing to put in, which may have been a mistake. I mean, it didn't lead to this kind of grand experiment. And so one of the people I spoke to for the piece is former senior NASA official who visited the companies when they were both kind of in their adolescence. This person said, look, SpaceX is a pirate ship, right? I mean, there are a lot, there are loads of young people running around. They're all dirty. They're all like lunatics. And Blue Origin was kind of like an academic lab. They had these massive 3D printers. They had beautiful gleaming space, but there was nobody there and there was no energy. And the Blue Origin people I spoke to at that time also said, they noticed that SpaceX

• 12:39Speaker 04

  was just having more fun. When they, they launched things and they, and they blew up, they laughed about it. They posted it on social media and meanwhile, Blue Origin was largely a secret. Now, there's a good reason, which is that Jeff Bezos was the CEO of Amazon and he had obligations to shareholders to make sure that that was primarily where he was spending his time. And so he would take Wednesdays and many, many Saturdays and go work at the Blue Origin offices. This is while Amazon is becoming what it is today. It wasn't on the sly, but he also wasn't advertising it. And his time largely was focused on Amazon. And he was incapable, if you want to ding him for something, he just never found the number two who could read his mind, right?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  And lots of entrepreneurs make themselves indispensable by being the only person who could interpret what they want. I think I've been around them, you've been around them. And while that's admirable to a certain point, that kind of thinking does not scale. And so what you see with Blue Origin is even though it had lots of resources, even though it had lots of brains, it was consistently being held back by this misalignment between what Jeff thought he wanted, how they were executing. And meanwhile, Elon was becoming the Elon we know, and he was tormenting Blue Origin and Jeff specifically by sort of like, you know, tweeting about him, making all the kind of pure allude jokes that Elon is capable of. And so there is this kind of role reversal.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  And somebody at Blue Origin from the early days said, you know, to me, look, the irony is that Elon took Amazon's strategy to build SpaceX. It was get big, fast, worry about everything else later. If you have to push yourself to the brink of bankruptcy to make the breakthrough, do it. Whereas Jeff was very incremental, logical to a fault in some ways. And then also sort of put his heart into it to such a degree that he couldn't see that maybe his own involvement was holding it back.

• 14:35Scott Galloway?

  I can see the business model for SpaceX, even if it's not the one advertised in the S1. I think this whole interplanet, developing an interplanetary species is total bullshit. But the ability to haul a lot of stuff into space, disrupting space hauling, to me seems like an incredible business that they have wide moats around. The Comcast in space, kind of wireless in places you can't get it. It's a superior product. I, I left Twitter because I can't paint the guy's fence. I absolutely use Starlink. I'm a total hypocrite. It's so much better. I pray when I'm on a plane that they have Starlink. So I see two viable businesses there. I don't see any others, but there probably are.

• 15:20Scott Galloway?

  What is the business model for Blue Origin? Like, how is their business model? What is the business model and how is it different? And what's your assessment of where it's strong and weak relative to SpaceX?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. So look, I think you're referring to the prospectus, the SpaceX prospectus, which is truly the first real blueprint for what is the East India Company of space, right? And what it sketches out, you know, and I write this in the story is you have to think of the business that both Blue Origin and SpaceX are imagining as a kind of ladder, right? The bottom rung is, is space launch capability. And right now SpaceX launches 80% of the mass in space. Its next closest competitor is the government of China, and it's not close. And it's just incredible how much they own launch. Blue Origin has launch capability, but it's not totally reliable.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  So rung one is launch capability. It's also not that profitable. It's a very expensive business. There are only so many customers. And so what Elon figured out in roughly about 2015, 2016 is that he needed to create some form of captive demand, which you, which you reference as the second rung, which is boring old telecom, right? Like telecom is a really good business. It spins out a lot of profit. And so Starlink, which works incredibly well, makes up a lot of the payload that SpaceX launches. And Blue Origin also figured out that in order to maximize its launch capability, it needed satellite capability. And so it has its own satellite array that it's working on.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  It has a contract as a, as a sort of one quarter provider for the launch of Amazon's future satellites. So satellite launch is really important. What's new in the last couple of years, highly theoretical, highly debatable, but both companies are pressing on is compute in space. Okay? This is data centers in space. Now, the reason you would want this as a business is that NIMBYism, the expense politically of, of getting data centers on earth is quite large and quite competitive. If you are one of the only companies that also has vertically integrated space launch

• 17:40Speaker 04

  and satellite capability, if you can get compute in space, you have a sort of unthrottled way to charge people and yourself to access this kind of like beautiful fountain of, of compute that you already have satellites for that beams back down to earth. So that's, there's a lot of science that has to make this feasible, but the people I spoke to say, look, we're five to seven years away from this being real. And quick digression, if we're five to seven years away from this being real, it does raise questions about the massive data centers being built around the world. What's going to happen to them if you're able to access compute in space? Now, if this sounds crazy, and I know it does, I want to emphasize that every other

• 18:25Speaker 04

  AI company wants to rush into the asylum. Like OpenAI and Sam Altman mused a year ago or two years ago about buying a company called Stoke Space because they didn't want to be cut out of the future. And many people really believe data centers in space is the future. Now there is a fourth rung to this ladder. And I would say this is where things get both like most ominous and most theoretical. And that is if you have your own AI model, which both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do, and you can connect it to unthrottled compute, then you're really someplace. Then you're really able to train models, power models.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  And even though you may not be in first place in the AI race today, you might catch up pretty fast if you can run experimentation on your models and train them and tune them without ever having to worry about power, about computability. And so that then becomes a vertical integration of incredible power down the road. And so that's ultimately what both are racing to. And there's some differences in the way they've articulated those businesses. And unquestionably, Elon Musk is far, far ahead at the moment. But as everyone who works in space told me, this is a decades long challenge. Just because he's in first place now doesn't mean he will end up there.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  But when you think about what that means, it means incredible future power over lots and lots of different things. And I think the United States government is only now just beginning to wake up to the fact that it has citizens who are capable of becoming essentially supranational.

• 20:06Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back with more from Josh Turingale.

• 20:15Scott Galloway?

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• 23:34Scott Galloway?

  Data centers in space. I realize I have a bias here. Elon is always great at promising something that says, give me more money, give me more cheap capital such that I can pull the future forward or become the Earth's first trillionaire, whether it was, we'll have a million self-driving Teslas on the road by, within 12 months. That was in 2017, I think. The robot thing, I find just absolutely ridiculous. We need to be an interplanetary species. I find that physically, economically, just a total pipe dream. Data centers in space. When I, the few times I've been to a data center, I see concrete, steel server racks,

• 24:19Scott Galloway?

  heavy, heavy compute or compute devices. Is that a reality? That within the next five to 10 years, we'll have data centers in space? And why does it make sense, other than as a fundraising tool?

• 24:33Speaker 04

  It's a great question. I am not scientifically equipped to answer yea or nay. But what I can tell you from my reporting is that every single one of these companies is racing headlong to deploy. So, Google is launching its first orbital data center project, I believe, in early 2027. Musk has said he's launching his soon. I talked to the head of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, a guy named John Caloris, who is, who used to work at SpaceX. And he's like, look, I was skeptical, but what I will tell you is that theoretically, this all makes sense. You need a constant source of energy in space. You have constant solar energy. You need a constant source of cooling.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Bend your solar the other way, and you get negative 250 degrees. This is on the moon they're talking about. The communications infrastructure is there. There is no NIMBYism. And the, the number of data center projects that have already been killed in 2026 is very much on the mind of every AI company. And so, I hear it. I hear data centers on the moon or data centers in space, and first I think, oh, it's a great band name, but that's just not happening, right? And the more and more I spoke to people, they are pursuing it headlong with capital. They believe that this is the way forward to get compute, that the demand for compute will be that significant. At the same time, like, I hear you.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Like, I read that SpaceX prospectus, and I thought two things simultaneously. One, this is actually a pretty interesting blueprint for what a future space business should look like, even though the total addressable market seems like it was made up completely on the fly. But I also thought this reads like, you know, an investment banker's weekend on mushrooms. Like, it doesn't seem feasible to me that this is real. But the more I dove into it and spoke to people who are independent, they continue to say, it is real. We will be living with this in five to seven years. I've also learned that space deadlines are entirely bullshit. There's not a single space deadline that has ever been met. But what I can tell you is they are pouring money into this project, and that both are

• 26:42Speaker 04

  pouring money into their AI models because they believe that this flywheel is the flywheel of the future.

• 26:49Scott Galloway?

  So, immediately, I go to a markets perspective here. Did you look at any of this? It strikes me that so much capital's been poured into data centers in space. There's got to be a lot of startups saying that they'll sell the widget you need to connect, you know, this, this to that in space. Is the whole, has the entire, if you will, for lack of a better term, space in space infrastructure, has that just gone crazy? It sounds like there's a ton of capital there looking for a place to spend it.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say it's gone crazy. I would say there's far more green shoots and far more people prowling around than I, than I expected to find. There are lots of people who have space funds, who are really looking at launch. But the, the thing about space, and the reason why, if you're concerned about competition, this is the moment to be concerned, is that nothing matters if you can't launch what you need to launch. And right now, one guy launches everything, like, everything. And so, I spoke to Jake Sullivan, who's a former national security advisor, and we were just sort of talking about space writ large. And obviously, Jake Sullivan ran into a moment where Elon Musk wanted to turn off Starlink

• 28:03Speaker 04

  for Ukraine, when it was in the midst of this sort of counter-Russian activity. And what Sullivan and Mark Milley realized is, we can't do anything about it. Like, Musk actually had control because he controls space and because he controls satellites. He had control over a massive conflagration, a private citizen. US could do nothing about it. And so, when you think about competition in space, none of it matters if you can't get aboard a rocket. Blue Origin, and Jake said, look, it's, it's insane that we find ourselves in this position. But if you really, it's great to have one company inside your country that can do this.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Ideally, you'd have more than two, but right now, we've got to have two. Mark Kelly, you know, center from Arizona, former space shuttle pilot, said the same thing. He's like, look, we, we need Blue Origin to succeed. Like, having our launch capability at the mercy of one guy is a mess. So, when you say all these other companies are there, they are there. And there are some space launch startups that are proving, you know, to be... Pretty interesting. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, there's a handful of them. But they are so far behind SpaceX right now, and Blue Origin is so far behind SpaceX right now. That is theoretical. Right now SpaceX controls space.

• 29:24Scott Galloway?

  Talk about NASA's role in this, its positioning, its competences. I mean, I immediately think, shouldn't the third player, or the second or the first at some point be NASA?

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so in the early 2000s, the United States passed this law, basically called Commercial Crew, that outsourced a number of functions from NASA to the commercial space. And even critics of Elon and Jeff Bezos will tell you, this is a very successful bit of public policy. The reason we are where we are as far as satellite capability, space exploration, is largely because these private companies have made it much, much cheaper than NASA ever could. It's also part of, like, it's part of NASA's heritage. I mean, even the Apollo missions were built largely by private companies, with NASA acting as a kind of, you know, sort of centerpiece to orient the projects, right?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  So it's not a crazy thing to outsource this to private companies. What's been missing largely from the United States, and we can talk about how this relates to China, is we don't really have continuity in our space plans, right? Every administration comes in, they realize the sort of optical value of space, and they steer NASA missions one way or the other, but never in the same direction. So, you know, the Obama administration, so George Bush wanted to go to Mars, but never actually followed up in any meaningful way. The Obama administration's last big plan was to launch a sort of small minivan to a circling asteroid that, it was like a multi-billion

• 31:00Speaker 04

  dollar plan, and literally no one knew what it meant. And so in 2017, Mike Pence, who actually really does seem to care quite sincerely about space, convened a transition team, and they basically said, okay, the moon makes sense. How can we get to the moon? Even after, when Biden came in, it was a very rare moment, but they agreed that the moon made sense. And so we've now had 10 years of continuity. But what we haven't had, and by the way, mission continuity is really important. China has the ultimate continuity. Has one leader for as long as he wants to lead. The snap of his fingers, all of Chinese infrastructure and industry responds, right?

• 31:42Speaker 04

  Doesn't work that way in the United States, but it has roughly for the last 10 years. There is a new NASA administrator named Jared Isaacman. He is a self-made billionaire. He also was an astronaut, and he worked for Elon Musk. He performed the first commercial spacewalk in history. And Isaacman, his relationship to Musk was actually a problem in his confirmation. For a while, it looked like his nomination would be withdrawn. Ultimately, he got through on a very close vote. What nobody knows is what Isaacman wants from these two companies. He has publicly said, when it comes to getting to the moon with the Artemis mission, both SpaceX and

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Blue Origin have lunar landers that they have been commissioned, and he's basically publicly performing a bake-off. What I spoke to people about was like, why do that? Why not revert back to our history and make these two guys work together to get America to the moon? Contract one to do one part of the mission, contract one to do the other. And what I got back is, it makes total rational sense, and it will be very interesting to see whether anyone in government, from Trump to Isaacman, is willing to exercise that sort of national prerogative over these companies, whether they feel like they have the power to do it or not. Because we know what happens if you ask Elon to do something he doesn't want to do. He will take his ball and go home, and he doesn't care about what happens to

• 33:09Speaker 04

  the Ukrainians in that case. And so NASA is in this interesting moment. Jared Isaacman, from what I understand, he did not speak to me for my story. He's very shrewd. He's pretty good, but he's very shrewd politically. And what I've been told is the line he is trying to walk is largely, make sure that the lunar program lasts beyond the Trump administration. So he's not trying to piss anybody off. He's not trying to do anything too provocative when it comes to Elon and Jeff. But we'll see. I mean, that's, that is the place where you would expect the country to sort of assert its authority over these companies.

• 33:45Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, also just culturally. Remember Doge was supposed to be Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswani, and Vivek lasted about four days. I just don't, I don't see the two of these. It's like putting a lion and a hyena in a closet. It's just not going to end well. So just some recent occurrences. On September the 28th, SpaceX's starship made its orbital debut and successfully deployed 26 Starlink satellites, despite an engine failure that cut the mission short. Blue Origin recently raised over $10 billion, including $2 billion from Bezos, in its first

• 34:26Scott Galloway?

  capital raise and included outside investors. The company has stopped tourism flights, and chief executive Dave Limp has put an increased emphasis on delivering for customers, including NASA. What does this test mean for Elon regarding what he's doing next? And how far would you say are Bezos and Blue Origin? Is it, they're a year behind, 10 years behind, will never catch up? Where do they, where do they have the most ground to gain? What's the most friction in them catching up? Is it capital, technology?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  I mean, they're, they're very far behind. And honestly, the biggest friction is execution. I went through a Blue Origin launch this spring, and it was going to be a booster, a reusable booster launch, right? So they, they were launching a satellite for another company, they're reusing the booster, which is the key to reducing costs, right? Like, both companies want the cost of getting things to space to come way, way down. I watched the launch. It was beautiful. Everybody celebrated. And then an hour or two later, I learned, it was a dud. This is their third attempt to reuse the booster. The booster worked, but they didn't put the satellite in the right orbit. And so, you know, a $25

• 35:38Speaker 04

  million satellite basically died. That's a problem. They do not execute nearly as well. So that was their third attempt. And then an hour after I learned that this had been a dud, SpaceX just posted, oh, we landed our 600th booster, right? So 600 to 3. That's the distance between where SpaceX is as far as routine execution of getting to space and where Blue Origin is. And Blue Origin's probably in second place. So there is a huge amount of executing to get to. Dave Limp is very impressive. He came from Amazon. He knows the way Bezos thinks. He's not a pushover. And he has started to make that company move a lot faster. But, you

• 36:21Speaker 04

  know, the scoreboard speaks for itself. It's 600 to 3. I don't think Elon is terribly worried about Blue Origin or anybody else. And I think he plans now, with all of the influx of cash that he's gotten through the IPO, it gives him something even more important, which is margin for error in the future. We already saw, look, Grok as an AI model was way behind OpenAI, way behind Anthropic. Very casually, they spent $60 billion to buy Cursor, which is one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. So he has the ability now to, he's not only operating from a competitive advantage, but now he has all this money that he can do lots and lots of

• 37:02Speaker 04

  different things with. So it doesn't look great for the competition, for the, certainly the short and midterm. That said, you know, even the notion that satellites feeding AI, feeding compute in space, all of this is new. New conditions emerge all the time. And so I think the way Bezos and Blue Origin thinks is, we have to get the fundamentals right, and then we may be able to make up lots more ground when it comes to AI, and they have a different vision for AI than SpaceX does. We may be able to make up ground in satellites, but nothing matters if you can't get stuff off the ground.

• 37:39Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 37:45Scott Galloway?

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• 40:31Scott Galloway?

  What do you think is the likelihood that Democrats, Democrats get control of Congress and then a Democrat is put in the White House in 28 and says, this is turning too much into a Bond villain. And the fact that one individual can turn off and on battlefield technology and maybe determine the outcome of an invasion in Europe, we're just not down with that. And there's going to be some form of, let's call it nationalization light, where they say, boss, we're implanting people from the Defense Department here to get to see everything. And if they're ever held out of rooms, we're going to start putting people in jail. This has become just such an enormous security threat.

• 41:13Scott Galloway?

  It feels like the Trump attitude of let our thoroughbreds run and it's all computer and trading stocks that, you know, the next Democratic administration with the way Musk has acquitted themselves, a more populist movement, incumbent equality, a belief that we don't need trillionaires and much less should have them. You know, what's the likelihood there's a fairly serious gag reflex on the current, the current structure or organization of SpaceX?

• 41:42Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm sure the gag reflex will be there, but you know, you know, leverage quite well, right? And so you know, the old phrase, if I owe you a million dollars, I'm in trouble. If I owe you a hundred million dollars, you're in trouble. And right now, the United States has outsourced launch capability to such a degree that we better be really careful about how we negotiate with Elon Musk. Because, you know, Musk, remember Musk and Trump have gone back and forth on this too. And Musk threatened to turn off the rocket, the one rocket that takes Americans to the International Space Station. And the Soviets, I mean, the Russians were only too happy to charge America $80 million a seat to get them there.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  So right now, the only way Americans can get to space is by SpaceX. So Musk has lots of reasons to depend on the United States government for funding, for licensing. It's not like we have nothing, but we do actually need to be careful because right now we've allowed ourselves to get into a position where we would not be negotiating from a position of ultimate strength. So will there be a reset in that relationship? Should there be a Democratic administration? Absolutely. Will it be overnight? And will it be the kind of strong arm of government going in and taking exactly what it wants and reposition? No chance. Musk has too much leverage.

• 43:07Scott Galloway?

  I keep asking myself, how did we get here? So.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  But Scott, we got here because we had inattentive government with a lack of consequences. Like it's, it's the same story writ across all of our institutional rot, which is we really weren't paying too much attention. We weren't really considering when we wanted to call a halt to bad behavior, to too much power, to lack of oversight. And so the bill has come due particularly in space because it's such a limited field and we do lack so much control. It's not that much better in AI. You know, basically in space right now, there's one company and an aspirant in Blue Origin. With AI, it's a handful of companies that really control that marketplace.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  We have the, the means to regulate, the means to exercise control, the means to use the Defense Production Act if that's what's called for. But right now, we don't have the leadership willing to do any of that. And you can say, well, it's because they're profiting from it, but either personally or because they're making short-term deals that work for them and not the country. But it's the same rot. It just happens to be interstellar in this case.

• 44:20Scott Galloway?

  There's so many things that have come, there's so many moons that have lined up. One, as a private company that has access to cheaper capital than NASA, right? But the thing that really stands out to me is they can take more risks. They can blow up a rocket. NASA blows up a rocket and it's just bad and people lose trust in government. Elon blows up a rocket and it's innovation. It's, well, you know, failures, we learn more from failure. I see the same thing happening. I'm curious if you see, if you connect the same dots I do with Anduril and the privatization of the military industrial complex. And that is, I just think it makes a ton of sense. I think these companies, cost plus billing, they're fat and happy. We've monetized the military.

• 45:02Scott Galloway?

  We have regulatory capture encouraging us to go to war, build more expensive products that, and now we have B2 bombers that cost a billion dollars and unfortunately have to have a handsome young man with a family back at home. And we've essentially built the most expensive glass jaw in history. And that is, if, I think if we've learned everything, anything over the last 50 years in warfare, it's not who's willing to spend the most, but who's willing to lose the most. And we're not. And I, so I see us outsourcing, just as we did space, I see us outsourcing at some point for really smart reasons, military industrial complex. And then basically we have Elon Musk and Palmer Lucky controlling, controlling space

• 45:46Scott Galloway?

  and our navy. I mean, it's, we really are sort of handing over the keys. Your thoughts?

• 45:53Speaker 04

  I agree. And, and I actually think that there are lessons to be learned from space before we do this with the military. I completely agree that, you know, the future of warfare is happening in Ukraine, right? You, there's not a lot of deaths from rifles, you know, in, in Ukraine. It's all drones. And so most of that war is fought on tablets by people who are trained specifically in drone warfare. And that is magnificent innovation that we need to learn from rapidly. And if we're going to do it, it's not like we lack the ability to, to make drones and operate drones, but we have an infrastructure that isn't guiding our expenditures that way.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  That said, the role of government, if we decide to pivot in that direction, has to be oversight, has to be creating a marketplace where one firm doesn't get such an upper hand that suddenly we're negotiating against ourselves. Like we want competition in this space. And so you get competition by using the architecture that we have, which is regulation, which is ensuring sort of fairness to market. It would help if we had a rational campaign finance architecture as well, so that companies couldn't just place themselves in the middle of an executive branch, as Elon did with Doge. But we need to be really, really smart about that outsourcing because the one thing you

• 47:18Speaker 04

  can say is like, right now, or at least 30 years ago, the United States decided when to go to war and how to go to war. We could do that. There is a thriving military industrial complex, too thriving. But if you are scanning ahead to the future and suddenly you need a very particular type of weapon and the company that you have contracted with, for whatever reason, perhaps because of a mercurial billionaire CEO, doesn't want to give it to you at that point because it doesn't work for their product line, that would be a disaster. And so we've had a brush with this, right? We had a brush with this in Ukraine and Musk. Hopefully we can learn something from it because I agree, that is where our military is headed in the next decade or two.

• 48:00Scott Galloway?

  If you, and this, I can see this happening, a new administration, and they say, Josh, give us advice on how to regulate this, where we should be making investments, our approach to regulating Blue Origin, SpaceX, Anduril. What are the one or two things that you think are elemental to leveraging the innovation of the private sector and these incredible minds and their incredible vision, while at the same time not setting up, you know, a Dr. Evil like scenario?

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think you have to place some limits on how much any one company can own the vertical integration of space. You just have to. You could almost regulate, you know, look, we, I talked earlier about the ways in which Elon sort of modeled SpaceX on the way he, he would go about deregulating telephony, right? You have to think the same way, which is, okay, do we want SpaceX? And you're, it sounds crazy. Do we want them to have the capability to own data centers in space? Knowing full well that they also have a massive AI model back home, knowing full well that they can create captive demand for their own satellites and squeeze out other satellite makers, probably not.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  In the same way that for a time, we didn't want movie studios to own movie theaters and that we didn't want auto companies to own dealerships. When you're launching a new territory, you have to think back to those methods. Doesn't mean they last forever, but to allow them out of the gate to create vertical integration, I would say, hmm, might want to look at all four of those rungs on the ladder and figure out who else might be able to get a piece. Or do we spin off some component of this so that they can profit from it, but somebody else actually runs and owns it? I don't think we need a whole bunch of new laws. We need to use the ones that we actually have in order to ensure that this works.

• 49:55Scott Galloway?

  Josh, I was really enjoying these conversations and learn a lot. I'm, I always walk away a little bit, I don't know, scared is the wrong word, but disturbed, but very much appreciate your time and good work, Josh.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Thanks so much, Scott.

• 50:11Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janera and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

• 50:37Speaker 06

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