SpaceX为什么现在上市？马斯克说出了AI时代最大瓶颈

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: 吉米·戴蒙在摩根大同志总部采访马斯克 围绕SpaceX为什么现在要上市 以及马斯克接下来想把Starnink Starship太空AI数据中心芯片制造 怎样把它粘成一条大的产业链 [00:00:30] Speaker 2: Sure, understandable, frankly. [00:00:32] Speaker 3: I'm you, I'm you. And then when you said you wanted to start with rockets, then I rolled my eyes. Sure. And then you did it. And so this is just a great party here and we're celebrating. Sounds awesome. Love you, love you so much. [00:00:51] Speaker 2: Love you too. [00:00:52] Speaker 3: One proud mama. Please. [00:00:56] Speaker 4: So let me, Elon, welcome you. It's a really privilege to have you here on this momentous occasion. It's new for us, but it's an important thing. The trajectory of America. [00:01:04] Speaker 2: I had no idea she was there actually. [00:01:08] Speaker 4: Elon is the Edison of our time. I remember visiting Elon and Tesla like 15 years ago. A whole new way of building cars, vertical integration, which had not been anything remote, what our car companies are doing. Now you have SpaceX. I visited the SpaceX factory in California and it's exceptional to have more than 650 rockets. and you told me one today, putting satellites in space. You have 9,000, almost 10,000 Starlink satellites up there. Starlink 3 is coming, which is a whole new generation, which hopefully will replace some of these undersea cables. It's been an extraordinary 24 years with watching Elon grow over time. And now making a massive leap into the future. So welcome and coming here. Elon, I have 10 questions for you. So I want to make sure I get to each one. Some of them came from folks here. They're all important. But one, just to start, is why SpaceX public now? Because you had choices, you didn't have to. Why now? [00:02:04] Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been asked for many years about taking SpaceX public. So it's probably been, I don't know, almost 10 years that people have been suggesting to me that I should take SpaceX public. We've been positive cash flow for quite a long time, I think, since around 2014, 2015. And we've been self-funding, in fact, in our private equity rounds. They actually have not been fundraising rounds. They've been liquidity rounds for investors and employees because we give everyone at the company stock. And SpaceX has actually bought back stock in most of our sort of funding events. So what's different about now is that it's a number of things. But we are embarking on a significant growth phase, a capital growth phase, where we are going to put in orbit probably 100,000 satellites. Probably over 100,000 satellites just for communications. And these will be the version 3 and beyond versus version 2 and version 1 that are currently in orbit. Version 3 is, depending on how you count it, 10 to 20 times more capable than the version 2 satellite. And there were three chips that the SpaceX chip design team taped out that are specific to this that are far beyond state-of-the-art. Which means it's 100 times more bandwidth than the SpaceX Starlink system currently offers. And also half the latency, because the altitude will be about half altitude. I think it will actually be the highest bandwidth, lowest latency means of communicating. And the future with AI and robots is actually going to require a lot more bandwidth than we currently use. Because you can imagine, what's the bandwidth of a human? Its peak bandwidth of a human is a few hundred bits per second. But bandwidth of a computer can be a trillion bits a second. So the appetite for bandwidth of AI and robots is going to be enormous. And then we're also doing the AI data centers in space. Which is another massive capital endeavor. But I think it will be the primary means by which AI can be expanded. It's increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground. There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard. So if we want to say double the electricity usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts. We would have to build about twice as many power plants. Which I don't think people are, most communities are not super excited about that. But actually if we go to space, we can go far beyond the electricity generation of Earth. In fact, this is going to sound crazy, but you could actually increase harnessed energy by a factor of a million. And still be using much less than a millionth of the sun's energy. So current human civilization uses much less than a trillionth of the sun's energy output. It's just humbling to think about. We're really a tiny, when you see the true size of Earth relative to the sun, we're a tiny dust moat in a vast darkness. And the sun is enormous. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. And most of the remaining 0.2% is Jupiter. Sometimes people ask me, I'm maybe going a little wide-ranging in this answer, because I just asked him why you're doing public now. I'm like, talking about the sun's power output. I'm like, a bit of a long-winded answer. If I was an AI, you might tell me to show, you know, okay. But also, but it is important. Some of these things are important because people start to wonder, what's the future of energy generation? And I can say that it is absolutely solar power. Or maybe a better word for solar power is star power. It's the power of a star. And the crazy thing is that you burnt all mass in the solar system. That was not the sun. The amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. Because the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Even if you teleported two more Jupiters from another, somehow, teleported two more Jupiters from another solar system and burnt them too, the sun would round up to 100%. So it's very much the sun. And you can scale to a million times Earth's economy in space, in terms of harness power, which is a good proxy for economic output, and still be much less than a millionth of the sun's energy. Which is humbling, really, to think about how tiny we are. And this is just one star among many. So I guess the deal would be we're embarking on a massive new growth phase, and we need capital for that. [00:06:36] Speaker 4: Okay. Okay. Number two. [00:06:40] Speaker 2: Another thing is the revenue. I also feel pretty good about the revenue projections. I mean, like before, like, the revenue was a little unstable. But now I feel like the revenue is, like, much more predictable. Yeah. [00:06:55] Speaker 4: Okay. I always learn listening to you, I guarantee you. So, I mean, you, people hear about multi-planetary species, travel to space, and one of the most exciting ideas in human history. Can you explain the bridge that you speak about, I've heard you talk about, from the Earth to the Moon to Mars? Yeah. [00:07:12] Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you don't necessarily have to go through the Moon to get to Mars. I just think that we can build a self-growing city on the Moon faster than we can do so on Mars. And there's also the potential, if you say you want to scale far beyond what you can do from Earth, is that because the Moon has no atmosphere and about one-sixth Earth's gravity, you can use an electromagnetic accelerator, a rail gun or mass driver. Basically, you don't need to use rockets to do AI data centers into deep space from the Moon. You can literally just shoot them like a rail gun type of thing. And you can manufacture the solar and the radiators, solar-powered radiators, on the Moon, from Moon materials. That would allow scaling potentially to beyond a thousand terawatts a year, which is a truly staggering number. Like I think we can do a thousand, I think we can do probably somewhere around one terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth. But we can do a thousand terawatts or more from the Moon. And like I said, we can also make a Moon base. And I think it would be pretty cool if you could vacation on the Moon. That would be the most epic vacation. Not everybody wants to go to the Moon, but I think a lot of people do. I think it would be pretty amazing. Obviously, provided you could do so safely and come back safely and everything. But I think that will be possible in the future. And then Mars is another step beyond that. Mars is a whole planet. And with gravity much closer to that of Earth. And it has an atmosphere, albeit with an atmosphere. And if you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth. Meaning with liquid oceans and life and where you could walk outside without a spacesuit type of thing. So Mars is, I call Mars a fixer-upper. [00:08:56] Speaker 4: You'd be in the hospitality business. [00:08:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. We should have Moon hotels, don't you think? [00:09:02] Speaker 4: Musk hotels. [00:09:05] Speaker 2: It could be other... Actually, you think of us more like, we're kind of like the Union Pacific. When they built the Union Pacific back in the day, people thought they were crazy. Because like, why are you trying to carry all this cargo and people to California? No one's there. But now, California's the biggest state in the country. [00:09:20] Speaker 4: Not for long, but yeah. Yeah, no. [00:09:23] Speaker 2: Admittedly, it's self-defeating. [00:09:25] Speaker 4: So Starship, you built it. Unbelievable ship. I think it's already had 12 flights, I read. But obviously, technically, it's just hard to do. What are some of the breakthroughs you have that people should know about that they don't know about? [00:09:40] Speaker 2: Our webcasts are very good. So I recommend anyone, if they want to learn about Starship, the SpaceX website or any of the Starship livecasts are a great way to learn about it. But really, the fundamental breakthrough of Starship is that it will be the first orbital rocket that is fully reusable. So this might sound like an obvious thing, but because in every other mode of transport, whether that's aircraft, cars, bicycles, horses, you name it, ships, these are all, we take it for granted that they are reusable. An aircraft journey would be very expensive if you had to throw the plane away every time, and that's how rockets have been in the past. But it's very difficult from a technology standpoint to achieve full reusability for a rocket. We've got part of the way there with Falcon 9, but we'll get all the way there with Starship. And once you achieve full reusability, then it's simply the cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant, because now you can reuse all aspects of the vehicle. And the propellant we use for Starship is liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the chiefest propellant you could possibly get. Just literally get oxygen from the air and methane from natural gas. So the cost of propellant for Starship will be less than the cost of jet aviation fuel, which means that you should be able to actually send cargo to space for less than the cost of cargo on an airplane going on a trans-oceanic trip. [00:11:13] Speaker 4: Really well. Starlink, another thing that has been amazing, global communications. We already mentioned Ukraine. You had mentioned to me that V3 would maybe be able to replace some of these cyber cables, which, by the way, is a huge security risk for all of us, because several have already been cut in the Baltic Sea. So what's the next view for Starlink, both V3 and maybe V4? [00:11:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, so the V3 satellite is a dragon, and you can look it up on the internet. As I said, it's 10 to 20 times more capable than V2. It's a very big satellite. In fact, it can only be launched on Starship. It's too big to be launched on any other rocket on Earth. So Starship has a 30-foot diameter cargo bay. And the V3 satellites are, let's see, they're about 7 meters, so about 22 or 23 feet wide. So very big. Like the size of a small bus, essentially. And there's a bunch of technical details about -- we have much bigger phaser-ray antennas. We've got more ground links. We've got more of our laser -- our satellites communicate with each other with lasers that we developed and manufacture. So it's got a lot more lasers and more advanced lasers. It's also got W-band and E-band. These are technical details. But it's got a lot of -- it's like a crazy orbiting radio station. [00:12:37] Speaker 4: And doesn't Starship do 12 of them, or 15 at once? [00:12:42] Speaker 2: It should be able to do 50. [00:12:44] Speaker 4: 50. [00:12:45] Speaker 2: Yeah. Because Starship is -- Starship V3 is aiming to do 100 tons to orbit with full reusability. And then Starship V4, we're aiming for over 200 tons per mission. And then being able to launch every hour. [00:13:01] Speaker 4: Next one, data centers in space. You've been talking about that. Other people have mentioned it. Some people have mentioned it, but obviously it has different technical capabilities. It's colder up there. It's less vibration. But you also got to get the data back to the Earth by some method. I think you mentioned to me, lasers. In good weather and bad. And so how hard is it to do, now that you've looked at it for a while? [00:13:23] Speaker 2: We don't think this is a particularly difficult thing to do. In fact, we think it's easier than our communications satellites. Quite a bit easier than our communications satellites. The Starlink V3 communications satellites is an incredibly complex machine. The AI data center would be much simpler by comparison. Because it's really just solar power plus radiator, some basic equipment for operating the satellite, and then the laser links, which would connect to the Starlink communications constellation, and then back to the ground. The connection would happen no matter what the weather is. Because once you connect via lasers to the Starlink communication constellation, the Starlink communicates the ground with frequencies that are cloud penetrating. [00:14:05] Speaker 4: Now you're talking about building the TeraFab, building chip fabs in New York. What compelled you to do that now with all the other things you're working on? [00:14:17] Speaker 2: What's the limiting factor? What we see as the limiting factor is being able to make chips, both logic, memory, and packaging. It's worth noting that there's not a single high volume computer memory fab in America right now. Zero. There's one being built in Idaho by Micron, but that will not reach volume production until, I believe, 2028. And there's some being built in New York, but they are in, I think, 29 and 30. And this is a tiny fraction of the memory that's needed. And in fact, even if you take the best case assumptions of the memory makers and the logic makers, it is not enough to meet the demand that is anticipated. Which is why you're seeing stocks of Micron go to, I think, 1.2 trillion or some quite high number. So there's just clearly a need for AI logic memory and packaging, AI computers essentially, that is far beyond what even the best case assumptions of the existing fabricators can do. And that's why we need to do the tariff app. Yeah. It's, it seems like essential advice. We will not, there will not be enough chips. [00:15:27] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:15:27] Speaker 4: So I'm going to do one more on some of the stuff you're building and then a little bit more on other issues. AI strategy. You've also bought, took a crack inside into, SpaceX. How does that fit into this platform you're building? [00:15:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. There's, you know, so we do intend with our SpaceX AI satellites to allow people to put whatever GPU or TPU they want. So if NVIDIA GPUs can be put on it, Google TPUs can be put on it, Amazon Traniums or any other chips that people want to put on, can be put on. We will also offer our chips in the future. And I think we also want to offer our software, our AI software as well in the future. But, but it will be such that you can run anyone's AI hardware or software on the Tesla AI satellite, or SpaceX AI satellites. [00:16:17] Speaker 4: So the next three are completely different. I'm going to mention each one. I'll each ask you each one, but one's about his view of patriotism as service to this country. One's about culture and bench. How do you actually build these wonderful companies? Because a lot of people here have that, those issues. And then kind of leadership about, I have a very specific question about that. But first I'll start with patriotism. You've served this country. I know you're a patriot. We've spoken about it. How do you grew your role of being an American patriot helping the United States? [00:16:49] Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm incredibly pro-American. So, and I think it always happened. So, yeah. So, SpaceX does do a lot of work for the, what used to be called the Department of Defense, the Department of War these days. We have a division called Star Shield, which provides military communications. And there's some other. This is a small business. [00:17:12] Speaker 1: This is a small business. This is a small business. May-E. Maske, also Maske's mother, is the mother. Maske's mother, is the mother. She said she was 3 years old. She said she was 3 years old. She said she was a man. She said she was a man. Then Maske said she was a man. She said she was a man. And Maske's mother, she was a man. She was a man. She was a man. She really did it. And then Maske's mother, she said she was a man. 接着把马斯克称为我们这个时代的爱迪生 回顾了特斯拉 SpaceX Starlink的发展 那真正的重点来了 为什么SpaceX现在要上市呢 马斯克的解释是 SpaceX其实早就不缺钱了 他说公司大概从2014 2015年的时候 现金流就是震的 过去那些所谓的融资 很多时候都不是为了给公司投钱 而是给这个员工 还有早期的投资人提供流动性 比如说我们记得 巴伦资本的 罗恩巴伦 他就经常去探访SpaceX的工厂 然后他来买掉这些员工手里面的股份 员工就可以早一点套现 就可以改善生活了 但是就是卖给了这些资本 就是一个员工早期退出的一个通道 提供流动性的一个通道 而不是为了融资筹钱 SpaceX不是一直靠外部输血活着的 而是已经能够自己养活自己 那为什么现在不一样要上市融资呢 因为SpaceX要进入一个新的大资本开支的阶段 这个阶段主要有三件事情 第一 这个Stalink星链要大规模升级到V3的卫星 马斯克说 未来可能要发射超过10万颗通信卫星 V3卫星比VR要强很多 大概是10到20倍的能力 整个Stalink的系统带宽可能要提升到现在的100倍 延迟还会继续下降 因为轨道的高度会更低 它的逻辑是 未来AI和机器人需要的通信带宽会暴增 人类的信息输入和输出很低 但是电脑 机器人 AI系统可以产生极大的数据流量 所以Stalink不只是给人上网 它要变成AI时代的全球高速通信的底座 第二 SpaceX要做太空AI数据中心 这是明确说就要做这个东西 很多人觉得是科幻 马斯克说 地球上扩建电力越来越难 因为没有人愿意在自己的家附近 新建发电厂或者数据中心 但是太空里面有太阳能 理论上可以获得远超地球的能源 他把这个逻辑讲得很大 人类在使用的能量 只有太阳输出的极小的一部分 如果把这个算力放到太空 用太阳能供电就可以突破地球电力的瓶颈 AI的瓶颈不只是芯片 还包括了电力 土地 冷却 审批 社区反对 马斯克想用SpaceX的发射能力 把这个数据中心搬到太空 用太阳能解决电力的问题 用散热板解决散热的问题 用Stalink解决数据传输的问题 第三 大的大火箭 兴建是这一切的基础 Starship最大突破是 完全可重复使用 那些火箭过去很贵 是因为发一次 基本上就要扔一次 Starship如果能够完全可重复利用 进入太空的成本 就会接近燃烧成本 就是燃料的成本而已 他用液氧和液态甲烷 这些燃料本身就很便宜 马斯克甚至说 未来把货物运送上太空 成本可能低于跨洋的飞机运出 所以他的逻辑是 SpaceX上市不是因为没钱 是因为要进入超大规模的建设周期 Starship降低发射成本 Stalink V3提供全球的高速网络 太空AI数据中心提供算力和能源 月球基地以后 还能进一步放大和制造能源的规模 中间还讲到月球和火星 马斯克说 不一定必须通过月球才能够去火星 但是月球可以很快的 更快的建成一个自我增长的基地 因为月球没有大气 重力只有地球的六分之一 可以用电磁发射器 也就是类似的轨道炮 把AI数据中心的组件 从月球发射到太空 不一定每次都要靠火箭 月球还能用本地的材料 制造太阳能板和散热器 这个想法很科幻 但它的意思是 月球将来可能成为太空的工业基地 火星则是更远一步 马斯克把火星比喻成需要装修的星球 意思是它现在不是和人类直接居住 但是它有潜力被改造成像地球一样的环境 后面又讲到Starlink的V3和V4 V3卫星很大 只能由 Starship星舰来发射 Starship V3的目标是完全复用的情况下 把100吨的赫载送入轨道 V4的目标是每次超过200吨 而且要可以做到每小时发射一次 这里重点就不是单客的卫星了 而是发射频率和运力 一旦发射变得像航班一样频繁 太空基础设施建设的速度就会完全变样 关于太空 AI数据中心 马斯克说它反而比通信卫星要更加简单 因为通信卫星它是很复杂的 要处理大量的通信设备 天线激光烈路等等 而 AI数据中心本质上是用太阳能板 散热器计算设备 基础卫星控制系统 再通过激光连接到Stanink的网络 最后传回到地面 他认为这不是特别难 这是非常反直觉的 很多人认为太空数据中心非常难 但是马斯克说 他反而比我们已经有的这些通信卫星 还要更加简单 再往后杰米戴蒙问到 美国在工业化和芯片 马斯克说 现在真正限制 AI发展的因素是芯片 包括推理芯片 内存芯片先进了封装 美国现在没有一个高产量的计算机内存的工厂 所以他提出来Terafab 也就是超大规模的芯片工厂 这里明确了一点 我认为他就提到逻辑推理芯片 再加上内存芯片 那么就不是英伟达那种训练芯片 不是那种最先进制成的那种芯片 就是美光也在做 然后英特尔也在做的这种 推理加上内存的芯片 如果AI需求继续爆发 现有的芯片厂商最好假设也不够 SpaceX 特斯拉 XAI 这套体系可能需要自己补上部分的芯片制造能力 最后 AI战略部分 他说 SpaceX的AI卫星会尽量的开放 客户可以放 英伟达的芯片 谷歌的TPU Amazon的Trainium 或者其他的芯片 而未来SpaceX也会自己提供芯片和AI软件 也就是说 SpaceX不只是卖卫星的带宽 还可能变成太空算力平台 马斯克把SpaceX上市的原因讲得很清楚 他不然要烧的钱太大了 过去 SpaceX靠这个猎鹰9号和Starlink 已经证明了商业模式 接下来 要做的是Starlink V3 Starship的完全复用 太空数据中心 甚至月球的工业基地 这个量级已经不是一家普通的私人公司 靠内部的现金流 慢慢滚动能够解决的 真正关键的是 他把AI的瓶颈 从芯片往外推了一层 现在市场都在讲什么 GPU 高带宽内存 先进封装 戴马斯克说 未来AI还会卡在电力 带宽发射能力和基础设施上 地球上的数据中心越来越难建 电力越来越难以拿到 审批越来越慢 所以SpaceX 他把算力搬到太空 用太阳能供电 用Starlink传输数据 用Starship把成本打下来 SpaceX上市 他卖给市场的故事 不会只是火箭发射 也不会只是卫星互联网 而是AI时代的太空基础设施 这个故事 远比传统航天公司 大得多得多 感谢收看 更多内容 抢先观看 点击下方链接 加入频道会员 我们下期再见