The Idiot Index
In 2001, Elon Musk flew to Russia to buy refurbished ICBMs. He wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars, cheaply, as a publicity stunt to reignite public interest in space travel. The Russians quoted him a price that he thought was absurd, and he flew home without a rocket.
A young Elon Musk at SpaceX
On the flight back, he did the math and thought about what a rocket is actually made of: aluminium, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. He realised that the raw materials that go into a rocket cost around 2% of what SpaceX customers were being charged for a finished one. If materials were 2% of the price, the other 98% was everyone else's margin, decades of an industry that had never been forced to get cheaper.
That calculation is the reason SpaceX exists. And, according to Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography, Musk started using a phrase to run the company: the Idiot Index.
This is a preview of a post from my blog. Read the full post with the interactive charts →
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