There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and what happens when employees of one company move to another. In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring researchers from open-ai, deepmind etc for 100s of millions for the knowledge in their heads of the recipes which work for making superior LLMs - the knowledge of which is empirical and may take years to discover.
You could also argue that they're hiring people for the general expertise they have in developing frontier LLMs. Distinguishing trade secrets from general knowledge is difficult and employees building the latter to make them more valuable to new employers is an explicit policy goal of US employment law.
FWIW, outside of the chapter bwfan123 references, this entire book is an excellent read. Great stories and even better writing - it's one of my personal faves :)
Lots of space technology is classified as weapons subject to export control. ITAR has plenty of rules about who can see information. US immigration status generally has to be green card or citizen, and country of origin and any second citizenships are considered.
("export control" in this sense really doesn't have to do with moving a physical object out of the country but sharing information, to the extent that a conversation in an elevator could be an export violation. most export violations amount to emails being sent to the wrong person)
When I worked briefly in defense, for example, there would be regular random searches of my stuff as I exited the building and security would wander the building and look at what you left out on your desk while you went to lunch. Entirely seriously they told us not to wear our badge in public if we left the building and not to leave our laptops in our cars because someone might follow us and steal it. Had colleagues who were visiting a foreign country for work have their hotel rooms obviously thoroughly and messily searched while they were out.
They also do national security missions so there are folks there with high clearances.
Thing is that even if you did steal a bunch of information, that doesn't mean you could just copy and be successful. Any one of a million things can go wrong with a self-landing rocket that will cause it to explode, you can't just steal the whole system of operation that keeps these things from happening.
You couldn't steal all of the secrets of a circus performer and suddenly be able to juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle.
I would say the main element of their success is not really in any specific close kept secrets - its in actually committing to reusable rockets and keep working until they had a working system.
While there are some really nice components and clever ideas (Merlin/Raptor engines & very good guidance tech) this all really has been doable for decades in less efficient form.
But so far no one other than Space X has been able to win against all the naysayers who were so sure only single use rockets are ever going to work, get enough funding to build a partial RLV & then operate it successfully as a business.
I don't think it depends on any single technology or a set of them only they have access to - rather that they have been able to persist and see it through, unlike all the other RLV projects that never got funding to go past the paper stage or very simply not viable (Space shuttle).
So, this is admittedly a little tinfoil, but I wouldn't be surprised if Musk is happy for some degree of espionage to happen. If it looked like there was a possibility of China getting this capability first, it would light a fire under the US government to give financial and regulatory assistance to the Starship program.
Musk does seem to think in terms of how much money he can get from the government for his companies. But to be fair, government subsidies are a successful strategy for entrepreneurs who want to make a lot of money.
Maybe they shouldn't be? And I think honest people can have that debate.
But you can't really argue against the effectiveness of government subsidy as a path to prosperity for the guy getting the money.
Despite his faults he does seem to care about the actual lofty mission statements of his companies more than just straight profit. Otherwise, you wouldn't see bizarre things like him directing Tesla to open source all their patents.
I imagine SpaceX having pretty fishbowl conference rooms for customers in the center of everything, with guest network ports just segmented off from the main but using the same hardware. Oh man that would stress me out if I was IT. And of course the '<Customer name> needs to print something off and needs access to the MFCs'. No, you print it out for them, like has been discussed and agreed to and keeps with ITAR. 'No, they need access, and now. Because I'm a sales guy and I won't tell them no' but if they get into/past the MFC, it's all on IT and IT being bad at their job/security, not the sales guy that demanded they get physical access.
Spacex rocketry tech is subject to ITAR regulations. That restricts who they’re allowed to contract with, data encryption and handling, but altogether those regulations are quite bare. It likely wouldn’t be enough to stop a state actor or rogue employees.
I think ITAR is mostly just to stop the outright sale of controlled items to foreign entities, not necessarily to prevent IP theft or corporate espionage.
I worked on an ITAR-controlled camera once and it was drilled into me than even allowing a non-US person to view the output images of the camera constituted an ITAR violation.
Right, which is all well and good if you're a benevolent actor, but ITAR really doesn't do anything at all to stop you from intentionally committing (corporate or actual) espionage if you want to. There should still be controls to prevent you from violating ITAR either accidentally or on purpose.
The controls are you go to jail if you get caught. At least this is what one is told in the mandatory ITAR compliance trainings. That seems to be how the law works for most crimes.
It's an incentive but it's certainly not a control. Controls stop something from happening, they don't respond to it after the fact. Controls would be things like security checkpoints, network monitoring, random searches, that sort of thing.
"You will go to jail if you kill someone" isn't a control against murder.
I don't think what SpaceX is doing is that hard to replicate. There's already competitors launching smaller payloads for smaller costs per weight. Just a matter of time until they creep into SpaceX's market, while SpaceX tries to build a starship inspired by the Futurama rocket.
It is insanely valuable, both commercially and strategically.
If it weren’t that hard to replicate, several countries (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.
I think you vastly underestimate how difficult rocketry is. There’s a reason “rocket science” is colloquially a metaphor for an extremely difficult and technical task.
>If it weren’t that hard to replicate, several countries (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.
There is a 100% chance multiple countries/companies will have replicated it in the next decade. If SpaceX never existed, they likely would have achieved it at the same pace regardless.
This is the same with EVs. If Tesla never rose, the world EV market outside of Tesla would have seen precisely the same rise.
There is a tendency to attribute the early movers with innovation in the inevitable, where we all stand on the shoulders of others and just reach a little higher.
As to the rocket science misnomer, that's a space race hangover where an engineering role was extremely public and celebrated, but in actual reality "rocket science" is a mediocre field with miserable pay and high unemployment.
As to how valuable it is, "insanely"? The world has a fairly finite launch need, such that SpaceX made a whole new business -- Starlink -- to make work for their capacity. Economically the space launch business is relatively minuscule.
I question your EV take. Tesla proved a business model, the technology and path from niche sports car to the best selling car on earth, and now on to the lowest cost per mile robotaxi. Simply knowing that a solution exists and is financially viable, is enough to motivate the competition.
Through almost all of Tesla's existence, its business model was ironically the sale of gasoline vehicles. Because, of course, Tesla's entire business model relied upon selling green credits to incumbent ICE vehicle makers.
So it didn't really prove much of a business model, effectively being parasitic.
>the technology and path from niche sports car to the best selling car on earth,
The overwhelming bulk of the technology advancements that enable modern EVs -- from advances in batteries to cameras to sensors to embedded controllers and CPUs -- is thanks to the smartphone industry. Modern EVs owe infinitely more to those than they do to anything Tesla did.
>knowing that a solution exists and is financially viable, is enough to motivate the competition.
I think of this much like compact fluorescents. Remember those? We all rushed to transition, and then they were absolutely demolished in every metric -- efficiency, colour, and most importantly the amount of environmental contamination when disposed -- by LED lights. I feel like we're going to feel the same about early EVs.
>now on to the lowest cost per mile robotaxi
Is this a serious comment?
Absolutely a serious comment and why Waymo will likely be unable to compete. Tesla is designing their fleet for the lowest cost per mile, and likely the real reason why they have pushed back on Lidar versus camera - humans can drive with binocular (some with just monocular) vision, why use Lidar as it’s more expensive.
If a Waymo car costs $100k and is good for 100k miles, then that’s $1/mile. Tesla’s robotaxi is likely designed for 500k miles at under $0.10/mile. Tesla’s robotaxi will be able to drive me for cheaper than I’ll be able to drive myself. Think of a cab company with scale enough to build their own cabs, optimizing for the lowest cost per mile, and with $0 labor costs. That’s going to be their huge win. And no, I’m not an Elon fan, but I do understand his business plan, and it’s brilliant. And no, I don’t think it’s going to displace personal cars. There’s too much burst demand during rush hour for a peak scaled fleet to be cost effective (I haven’t run the numbers, so even that slight may be incorrect). However I do expect to never have to drive myself once I hit retirement age, and I’ll probably not even own the vehicle. My hope is that there will be a fast follower, able to compete against Tesla, otherwise I’ll be paying Tesla $0.99/mile instead of $0.12/mile.
> The overwhelming bulk of the technology advancements that enable modern EVs -- from advances in batteries to cameras to sensors to embedded controllers and CPUs -- is thanks to the smartphone industry.
Would you point me to a source where I can read about this?
If Tesla never rose, the world EV market outside of Tesla would have seen precisely the same rise.
would have seen the same rise _eventually_. I know from a friend that worked R&D at a major car company that Tesla really lit a fire under then and 'forced' them to push their own EV experiments from proof of concepts to commercial product much faster than they where originally thinking about doing it.
The EV ventures of most automakers are massive money losers (just as it always has been for Tesla outside of selling green credits and subsidies). But for sure they all rushed to get there not because the EVs themselves were valuable, but because of the insanity of the capital markets where Tesla is valued at a trillion dollars at a 200x P/E, while the rest of the market is at like a 7-14x ratio. Everyone wanted some of that irrational hype.
The problem lies in forming and managing such a huge organisation that deals with the problem in an efficient and lean way, not the technical aspects.
The materials science aspect is a challenge, not to produce, but to produce with a sane cost.
The rocket science aspect of things (namely the linearisation of the booster model in order to be able to be solved in constant time by an MPC) is more or less a solved problem.
Coordinating such complex interconnected systems will always remain one.
SpaceX itself replicated the DC-X from the 90's. The reason the DC-X was cancelled was because of the economics. Reusable rockets are a solved problem, with only the economics of it a barrier (see Space Shuttle). SpaceX has to rely on their own investor funding for Starlink to remain a viable entity.
The DC-X was stupid, dumb, insane, bunkers, and a waste of money and not replicable.
"sure, let's put four RL-10 hydrogen engines on it! They are expensive and the worst possible for the low-altitude flights we are going to do so some sucker will believe we can do multi-stage reusable flights to orbit".
"sure, we don't actually need to go to orbit anyway. That was always a dumb idea. Who said we ever wanted to do that? No, suborbital is really useful, we promise. And we are going to do it with a single stage (using hydrogen) cuz we are so smart and the future and everything!"
"sure, let's build a specialized hydrogen tank in a stupid shape."
"sure, let's give the whole single-stage low-altitude rocket a k00l shape that makes it more expensive."
"People knowing it can't be done shouldn't interrupt people doing it wrong."
Funny how many words it takes to say Elon’s dad in fact own a stake in an emerald mine, invest in Elon’s business, and give Elon an incredibly privileged upbringing.
There's a lot of unanswered questions from the article which is seems anyone with even mediocre skills as a journalist should be willing and able to answer.
It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol Musk own 1% or 90%?
* In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk, an engineer, owned a small percentage of an emerald mine and had a couple of good years before the mine went bust and wiped out his investment."
Elon graduated from college less than 10 years later but says he was $100k in debt. Was he actually in debt? Did he spend years paying that off or did he (or someone else) pay it off shortly after in a lump sum or very quickly?
His dad provided $20k of a $200k seed round for Zip2, was the rest also from friends and family or more institutional investors? Did his dad receive equity for that or was it a gift?
Reading through the article again (and a little more closely than before) it doesn't seem Elon had "an incredibly privileged upbringing" but maybe that's a mix of good PR and this now being 40-some years ago? They're referred to as upper middle class but if that's all it takes to be "incredibly privileged" then 90% of the kids born to people reading HN are also incredibly privileged.
Arnold's piece seems to contradict basically everything else in the article so I'm not sure what to make of it, but it also sounds like he made about $350k profit over the lifetime of his ownership in the mine? Certainly not nothing but it's not opulence and it doesn't sound like most (any?) of that made its way to Elon.
> Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.
> Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they'd take the plane to Lake Tanganyika [in Zambia], where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine.
That sounds more privileged than upper middle class to me.
