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

Ashlee Vance is the author of When The Heavens Went On Sale, a new book about the modern day space race. Join us for a conversation about the commercial ventures fighting for their place in low earth orbit, and why governments have ceded the space to the private sector. We'll discuss SpaceX, Planet, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace. Stay tuned of for the final 20 minutes, where Vance discusses his relationship with Elon Musk and the state of the billionaire entrepreneur. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ You can pick up Vance's book here. Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Ashley Vance. He is the author of When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. He's also the author of Elon Musk. He hosts the show Hello World, and he is a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. Ashley, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. So we're here to talk about your new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, and just want to let you know and let listeners know that this is a new territory for us, not quite space here on Big Technology Podcast, but we're in the frontier because... Basically, I decided that when, you know, every book, for those who don't know, every book

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  comes out on a Tuesday, we typically do our flagship interview on Wednesday. And I kept getting like becoming second from all the shows that would release on pub day. So new rule here on the, on the show, when we have a new book and we do the interview, that will come out on Tuesdays now instead of Wednesdays. We'll move it up and then we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming, you know, week after. So actually want to say thank you for helping me trial this out.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  I'm honored to be part of your master plan.

• 2:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you. And hopefully, unlike the early SpaceX missiles, it won't go up in flames on the way into the atmosphere.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  You know, be first, be first when you can be first, man. I'm all for it.

• 2:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Well, that's cool. I really enjoyed the book. I think there's a lot to talk about here. I think that the best place to start is actually where you started off the book. And the book doesn't really focus as much as I expected on SpaceX. And we'll get up, get into that, you know, as we go through this conversation. But I think we should talk about the innovation that SpaceX had because, you know, I think that a lot of people see it as this company that Elon Musk founded to show he could go to space and just think that it like actually does, you know, space, you know, rockets the same way that everybody else, people might know that they land and they come out. But actually, that's not really like the core innovation as far as, you know, I came away from reading your book. You want to talk a little bit about how SpaceX really changed the game?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You know, like you said in the book, I mean, we kick off with SpaceX and then kind of move away from it. But it was really important to me because it's a funny thing, you know? We think of space as this sci-fi, very modern sort of thing. But, but you know, if you actually pay attention to the industry, I mean, it, it kind of like got going big gangbusters style in the 1960s and like didn't really change. The rockets were the same, like NASA, the government run space programs, the military contractors did not embrace modern computing technology. They used all this sort of like ancient specialized stuff that had been certified for space.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And so, you know, it was just this like. It was this industry that was like kind of caught in a time warp, you know?

• 4:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. This whole idea of space grade, like you need space grade material. It's almost just like, is it, is it really that you need space grade material? Or do you need to just pay the contractors who've created this term? So that contracts get inflated.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  For people who don't know, we're talking about stuff as simple as something like a radio, where I'm sure in the 1960s or 70s, you probably did need a space grade of radio to survive the rigors of the launch and the conditions in space. But then, once they, and then, once they certified this, this radio as being good for the job, nobody ever wanted to try anything ever again and run the risk of that being this, the small thing that led the mission wrong. So then you, as you said, you end up with military contractors that are charging a hundred thousand dollars for radio. And so SpaceX, you know, a couple very rich people had tried to get into commercial space before and failed.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  And then Elon and SpaceX, part of it was timing and part of it was, as you can imagine, kind of Elon's force of will. But you know, right, right company at the right time. The technology had gotten to this point where somebody with a clean slate could try this all again. And so SpaceX, exactly what we're talking about. Instead of, instead of buying this, all these space grade components and doing things all the way they had been before. They're like, look, I think materials have advanced. I think computing's advanced. I think we can make this just way cheaper than we have before. And so, you know, the company starts around 2002 and then in 2000, it takes them until 2008

• 5:58Speaker 02

  to launch their first rocket, which was called the Falcon 1. And it took them four tries, but when that rocket reaches orbit, I argue in the book that it's this seminal moment where, where finally commercial space became real. And this sort of set this huge shift that I write about underway.

• 6:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so this book and this conversation is all about basically what happens when you make space accessible and the race that has followed there, like not just the rockets, but actually the businesses that emerge when space becomes something that not just NASA can get to, but well, everyone is kind of a stretch, but lots of different people that can get to. And it's not just the space tourism. It's a whole different variety of businesses. But you know, it sort of leads me to the question I set up at the beginning here, which is like, when I first heard that you were going to write this book, and it was called When the Heavens Went on Sale, I was like, hot damn, this is going to be the book that talks about like Elon Musk's space race against Jeff Bezos, space

• 7:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  race against Richard Branson. But that's actually not what it is. So just tell me, like, why did you decide to not cover? I mean, that's kind of sort of the space. If you think about the blockbuster, right? And okay, I understand you're going to make this into some sort of documentary or movie. But when you think about like the blockbuster hit, like these billionaire entrepreneurs going after the heavens, to me, seems like that's the, you know, the blockbuster hit. But you went a different way. Why?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I heard this from more than one person as I was getting into this.

• 7:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I can't even imagine the pitch meeting. Yeah, go ahead.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it was just very intentional, you know? I mean, look, Elon and SpaceX have done fantastically well. But when you look at the other billionaires, they actually haven't done that great. I mean, there's a little bit of space tourism with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, although they're both kind of stalling out. And then you get to like, people trying to get to Mars and the moon, and it's many year off things. What I saw was that the real action and this exciting story was, and I apologize because I haven't found a better term for this, was like, sort of the Wild West of space. It was, it was like this, these people all over the world who we'd gone from countries

• 8:16Speaker 02

  funding space to billionaires funding space to venture capital now pouring into space. And you had just like this race of capitalists trying to build, you know, this is the focus of my book, is trying to build an economy in low Earth orbit through thousands upon thousands of satellites. And, and so, you know, it just jumped out at me that I was like, look, I think people have sort of missed. I think they got, they got sort of fixated on the tourism and these, these, these colonies and stuff, but the real action, the, the real business, the excitement to me was all in this, this like this is happening now. This is not like we're going to be on Mars in 10 years, you know, we could get into this, but I don't think people realize like how far

• 9:02Speaker 02

  commercial spaces come relatively quickly. And, and yeah, so for me, it was just super exciting and the characters were like larger than life all over the place. And so I dug in.

• 9:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I think that, well, Kevin Wheel from Twitter went over to Planet and we've had him on the show. So I was somewhat aware that we're, and Planet is one of the books, one of the companies you cover in the book. So I was somewhat aware that we are, there is something emerging in, in low earth orbit, as you put it, that is, was interesting. But I think the extent of it was, did catch me by surprise. And it is these sort of stories that we don't hear a lot about that become the ones that you really want to get engrossed in. And I think that's sort of like where you end up with this book. So, you know, you, you, you mentioned it, right? We have a lot of capital moving into companies that are trying to get a piece of, of the wild west of space. By the way, I think it's a good term. So, but anyway,

• 9:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  don't come up with a new one. It actually describes it really well. Lots of open space that's out there to be, you know, effectively, you know, I don't know, conquered, colonized. And, and so the question for me becomes, what do people want to do with this? And what is that? You know, the money's trying to get a return. So where's, where's the business there?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this one's a little tricky to unpack, but you, you talked about Planet Labs. And so let's just do them real quick. Cause this is, this is where some of the money is.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  This is a company that I'm sure most people listening to this have no idea, but they've already surrounded the earth with hundreds of imaging satellites that take pictures of every single spot on the earth's landmass every day. So they, you know, it sounds like espionage, but it's like, it's not about watching individuals. It's about watching the sum total of human activity, you know, where.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  How many trees do we have on Earth are rainforest being cut down in the Amazon? How much oil is in Saudi oil tankers right now? You know, it's just this, this sort of day to day human activity and, and following it. So these images are, it's a public company. They make a lot of money. This is used by farmers, Wall Street traders, nonprofits, all kinds of groups. And, and so there's money in imaging. There's also money, you know, all the money is in the satellites. It's not in the rockets. The rockets are like the, the kind of sexy thing that people fixate on. But all the money is in the satellites and in the next big bucket is communications. So we've seen, you know, SpaceX putting this Starlink space internet system.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  You could think of it as like a global telecommunications system. It has a couple of rivals. And just to give people like the most obvious data point on this, from, from 1960 to about 2020, we had put up 2,500 satellites into low earth orbit. From 2020 to 2022, so just two years, that number doubled to 5,000 is going to double again this year. The year after that, we're going to be up to go from 2,500 to 100,000 satellites in, in short order. And so this is where the money is. The, the last bit is that outside of imaging and communications, I write about this in the book.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  I mean, nobody really knows if anything else works after that. And we're sort of, we're, we're putting this huge investment and gamble into the notion that once you get rockets cheap enough and satellites cheap enough and the rides frequent enough that people think up a ton of new ideas of what to do up there.

• 12:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So then what are some of the more experimental uses? I mean, I think the planet guys are trying to build a moon colony or something like that. So, so that might be one, but, but can you expand a bit on the different uses? Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, like, to be totally honest, it's a bit frustrating because even the smartest people in this field don't have terrific answers on this, but we're already seeing like some hints of what's going to go on. So there's a, there's a startup in Los Angeles called Varda. Next month, you know, they're going to be on a SpaceX rocket sending up. It looks like sort of one of the capsules you see that that brings humans, you know, back from the the space station, except a kind of miniature version of that. And they are going to be manufacturing pharmaceuticals in in orbit. So it turns out that atoms and molecules behave very differently outside of the the constraints of gravity.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And we've already shown you can you can create all kinds of novel drugs in space. And so, you know, we've we've got this huge imaging business, this huge communications, this manufacturing stuff. They're one of several companies starting off next. There's a whole raft of like other science going on. But then after that, you know, this reminds me so much of like 1996 with the consumer internet kind of taking hold. And it's like, we're going to build all these data centers. We're going to lay all this fiber. Pretty sure this thing is going to be crazy. Can't kind of like tell you exactly what it's going to do. But like, if you build it, they will come. And and I think it's less obvious to me on this one, but that's the general principle here.

• 14:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm kind of curious about like the rules, right? Like, you know,

• 14:25Speaker 02

  It's a good question.

• 14:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Who sets? Who sets? I mean, come on, you know, it does. See, I told you there were some parallels with the West. But like, who sets the rules? For for instance, you're building a pharmacy, you know, in in space. Is that like, are the rules set by the people that were the country that you launched from? And then like, are there any like regulations? I mean, you know, on one hand, it's you cite these numbers about the exponential growth of satellites in space. And one is, OK, that's cool. On the other hand, like, damn, we're firing a lot of stuff into space. And like, that's oftentimes it stays there, right? And, you know, we're pretty good at polluting things. So are we just now going to ruin another environment?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So if you've heard this story before of what happens when humans get a new a new playground, you know? Well, so there are some regulations, right? The

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Federal Aviation Administration in the United States governs, can't, when can you send off a rocket? Is it safe? The FCC governs a lot of stuff around the satellites. There's international bodies that try to coordinate all this stuff, make sure satellites aren't running into each other, making sure your communication satellite isn't interfering with somebody else's. That's sort of like the good news. The bad news is this commercial space explosion is taken off so much faster that the regulators cannot keep up with it. And at the moment, I mean, not to keep harping on this Wild West thing, but it very much is like, if you get there first, you get the territory and it makes it extremely difficult

• 16:04Speaker 02

  for somebody else to sort of barge in. And then there's almost no laws. If you, once you, there's like laws gating how you get the satellite to space, but once the satellite is in space, it's like, pretty much nobody cares. New Zealand is actually the only country that I'm aware of that has a sort of policy that says, you know, like if you stuck something up there, you're kind of responsible for, for what it does and getting it back without causing damage. Everyone else is just like, all right, that was, that was good.

• 16:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nice work, everybody. It's there. No need to worry. But so, you know, it's interesting because you, you described like, okay, let me see if I get this right, but a territory where like there's not many rules and, you know, only a few countries care what you do and you sort of are at the frontier of potential innovation. It sounds like a kind of exactly the type of place that Silicon Valley wants to be. The question is, of course, like, well, what is, what's the deal? What happens if Silicon Valley, you know, takes, or even the tech industry, right? Maybe Silicon Valley isn't the best metaphor, but the tech industry is sort of gets there first and, and sort of, yeah, I mean, before governments,

• 17:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  before anything like that. Like, is it a good thing? And I'm curious if you can sort of talk a little bit about that tension, which does run through your book. Like, what do you end up with if you, if Silicon Valley is the one that's getting in there and doing all this stuff?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is like the many trillion dollar question. And I, you know, I don't think we're exactly sure how it plays out. There's some early indicators that are pretty fascinating, though.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Without jumping too far ahead, like if you, let's look at Ukraine for a second. You know, this conflict breaks out, Russia attacks Ukraine, Russia is a traditional space superpower.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Ukraine ends up very astonishingly turning commercial space against Russia. So Russia goes in, they try to take out Ukraine's communication systems. Ukraine fires up SpaceX's Starlink internet to like be the backbone of their military and the country. Meanwhile, they're tapping into all of these imaging satellites from Planet and another company called Maxar, watching the Russian troops every move. It's like one of the major reasons they were able to stave off that initial attack on Kiev. If you look at Starlink in this example, SpaceX is a nation state. Like there is, there is no government that could have done what SpaceX did. SpaceX has more satellites than any government on earth.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  They have more access to space than any government through their rockets. And so like already, just like this would have been impossible five years ago. And this whole balance of power has already tilted and you know, Elon became like a, like a supreme ruler during this. You had Ukraine begging him to keep Starlink on. He was saying, oh, it's really expensive. We're having to donate it. Nobody will pay for it. And, and this was like keeping this country alive and it was dependent on this one person's kind of whims as to what he wanted to do.

• 19:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was crazy. Like they had to watch the way they even spoke about him because he threatened retaliation, which like, is it your ego or is it the decision to help a country that really is motivating you? But anyway, that's besides the point. Go ahead.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but it's fascinating, right? Because the like, the US government like obviously would have wanted to just be like, okay, we'll just hop on our system. There was no other system. There's nothing they could do. They couldn't send up 3,000 satellites the next day to sort of replace this. And so we're already at this, you know, Planet is the same way, right?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  The US, China, Russia, do not, they don't, they have a fraction of the satellites that Planet has. Their spy satellites from the governments can only look at certain points on Earth, a very limited set of stuff, whereas Planet sees everything all the time. And, you know, so there's, there's this, there's this changing balance of power. But it's, it's pretty fascinating, too, because if you are, if you're, say, Peru, or you're Mexico, and you really haven't had a chance to invest in some sort of like satellite infrastructure, have access to imagery like this, you could just buy it now. You don't have to, you know, pay billions of dollars to send up tons of satellites. And so, so it's like a leveling

• 20:37Speaker 02

  of the playing field while things are getting sort of turned upside down. And, and so, it's gonna be interesting to see how this all plays out, to say the least.

• 20:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. That's what I want to hear from you. I mean, you, you call the Ukraine war like the first space war, where you have Planet being used to like monitor troop movements in the beginning, and Starlink, like you mentioned. So like, my sense is you, that governments aren't big fans of like when companies become, you know, as powerful than, as them in certain sectors, right? Like, of course, like SpaceX doesn't have an army, but like, you don't, like governments don't like being reliant on the private sector most of the time, on critical functions, you know, on some of the other stuff, maybe they can, you know, turn it over, but critical functions, no. So, you know, I'm curious, like, you know, A, how you might end up, how this might play out at home, right? And, and B, like,

• 21:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  do these companies be, become seen as combatants in war? And how does that change for them? And also, like, I think we should, we should also mention just like, the reason why Planet is able to see this is because they just have, so, I mean, but, uh, phone-sized satellites out there, thousands of them, hundreds, thousands?

• 21:45Speaker 02

  They have hundreds. I mean, that was the big idea, was that you, traditionally, for people who don't know, you know, a satellite is something that takes like five years to build, it's a cost of billion dollars, it's the size of like a school bus, it's supposed to stay in space for 20 years. As much as SpaceX changed the economics of rockets, Planet changed the economics and thinking around satellites. So, you know, they realized more than anyone that computing had gotten so good that you could...

• 22:14Speaker 02

  You could shrink these things and instead of trying to put up one that's supposed to last forever, you just put up hundreds of them and they're really cheap and you surround the earth. And so, you know, they're the first ones that sort of pushed this revolution through and the, the people who founded Planet really are the most idealistic bunch in my, in my book. I mean, they, they would not want any part in a space war by nature. They wanted all of this to be able to track the environments, what's happening with like refugees and things like that, but, but they had to become a going concern as a business. And so, um, you know, it's like the same old technology story we see play out time and

• 22:59Speaker 02

  time again. It's like things start in this kind of one place. Google's wants to do no evil. It's just a search engine giving us all the information of the world. And then you fast forward 20 years and things have gotten a lot more complicated.

• 23:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so talk a little bit then about, again, the government question, like, are they going to want to like come after these companies?

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's like, it's over, you know, as far as I'm concerned. SpaceX has these thousands of satellites. Amazon's about to put up 14,000 satellites of their own. OneWeb is a company sort of quasi based in Europe. They're doing the same thing. There's, you know, this, this percentage of sort of computing that was up there has already tilted so far towards the commercial side. And this comes with major ramifications. I mean, Russia's space business is, is basically kind of going away in part because of the war, but it was already on this huge decline because of SpaceX. And, and so all these rules that have existed

• 24:02Speaker 02

  for like 60, 70, 70 years, these boundaries, this like status quo of, of, you know, how we knew this was supposed to operate is over. And, and super quick, you know, Rocket Lab, which is another of the main characters in my book, is a fantastic example of this. Um, this is a company based in New Zealand. This was started by a guy named Peter Beck, who did not even go to college. New Zealand has no real military. They've got no aerospace experience.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  What they've made, it's a rocket. It's the equivalent of a missile, an ICBM. And, and they built it in New Zealand, in the middle of nowhere with a guy who had like no formal training in any of this, you know, and Peter's probably like a one in a billion kind of person. But the point is like, we've spent decades trying to keep someone like North Korea from developing technology like this or whomever, but the stuff is all like gotten good enough that somebody who's motivated enough and smart enough and has a bit of a access to capital can reach space and do interesting things there.

• 25:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, when you say it's over, it sounds like you discount the possibility of like cyber warfare against some of these satellites. I mean, if I would, if I'm a, a country where this stuff is being used at, I have all of my top hackers immediately trying to get a hold of these systems and crash them into each other.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  So, well, so we've already seen, you know, there's been rumors flying around for a long time that the Russians tried to hack Planets satellites because if you're taking these images, and this is supposed to be sort of this ground truth, but somebody's able to hack your satellite, it raises all these questions about what's true and what's not, right? And so these, like, you have to believe that this image is accurate in order for it to have meaning. And then a couple of years ago, Russia did something pretty spectacular and dumb, which is they shot a missile from Earth into one of their own satellites to blow it up and remind everybody that they can do that. And it created this huge debris

• 26:12Speaker 02

  field in low Earth orbit that's still going around. But yeah, so that, you know, to your point, okay.

• 26:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's crazy, man.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the governments are not going to go lightly. If I, can I tell one quick story that's totally crazy?

• 26:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of course.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  That'll, I think, freak people out. So, we've seen. I'm trying to remember now if it was China or Russia, but one of these countries put up a satellite and then it launched a baby satellite out of it, which then went and it was like orbiting right near American satellites. It was basically like a reconnaissance satellite. And the implication of this was that, you know, we could attach ourselves to your satellite if we want to. We could deorbit your satellite if we want to. And so I totally get your point. I'm saying, I guess I'm saying writ large kind of commercial has taken off, but you're exactly right that that some of these countries will not go quietly, you know, into the night.

• 27:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ashley Vance is here with us. He's the author of When the Heavens Went on Sale, which is on sale today. We'll be back in the second half to talk a little bit more about what's going on in space and talk about everybody's favorite character, Elon Musk. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended

• 27:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwall.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are

• 29:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 29:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  And 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?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  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

• 30:06Speaker 02

  a narrative, a story, more than anything else. You know, it'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 Wolfe, but for the modern age, you know, giving people insight into this world. And one of my favorite characters in the book is this guy named Max Poyakov. 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.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  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. They 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,

• 31:34Speaker 02

  not too far from Crimea, actually, called Dnipro, which is where a lot of this stuff was housed. And 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.

• 32:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I'm curious, just curious, has any of that technology being, I mean, if they have this missile technology sitting in Dnipro, is any of that being used in the war?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Well, you know, 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, you know, getting Ukrainian expertise and smarts kind of on the, on the black market. And, and, you know, in Ukraine, the, 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, their brains. I actually think the US made a just a horrendous mistake. I mean, they left Ukraine in this tough spot.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  They said, you know, give up your nuclear weapons as the Cold War ended and we're going to protect you from Russia and, and you can like hold on to some of this other stuff. But the, the business was never big enough. And, and so the scientists have been like up for grabs. And kind of shockingly, like 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, and then tries to create this, this merger of technology and the US government basically accuses him of being a Russian spy and throws him out of the, the country. And then a few months later, the war in Ukraine breaks out and all those assets and factories, you know,

• 33:39Speaker 02

  go up for grabs.

• 33:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, so as, when you say go, like go up for grabs in the US?

• 33:44Speaker 02

  No, no, I mean, the, you know, the Russians moved in very quickly.

• 33:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  So they've taken over?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  It's unclear, you know, like Dnipro hasn't fallen yet. It was, 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.

• 34:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so then what's going on with the company in Austin?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Well, so Max 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, and so now it's run by, by money people. It's not okay, you know, they. Firefly has launched twice. They haven't reached orbit yet, but the second launch got very close. And, 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, you know, after Elon and Jeff Bezos, Max had put the most money into a private rocket company and, and just never really got to enjoy it.

• 34:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And he's, he's in Ukraine now.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  He's in Ukraine part of the time and then in Scotland. He actually has British citizenship as well.

• 34:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I see. All right. So we've talked about Firefly. We talked about Rocket Lab and Planet Labs. What about Astra, which is the fourth company that you cover?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  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, and right as I was kind of getting into this world, this company called Astra, I heard rumors about it. Somebody 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. And I talked my way in and I, this was my, I was there pretty much like the very first

• 35:46Speaker 02

  day they started. And so I got to 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. Astra wants to make a $1 million rocket that you could 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 of 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

• 36:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's such an interesting business because you effectively get a handful of very expensive shots at the very beginning. And 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 cross your fingers and, and hope that it works. And it's not a very high success, you know, rate, at least in the beginning.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  No, and like, you know, traditionally, these companies are private and you, yes, people can see your rocket launch, but, but you're, you're kind of like operating behind closed doors. But most of the startups that we're looking at now, they made this like Faustian bargain during COVID, when the SPAC money was flying around. And 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, you know, 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

• 37:51Speaker 02

  see their rocket blow up, you know, you start hitting sell really quick. And so it's, it's like the, 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, the public eye. Like 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.

• 38:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, to continue with our Wild West theme, there's, there's kind of a cowboy feel to a lot of this, which was surprising to me because, you know, I would imagine that the rocket scientists are kind of button up lab quote people sitting behind computers. But, you know, you talk about as people without college degrees that are, you know, pushing this forward. Of course, you know, Elon Musk is an interesting character himself. And the, the launch sites are just kind of

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 38:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, they're, they're wild, like, you know, deep inside India or on, you know, islands in the Pacific. So I'm kind of curious, like, why you think, you know, this very important business has taken on this kind of like, Renegade fuel.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think in some ways it's like normal. I mean, every this is another this is you were asking at the beginning, like, why not the billionaires? I mean, this is kind of why I wanted to write the book is that like every space story, anyone listening to this has ever seen on TV or read in a book is like our best and bravest pilots, you know, 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. And and the point here is like, this is not what what commercial space looks like at all anymore. It is is like welders from Texas and people

• 39:45Speaker 02

  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 it's 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.

• 40:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. So just trying to put a, you know, exclamation point in this discussion, let'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 runs 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? I mean, you mentioned North Korea more than once and in, you know, under 40 minutes. So that to me sounds pretty concerning.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  You know, it's um, there's this law called ITAR in the US. It governs like the export of prized technology, especially, you know, in the defense military realm, which and it governs all this space stuff. And 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 friggin smart and have a bit of money, but not that much, surprisingly. And so, yeah, it's scary.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  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 you create this field of debris, it's it's sort of like a cascading exponential, you know, disaster.

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which I mean, we could end up seeing that. Like, we could end up having this huge, you know, like space junk proliferate and make it impossible to get stuff into orbit.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  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 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. It'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.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I don't think, I don't think the average person on the street has any idea that this is happening.

• 43:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so, okay, we cover heaven's earth in one question, which is good. So that's good. So that saves me, saves some time.

• 43:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  But no, I want to ask you also. 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 civilization is 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 is like real risks like this, this is amazing in many ways.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  It's pretty exciting, you know, like when you, when we talk about planets and what they can do.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  You know, it's almost like having a Google search engine for earth above us and, 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, like 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 like any kind of carbon credit program or taxing a business for like how much methane is coming out of their oil fields. This is like the only way we can actually count this and put numbers behind it.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  And we're like, we are doing that now and on the cusp of this, this, 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, they can because of this, the space internet. And, and you know, it's like obvious that once you plug in to the modern economy, your opportunities just increase so dramatically. And, and so, you know, this puts people on a much more level playing field.

• 45:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, let's just one follow up about the space internet. How far away are we from that being readily accessible to the whole world and affordable?

• 45:25Speaker 02

  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 only, they're like a fraction of the way to putting all the satellites they need up. And so it's, it's regional depending where you live. But you know, within the next, call it three to five years, there should be at least two rival systems that people could, could tap into. And but already, you know, Starlink is surprisingly widespread. I have it at a, at a, my parents' house in Mexico.

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, cool. All right, so we have 10 minutes left. Not going to let you go without letting you, making you answer some questions about Elon.

• 46:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  You wrote the book Elon Musk. What is your take on the state of Elon right now?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  You know, I find it all pretty funny, man. I mean, I had a like a real up and down relationship with Elon over these many years. Some little PTSD along the way.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  I think it's funny, maybe as somebody who's like kind of studied him, I guess for lack of a better term.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  The world seems, in my impression, to have chalked him up to this like binary proposition. You're either like 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 like he would not talk to me at all for years, we talk a lot more now and I've seen him in person. 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

• 47:28Speaker 02

  the world and, and having, you know, sort of sport about all of this. Like when you talk to him in person, he's actually.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  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, than the rest of the world seems to see.

• 47:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  There's, you know, if you, if SpaceX and Tesla were to go away tomorrow, you cannot question that he like changed the world. I mean, electric cars would still be a reality. Commercial space would be a reality. The US, which had like this dwindling, depressing, sad space program would still be like the forefront of, of, of space. Um, so the band did a lot in 20 years. I think that 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, um, you know,

• 48:44Speaker 02

  wants and needs. I mean, that, that was like, this is like this, like kind of Steve Jobs thing, you know? Um, 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. And who knows where it actually ends up with all said and done.

• 49:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. You think there's a chance that it's going to end up well?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  It's not like a great, at the moment, but I know he's like, 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.

• 49:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  He's been through this before. So I don't think it's like really that horrifying to him. And, 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. And so I don't know, man, somebody's got to, got to 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.

• 49:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  It was not a well-run company before.

• 49:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 circuitous 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.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Like, I know David Sacks and I don't know if we're friends, but we're friendly and I respect him. He, when I see him tweet some stuff, like I, he like does not seem to understand why most people use Twitter.

• 50:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  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. And this is like my, my little fiefdom, you know?

• 50:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. When you speak with Elon, what do you talk about?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  I've been going, I spend 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 spend a lot of time talking about monkeys with chips in their head at the moment.

• 51:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I'm curious. What is going on there?

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Well, I would love to tell you everything. I got a big story coming. So I will be a little reserved. I would say, I would say people, something like equally fascinating has happened in that space, which is that 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. But there's, there's like 20 or 30 brain computer interface startups now. And I would say Neuralink is the

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Some of them are certainly farther along with like 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?

• 52:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Could you see yourself within five years putting a chip, one of those chips, attaching it to your brain?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  No, and I want to give people the right, 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. You know, the obvious beneficiaries of this technology will be people who've suffered from 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 up for like the general purpose Neuralink chip anytime soon at all. And I also don't think that'll be available.

• 53:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Within your lifetime?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Whoa, it's a good question. I think that the technology will be there and it might be safe, but I don't, we still don't know, like, we still don't even know if it's possible to send information from a computer into your brain. We 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, 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.

• 53:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Okay. One more Elon question for you. SpaceX does do a lot of business with the government. I'm curious, I guess I think about it like a lot from like the Twitter perspective, right? Like, it does seem like Elon, well, actually, let me, let me put it this way. Two questions. One, Elon is doing, you know, all this work with the government. 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, we're going over. Do you have five more minutes?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  I'm here for it, man.

• 54:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  You know, I think it's more of a risk. There was a time when, when Elon was dependent on the US government to sort of help fill some, some gaps with SpaceX. Now, the, the, the tables have turned on that one. You know, I think the US 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 of other rockets that are incredibly expensive. I know people dig on, on SpaceX, you know, getting like what they call subsidies from NASA or other parts of the government. Like SpaceX is the biggest

• 55:08Speaker 02

  saver of taxpayer money you can imagine when it comes to space. So anyway, I think Elon's actually like, I think the stuff that happened in Ukraine with Starlink was probably like horrifying for the US government to realize that like, they are at the whims of a person they do not control and who is not have a deep track record of like predictable decision making.

• 55:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  To put it lightly.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  I think there was 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. I noticed Elon doesn't tweet a lot about China, you know, or, or jump on any anti-China.

• 55:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now 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.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  No, I didn't.

• 56:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Put the label on NPR and NPR complained. He took the label off of NPR and the China state media.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, that one's tricky. And I'm sure that probably raises some more like, like Elon's a nation state. Like, think about Tesla even for a second, you know, beyond the cars, think about like the charging network. I 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.

• 56:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Interesting. 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.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  He seems to say that. Yeah. You know, he just, he's,

• 57:07Speaker 02

  he's always had, Elon's kind of got his version of the truth.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  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 affront against that, which is like true and right and like integrity. Even though like probably reasonable people could sort of, you could make a case for either side. As time has gone on, it's just like really clear. It just is sort of, you know, I think he's said as much. It's like gets to him, you know? And, and he's due to the things he says on Twitter, he's become way more polarizing than he used to be.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  And so he gets, he, he gets like 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, or the mileage isn't what you said it was.

• 58:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally different ballgame.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, and I just, I don't think this like plays to sort of his strengths. And, and so, you know, and then I think he realized, you could see, you know, he used to be like a, a kind of moderate Twitter user. And then somewhere roughly around like 2017, 2018, obviously he just like shifted and was like, oh, I don't have to like talk to the media anymore. I can just talk through this thing, you know? And then, 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 like the New York Times Tesla journalist, because I can, why would I not do that, you know? And so we've been on this, this path and, and it's pretty interesting.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh my God, that BBC interview. It would have been nice if the BBC prepared for that interview.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  That that gentleman was not, he was not up to the task. And the, yeah, that was painful. Yes. So I don't know, man. He's got a weird relationship with journals. Like I said, we had a real up and down sort of thing. And, um, and it's, it's just, you know, I think it's like not unusual, probably. Like if you think back to Steve Jobs, he like had his little handpicked reporters and hated everybody else. It's just the like Elon is the first richest person in, in the world, like 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.

• 59:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, yeah, it's his, it's his own doing. You mentioned that you had a falling out with him. You know, I, I guess like I'm, I'm pretty curious, like when, 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. Like, I know you, you know, I'm, I'm sure it's not like, oh God, I have to compromise the truth here. But like, it is this sort of balance being that you have to walk, right?

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, like some of it was solved for me because like after the book, I was just so tired of thinking about him. It's like weird when you do a biography, you start to.

• 1:00:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  It's like you just, things I didn't know before I did a biography, you just, you just get way too into this person's life to the point where you're like dreaming about them.

• 1:01:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Give me a break.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. You just have to think about him all the time. And then he was like, you know, threatening. Legal action against me and things like that. So 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, seemed 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.

• 1:01:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  He does command an army.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  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. Then 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 was, I felt like I had done so much SpaceX and Tesla stuff and was doing the new book. And, and so, I don't know, I got my first big Neuralink piece coming here soon. We'll see, we'll see what happens.

• 1:02:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you're, you did the, what the Bloomberg cover and the headline was not, not Elon's rocket.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Oh, that was, well, and that's about Peter Beck. Yeah, yeah. And Rocket Lab. And well, he didn't, he hasn't berated me for that.

• 1:02:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm sure by the time this comes out, there'll be some tweets. So looking forward to it. Okay, last question for you. You spent, you know, years looking at space. Are you gonna go? I mean, and do you have a desire?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  I actually do. I kind of.

• 1:02:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  I bet, I bet that depending how the Neuralink story comes out, Elon will send you.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  That was always, that's always, I always like, imagined he was just gonna hover a Falcon nine over my house.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  The, you know, I, the stuff that's like existed so far with, with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, where you do this like six minutes, kind of like barely on the edge of space is like, is not really what I would want to do. I, and I, I was hoping to use my connections as a, a well-sourced space reporter to do, be the first journalist out there. I 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, the good people of Earth, I, I would actually do that. SpaceX has flown a lot

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  of rockets successfully. I, I actually would feel pretty confident on that one.

• 1:03:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Thank you. I really had fun. Thanks. I appreciate it.

• 1:03:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, 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 Rajan Rai as always, and Ben Smith, author of Traffic. He's been doing the circuit, but we'll have some first stuff for you. So we hope to see you there. All right, that will do it for us here. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  In this life, you can't win.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  When the world gets you down.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  No!

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Shwing!

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 1:05:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  We're not worthy!

• 1:05:19Speaker 05

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.