Original Author: Marc Andreessen, Michael McGuiness, a16z
Translation by: Yu Eleven
Elon Musk's compensation plan at SpaceX revolves around two goals.
The first goal is: if the company's valuation reaches $7.5 trillion and a permanent human colony of at least 1 million people is established on Mars, he will receive the first bonus.
The second goal is: if SpaceX operates data centers in space and has these data centers consume at least 100 terawatts of power—this number is 1,000 times greater than the total power consumption of all data centers on Earth—he will receive the second bonus.
If neither goal is achieved, Musk gets nothing other than his annual salary of $54,080, which he has been receiving since 2019.
The board members who signed off on this compensation plan have witnessed one thing over the past two decades:
Musk has made seemingly impossible predictions about SpaceX time and again, and those predictions have repeatedly come true.
He said SpaceX would send humans into orbit—before that, no private company had accomplished that. Now, SpaceX regularly transports astronauts for NASA.
He claimed SpaceX would land and reuse orbital-class rockets—prior to that, the entire industry viewed boosters as expendable. Now, SpaceX has successfully recovered and reused boosters hundreds of times.
He predicted that a satellite internet business could be worth tens of billions of dollars—before that, satellite internet was nearly the graveyard of bankrupt enterprises. Now, Starlink’s revenue has grown from zero to $11.4 billion within a few years.
These predictions are often aggressive in their timelines, but they have almost never missed the mark in terms of direction.
And SpaceX's original mission, written in 2002, is to make humanity a multi-planet species.
So, the board has tied his compensation to this very mission.
If this mission sounds like science fiction, it may be because it indeed comes from science fiction.
Iain M. Banks and the Blueprint of "The Culture"
Iain M. Banks spent twenty-five years writing a world called "The Culture."
By most reasonable standards, it could be considered the best utopian society ever imagined by humanity.
There, humans live alongside super-intelligent AIs known as Minds. Minds run small, world-like massive orbital habitats. The relationship between humans and AIs is not one of servitude or competition but a partnership.
No one is forced to work.
No one goes hungry.
Minds handle the incredible computational load required to operate the space cities.
And humans are responsible for continuing to be human.
The act of being human itself turns out to be a full-time job.
The three autonomous drones used by SpaceX to recover Falcon 9 boosters are named after conscious starships from Banks's novels:
- Of Course I Still Love You
- Just Read the Instructions
- A Shortfall of Gravitas
In an interview at the 2023 UK AI Safety Summit, Musk was asked: what should a good AI future look like?
He responded:
"Banks's 'Culture' series is the best imagination of a future with AI to date. Nothing comes close to helping you understand what a relatively utopian, or progressive utopian, AI future would be."
He has been signaling with the names of those landing pads what exactly he wants to build.
Caption: “Of Course I Still Love You” caught the Falcon 9 first stage booster on April 8, 2016. This was the first successful drone ship landing in history, marking the moment reusable orbital-class space travel transitioned from theory to reality. The name of this ship comes from a conscious starship in Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' series. (Image: SpaceX)
But "The Culture" is not a frictionless paradise.
Banks's novels are filled with war, intrigue, and moral complexities. It is a utopia because civilization has solved the preconditions for survival well enough that trillions of humans can finally care for what Banks calls the "truly important things in life":
Exercising, games, love, studying dead languages, barbaric societies, impossible questions, and climbing mountains without a safety net.
This future has four prerequisites.
First, the ability to access a meaningful portion of a star's energy output—this is several orders of magnitude higher than the energy produced by human civilization today.
Second, large-scale physical intelligence: machines capable of building, mining, refining, and repairing anything without human intervention, and capable of doing so anywhere.
Third, cheap digital intelligence that surpasses biological intelligence.
Fourth, the ability to cheaply, frequently, and reliably send mass from Earth. Because all of the above cannot be scaled using only Earth itself.
Working Backwards from the Future
Most analyses of SpaceX are done looking forward from the present:
Rockets, satellites, contracts, revenues.
But a more useful method to see what is truly happening is to start from the endpoint and work backward.
Martian Cities
The operational goal is:
In the lifetime of today’s living generation, to establish a self-sufficient city of 1 million people on Mars.
The real difficulty lies in "self-sufficiency."
This means: if Earth stops sending shipments, the city must still survive.
It must produce everything itself:
Food, water, air, energy, medicine, machines, and ultimately, more humans.
According to SpaceX's own estimates, to send 1 million people and millions of tons of goods to Mars within decades will require thousands of Starship flights; during each transfer window, over ten launches must occur daily.
These windows are determined by the Earth-Mars orbital mechanics, are only a few weeks wide, and only open once every 26 months.
Caption: SpaceX rendering of a Martian city. (Image: SpaceX)
Lunar Cities
A lunar city is a closer, easier rehearsal.
There is ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar South Pole, while certain ridges can receive continuous sunlight, making it naturally suitable for establishing a base.
But Musk is not just talking about a research outpost.
He envisions building factories on the Moon to produce AI satellites and launching them one by one into space with mass drivers.
Mass drivers are also a concept Musk borrowed from science fiction. They are electromagnetic launch systems that use the Moon's only one-sixth gravity and lack of atmosphere to fling solar satellites into deep space on an industrial scale.
These satellites can be manufactured on the Moon, as lunar regolith contains about 20% silicon and 10% aluminum by weight—these two are the main inputs for solar panels and satellite structures.
Musk explained: "If you want to surpass an annual scale of 1 terawatt, you must go to the Moon."
Caption: SpaceX rendering of a mass driver located at Moonbase Alpha, used to launch AI satellites, i.e., data centers, into orbit. (Image: SpaceX)
Orbital Data Centers
Musk bets that:
Years from now, economically, the most suitable place for AI data centers will be space.
The bottleneck for AI is energy. Outside of China, energy supply is growing very little, while the demand for AI computing power is growing exponentially.
Solar panels in orbit provide power that is 4 to 10 times greater than the same solar panels on the ground. The specific multiple depends on how sunny the ground location is.
The reason is simple:
In space, there is no atmosphere, no day-night cycles, no clouds, and no seasons.
NASA figured this out decades ago. Now, rockets have finally become cheap enough to make it a reality.
Musk expects that in five years, the AI computing power SpaceX launches into orbit annually will exceed the total installed computing power on Earth.
That is why SpaceX merged with xAI in February.
Rockets and intelligence are becoming the same issue.
Starship: The Vehicle of Everything Upstream
Starship is the vehicle that makes everything upstream possible.
Starship V3, which had its maiden flight this year, is the largest and most powerful rocket built by humans. It is taller than a 40-story building and has more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V, which took astronauts to the Moon.
According to NASA, the cost of accessing orbit has historically been about $18,500 per kilogram.
In 2010, the first Falcon 9 reduced that cost by about 85%, bringing it down to approximately $2,700 per kilogram.
In 2018, Falcon Heavy further brought it down to about $1,400 per kilogram.
Starship, as the first fully and rapidly reusable spacecraft in the world, aims to reduce that cost further to between $100 and $500 per kilogram.
The past launches costing billions of dollars are turning into businesses in the tens of millions of dollars.
Starlink: The Cash Wheel
Starlink is the cash wheel that helps pay for everything else.
According to SpaceX’s IPO documents, the connectivity business segment—almost entirely Starlink—is projected to bring in $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, a year-over-year growth of about 50%, with an adjusted EBITDA profit margin exceeding 60%.
As of March 2026, Starlink has 10.3 million users in 164 countries, operating on over 9,600 satellites.
Starlink was initially just a side project to fill the company's own launch capacity; now, it is becoming one of the great consumer businesses in history.
In 2019, when a16z was conducting due diligence on SpaceX, several people told us that this economic model would never work.
The reason was that the terminals needed for Starlink's antennas required technology previously used only for the F-22 fighter jets and Navy destroyers, and such technology had never been mass-produced for consumers.
The first batch of terminals by SpaceX cost about $3,000 to manufacture but were sold for only $499.
But they eventually brought down the manufacturing costs and proved the skeptics wrong.
Falcon 9: The Main Rocket Buying Time for Everything Else
Falcon 9 is the main rocket that buys time for everything else.
It is the only mass-produced reusable orbital-class booster on Earth. A single booster can typically fly more than twenty times before retirement.
In 2025, SpaceX launched 83% of the total mass sent to orbit globally.
Despite the half-century head start of others, SpaceX's effective payload launched into orbit has now surpassed the combined total of all other forces in the world.
This is the stack from top to bottom.
Generations from now, a "Culture"-style future will reside at the top.
Falcon 9 and Starlink sit at the very bottom, paying today’s bills.
Each layer enables the next layer.
SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen described the feeling inside the company:
“[Musk] created a culture: you set an initial goal that seems extremely bold, and then step by step, you find yourself moving towards something absolutely achievable…”
For example, as for going to Mars. When I first came in 2011, if anyone brought up Mars and multi-planetary species, others would roll their eyes. Now when we talk about it, the reaction has become: ‘What year?’
I think what’s most impressive about Elon is that he set these goals and built a fantastic business model around each piece of intellectual property needed to achieve the ultimate goal.”
The Idiot Index and the Algorithm
Musk did not initially intend to start a rocket company.
In 2001, 30-year-old Musk was thinking about what to do after selling PayPal.
He had always been interested in space. When he went looking for NASA's plans to send humans to Mars, he was surprised to find that there was no such plan at all.
So he designed a plan:
To send a small greenhouse to Mars and transmit photos back to Earth.
His idea was: if people saw a green sprout appear on the desolate red planet, perhaps it would reignite public interest in space and inspire political will to fund a real Mars program.
He just needed a rocket to send the greenhouse over.
Later that year, he went to Moscow to try to buy a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile. This was the first of two trips to Moscow.
It is said that those meetings were filled with vodka and posturing.
Musk's best friend from the University of Pennsylvania, Adeo Ressi, went with him. He told Esquire in 2012:
“We would walk into a small room with a bottle of vodka in front of each of us.”
The Russians did not take Musk seriously.
At one point, a chief designer even spat on Musk and his team in contempt.
The second trip to Moscow was in February. Musk asked how much a missile would cost.
The answer was: $8 million each.
Musk countered: two for $8 million.
Musk's space advisor, Jim Cantrell, remembers the response was something like:
“Young man, no.”
And implied he had no money whatsoever.
Musk figured they weren’t serious, and got up to leave.
Cantrell thought this trip was over.
On the return flight, he and Mike Griffin, who would later become NASA administrator and was also traveling as an advisor, shared a drink and toasted their escape from Moscow.
Musk was sitting in the row in front of them, hunched over looking at his laptop.
Then he turned around:
“Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”
He showed them a spreadsheet listing the raw materials needed to build the rocket: aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber, and the cost of each material.
The materials cost represented only 2% of the quote.
As Musk later put it:
“It was obvious; you just need to figure out smart ways to combine these materials into the shape of a rocket.”
Within months, Musk decided to risk $100 million to start a rocket company. This was over half of the approximately $180 million he received from selling PayPal.
And that’s how SpaceX was founded in a warehouse in El Segundo, California.
He invited five people to form the founding team.
Three turned him down, including Cantrell and Griffin.
The two who said yes were:
- Tom Mueller, who later became Vice President of Propulsion Systems and the first employee of the company;
- Chris Thompson, the second employee, who was responsible for operations and production.
Musk joked later that:
“In 2002, SpaceX was basically just carpets and a Mexican mariachi band. That’s it. You can see I’m a dancing machine.”
Years later, Musk referred to the diagnostic tool behind that spreadsheet as the "idiot index."
If the cost of a part is significantly higher than the cost of its raw materials, either you're an idiot or you're working with one.
It sounds like a joke, but it's the foundation of SpaceX's strategy.
Every part SpaceX procures accompanies an "idiot index" calculation.
One of the early legendary stories of the company involves Steve Davis.
Davis joined SpaceX directly after graduating from Stanford and was the company’s 14th employee. His task was to procure an actuator to control the steering of the upper stage on the Falcon 1 rocket.
When he reported that traditional aerospace suppliers priced it at $120,000, Musk laughed.
Musk told him the complexity of that part wasn’t more than that of a garage door opener and gave him a budget of $5,000 to create it from scratch.
According to biographer Ashlee Vance, Davis spent nine months iterating on the design, ultimately creating a usable actuator for only $3,900.
When Davis sent the breakdown of this victory in technology to Musk, he received a response with just two letters:
“Ok.”
To push the idiot index toward its theoretical limit, you must vertically integrate and control the process end-to-end.
But vertical integration incurs fixed costs that are only worthwhile at high production volumes.
And to achieve high production volumes in the rocket business, you must break the operating norms that have existed in the industry.
Traditional launch service providers like ULA and Arianespace treat each mission as a custom project.
Customers specify the orbit, payload, and integration requirements, and the launch service provider designs a custom mission around the satellite.
This model assumes:
There are only a few launches each year, and the cost per mission is extremely high.
It prevents scalable manufacturing from happening.
SpaceX does the opposite.
They published a Falcon user's guide that defined the precise specifications of the rocket and told customers:
Please design your satellites to fit our rocket.
At the time, this was considered extremely radical and caused SpaceX to lose some early business.
But it opened up the manufacturing flywheel.
Standardization and reusability reinforce each other.
Because each Falcon 9 is the same, recovered boosters can be turned back into a finished, qualified product ready to fly again.
The first Falcon 9 booster to fly twice was completed in 2017.
By 2020, a single booster was able to fly five times.
By 2021, it could fly ten times.
Today, the record holder has flown 35 times.
This reusability has changed the economics of space and makes it hard to see how competitors can catch up.
In 2021, Musk estimated that in the best-case scenario, the marginal launch cost of Falcon 9 to put 15 tons of payload into orbit (excluding indirect costs) was about $15 million. He stated this was about one-half to one-third the cost of alternatives.
Today, SpaceX launches a rocket with reusable boosters every two to three days, while competitors can only launch a handful of custom rockets each year.
But SpaceX's advantage is not just scale economics, vertical integration, and better strategy.
It also includes speed and culture.
Traditional aerospace companies eliminate uncertainty through analysis.
NASA once politely described Boeing’s commercial crew program:
"Established mature systems engineering approaches, with upfront engineering research and analysis to mature system design before manufacturing and testing."
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