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🇺🇸🇯🇵 Japanese Reporter: Why didn't you tell us before starting war with Iran? President Trump: "We wanted surprise. " "Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?"

In an era where anyone can create an app with no coding experience, hardware is a moat

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In late October 2001, a 30-year-old who had just been fired from his own company flew coach to Moscow to buy a nuclear missile. Elon Musk brought two people. Jim Cantrell, an aerospace consultant who had worked on a joint Mars balloon mission for the French Space Agency and the Soviet Union. And Adeo Ressi, his college roommate, who had spent the previous month compiling videos of rockets exploding and staging interventions with Musk’s friends to convince him to stop. The plan was to buy a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile from a Russian company called ISC Kosmotras, gut it, fill it with seeds and nutrient gel, and land a greenhouse on Mars. The entire purpose was a publicity stunt to guilt NASA into funding a real mission. Musk had $180 million from selling PayPal and was willing to spend $20 to $30 million. The Russians quoted $8 million per missile. Musk offered $8 million for two. They laughed. One reportedly spit on him. He came back four months later, February 2002, bringing Michael Griffin, who would later become the head of NASA. Same result. The price kept climbing and the Russians wouldn’t close. On the flight home, Cantrell and Griffin called over the drink cart and started celebrating the fact that they’d made it out of Moscow in winter. Musk sat in front of them, silent, typing on his laptop. After a while he turned around and showed them a spreadsheet. He’d modeled the cost of manufacturing a rocket from scratch. Raw materials, he’d calculated, were about 3% of the typical launch price. The other 97% was margin, bureaucracy, and vertical integration that nobody had attempted. SpaceX incorporated March 14, 2002. First office: a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in El Segundo with a few cubicles. Musk put in $100 million of his own money and personally interviewed the first 3,000 employees. First rocket: Falcon 1, named after the Millennium Falcon. Target price to orbit: $6.9 million when the going rate started at $30 million. First launch, March 2006, failed 25 seconds in. Corroded fuel line nut. Second launch, March 2007, reached 180 miles altitude before the engine cut from fuel slosh. Third launch, August 2008, the first stage bumped the second stage after separation. Residual thrust. A fix that took one line of code. Three failures. Tesla hemorrhaging cash at the same time. Divorce proceedings. Musk later said he was waking from nightmares screaming. 2008 was the worst year of his life. The fourth rocket had no paying customer. Nobody wanted to fly on a vehicle that had exploded three times. The payload was a 364-pound aluminum dummy nicknamed RatSat, built from spare parts in the factory. Musk split his last $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla. If the rocket failed, both companies die. September 28, 2008. Falcon 1 reached orbit. First privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to do so. NASA called six weeks later with a $1.6 billion contract. Musk couldn’t hold the phone. He just said “I love you guys.” SpaceX is now valued at $1.25 trillion after the xAI merger, filing for an IPO targeting $1.75 trillion. It launched over 160 rockets in 2025, more than half of all orbital launches on Earth. Starlink has 9 million subscribers across 150 countries from nearly 10,000 satellites. Twenty-four years ago, his best friend made him watch compilation videos of rockets blowing up to convince him this was insane. He watched every one of them and flew to Moscow anyway.