Elon Musk poised to reclaim title of world’s richest person + SpaceX MASSIVE Test - February 11, 2023

Originally aired : February 11, 2023

Elon Musk is on the cusp of reclaiming his position as the world’s richest person after a surge in Tesla’s share price.

The static fire test took place on Thursday, February 9, with the Booster 7 prototype standing tall on the launch mount at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. As hoped, there were plenty of jaw-dropping visuals to go around and plenty to think about as SpaceX pushes forward with its ambitious Starship program.

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Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Hi and welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast where we cover
Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neurolink, Boring Company, and
everything else Elon Musk. So please take a second hit the
subscribe button so you can get daily updates about everything
Elon Musk on your podcast. Player of choice Elon Musk, the
billionaire entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla, is poised to

(00:25):
reclaim the title of the world'srichest person after a surge in
Tesla stock price. Musk has earned $45 billion this
year, and on Thursday, Tesla's shares rose for the 8th
consecutive day, putting Musk within touching distance of
overtaking French luxury magnateBernard Arnault.
In December, Arnault surpassed Musk as the world's richest

(00:47):
person when investors lost confidence in Tesla and grew
concerned about Musk's focus on Twitter, which he acquired for
$44 billion in October of last year.
However, Tesla shares have rallied in recent weeks and have
almost doubled since the beginning of the year, reversing
most of the 65% drop they suffered in 2022.

(01:08):
And on Thursday, the shares climbed by almost 5%, putting
Musk's net worth at over $185 billion compared to our nose
$187 billion. And the rise in Tesla share
price comes after the company unveiled better than expected
quarterly results last month, and other high growth stocks

(01:28):
have also jumped due to the prospect of lower than expected
interest rates. Despite selling off billions of
dollars to Finance's acquisitionof Twitter, Musk remains Tesla's
largest shareholder and is pledged not to sell his shares
for approximately 2 more years. In addition to Tesla's recent
success, Musk also announced this week that he will soon

(01:51):
present the third version of Tesla's master plan, which will
outline the path to a fully sustainable energy future for
Earth. Previous version of the planet
have focused on taking electric cars, mainstream autonomous
technology and home energy storage.
The company has also cut vehicleprices while it plans to start

(02:11):
manufacturing its long-awaited cyber truck by the end of the
year. Tesla's rising stock price
suggests that investors has shrugged off concerns about
Musk's management of Twitter, which had been seen as a
distraction in the social network, experiencing hours of
glitches earlier this week as itattempted to introduce new
features. But Musk's 13% stake in Tesla is

(02:34):
the largest source of his wealth, which is also made-up of
shares in SpaceX and Twitter. He recently claimed that Twitter
was on a course to profitabilityafter cutting thousands of staff
last year, saying that he had tosave Twitter from bankruptcy.
Space XS Starship Super Heavy Booster 7 conducted A preflight

(02:54):
test, a static fire test of 31 of the 33 Raptor engines
recently, and the hot fire demo started about 4:14 PM and lasted
for about 10 seconds. It's considered a full duration
test of these engines. Musk pointed out in a tweet that

(03:16):
the team turned off one of the engines prior to the mass
ignition and 1 engine stopped itself.
That only 31 engines fired out of the 33.
Elon said, but still enough engines to reach orbit.
So this is a success on Spacex'spart because they didn't know
exactly what was going to be happening during the static fire

(03:37):
test. They knew everything down to
what was going to happen to the engines, how they were going to
fire it, how everything was going to work up until the
engines actually static fired. But after that, they had some
calculations that they ran. They figured it would work,
right? But you never know with
rocketry. It's literally the hardest
engineering task on the face of the Earth.

(03:59):
And the next step for this rocket, possibly orbit.
SpaceX didn't disclose much information beyond what's going
to be happening after the staticfire of the 33 engines of the
Raptor 2 engines. But we're assuming if everything
went right, the next step for booster 7 is to stack the
Starship on top of it. This is the physical stuff

(04:21):
that's happening. Stack the Starship ship on top
of it. That's about 160 feet tall,
meaning that the whole stacked ship will be about 400 plus feet
tall all together. And they're going to be doing an
orbital flight test in March or April.
Now, what happens between now and March or April?
Well, they have a deluge system at Starbase that just came in

(04:44):
from Florida and they're building it out as we speak,
night and day, 24/7. This static fire only lasted 10
minutes, but they're doing cleanup for the next few hours
afterwards and the next few daysthey're making sure that all the
data points have been reached and have been sent out to the
appropriate committees. Well, it may be NASA, and it is
most positively the FAA, becausethe FAA will comb through this

(05:08):
data and make sure that SpaceX is going to have a safe and
reliable flight when they do theorbital flight test.
Doesn't seem to be a problem with the FAA, doesn't seem to be
a problem with any of these Raptor engines.
So it seems like the FAA is probably going to push this
thing straight through. Now, if you think about it, the

(05:29):
Raptors have about 51 or 510,000lbs of thrust each.
The whole rocket, £15.8 million of thrust in the SLS rocket.
The Space Launch System, NASA's most powerful rocket, only has
£8.8 million of thrust on lift off.

(05:51):
So Spacex's Starship is about double that.
And there's a series of clamps and restraints that held this
rocket down during the Starship's static fire test.
Now, SpaceX has been known to docrazy things at Star base.
They've launched Starships into a suborbital flight and landed

(06:14):
them and also exploded them whenthey landed.
But now they're going a little bit more cautious.
We have Gwynn Shotwell, who's the COO of SpaceX, She's also
the president of SpaceX, said she didn't expect the pad to
have the same issues that they had with the 14 engine static
fire test. And because the company
performed some work on the pad and she didn't really tell

(06:36):
exactly what that was. But she from things that we've
seen, they've added new reinforced concrete to the pad.
And from what we saw from the videos from numerous sources,
the blast from behind the launchmount shows that there was about
a, there was a huge mass of smoke that billowed out of this
thing. And it didn't blow up the

(06:58):
launchpad though. And that's a success because
every static fire before this, the 11 engine static fire and
the 14 engine static fire rippedthat thing to shreds.
And there was concrete flying for miles from that pad all
around * base and all around theBoca Chica area because it's so

(07:19):
powerful. These rockets are so powerful
that it would basically an ignite the the concrete and
blast it up into the air. Numerous birds.
There was a huge flock of birds in front of this booster right
before they blasted it in the environmental study that was
happening last year. They put a precaution in there

(07:41):
saying that we can't control wildlife.
They do their own thing and thisis not going to be a stopper for
SpaceX in the future. And locally, some people had to
leave their homes. There's an over pressure notice
that's handed out to the people of Boca Chica Village.
And during the static fire test,everybody has to leave the area.

(08:02):
And if it's a long duration test, if there's if they're
going to be a couple days, they'll put them up in a hotel.
But this didn't happen to be a long test.
It was only 10 seconds. And at about 4:00 in the
afternoon, everything was good to go after a 10 second static
fire test. So the FAA, everything looks

(08:23):
good, the locals, everything looks good.
Everyone's back in their homes. And now we just have to wait for
the FAA to approve SpaceX for the orbital flight test of the
Starship. Now, when I was talking about
this earlier, the the gigantic smoke cloud that happened during
this static fire test, gigantic exhaust, it dissipated pretty

(08:48):
easily into the Texas sky. And this is the methane, you
know, it's methane fuel in this.There's some carbon dioxide and
water vapor, and these are the byproducts of that.
And there is more water vapor than there is methane in the air
from these things. So it didn't really damage
anything in the environment. So this is a partial test,

(09:09):
though this isn't a full test ofall 33 Raptor engines.
So we're not exactly sure what the environmental impact will be
or if it will affect any of the clouds nearby or any of the
wildlife nearby with any of thiscarbon dioxide and water, water
vapor. But the area is wide open.

(09:29):
So I believe it's going to dissipate more than it in a in a
closed area. So we'll see what happens with
the first environmental checks after this with the FAA.
If they approve them, then SpaceX should in theory be able
to watch this Starship in the next few months.
And this is a massive, massive deal because this is literally

(09:51):
the most powerful rocket that will ever be built.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's company, is building something
similar, but not quite as big, not quite as powerful.
SpaceX fully reusable. Blue Origin kind of wants to
make it fully reusable. They're on that path, but they
haven't shown anything it to thepublic that shows that they're

(10:13):
on the right path to make it fully reusable.
Now, Spacex's COO, Gwynn Shotwell said something
interesting the other day at a conference.
She said before they fly people,they want to have 102 hundred
plus of these launches of these test launches before they put
people in the Starship. So they're going to ramp up

(10:35):
production of these starships and they can only do five of
these launches per year in Texas, if I'm not mistaken.
I may be a little bit off there,but I'm, I think there's 5 to 15
launches per year. I'll have to get back to you on
that one. So if they need to do hundreds
of launches, if they can prove that they can do 5 successful

(11:00):
launches per year, 10 successfullaunches per year, they may move
the production and everything else over to Kennedy Space
Center in Florida, where they could have a, a faster cadence,
a faster turn around for these ships.
And once they start catching these on the robotic gigantic
meccazilla arms on the launch tower, it's going to be a turn

(11:22):
around time of hours, not days. And they'll be able to launch
numerous rockets per day if theyhave flight clearance, because
they could possibly have the theKennedy Space Center for the
whole day. They could sanction off for a 24
hour period to have Kennedy Space Center reserved for

(11:45):
launches of the rocket. And that's usually how it goes.
If there's a Falcon 9 rocket launching from Kennedy Space
Center, more than likely it's the only rocket launching that
day. So if they have numerous
rockets, they could possibly work with NASA and work with the
FAA to get numerous flights per day.
And if that's going to happen, they're going to get to 100

(12:06):
flights relatively quickly. And Artemis 3, that's going to
be the first time that people goback to the moon since the
Apollo program. SpaceX has to be ready.
So they're going to do hundreds of flights before that.
And in a few years, Artemis 2 will be going around the moon
and coming back with people inside.

(12:27):
And SpaceX by that time should have had at least 50 to 100
flights and get ready. Because when people get inside
of the Starship and start orbiting the Earth, it's going
to be a amazing, amazing change in spaceflight.
Twitter is reportedly making millions of dollars from just a

(12:48):
small number of its most notorious users, according to a
recent study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the
CCDH. The report estimates that the
social media giant could generate up to $19,000,000 in
annual advertising revenue from just 10 accounts that were
previously banned from the platform for promoting hateful

(13:08):
content and dangerous conspiracies.
The study analyzed the engagement of these 10 accounts,
which include prominent figures associated with the extremism
and conspiracy theory groups such as Andrew Tate, Andrew
Anglin, Robert Malone, and The Gateway Pundit.
Over a 40 day period in Decemberand January, the CCDH analyzed

(13:30):
nearly 10,000 tweets from these accounts and found that they
received a combined total of 54,000,000 impressions on an
average day. Projecting this average across a
year, the accounts could potentially reach nearly 20
billion impressions. To determine the ad revenue
these impressions might generatefor Twitter, the CCDH created 3

(13:51):
new Twitter accounts that followed only the 10 users named
in the report. The authors found that the ads
appeared about once every 6.7 tweets, and using data from
analysts firm Brandwatch estimated that Twitter ads cost
an average of $6.46 per 1000 impressions.
Based on this information, the CCDH calculated that the 10

(14:13):
accounts could generate up to $19,000,000 in annual ad
revenue. And the report highlights the
value that a small number of highly polarizing accounts can
have for a platform like Twitter.
It also sheds light on the potential profits Twitter can
make by reinstating even more controversial users, as the
company has recently announced plans to allow previously banned

(14:36):
users to appeal their suspensions.
However, Twitter's advertising business has suffered majorly
since the takeover by Elon Musk,with high profile advertisers
pulling back from the platform and revenue down by as much as
40%, according to Platformer. The report also notes several
instances when ads from prominent advertisers appeared

(14:57):
next to offensive and inflammatory posts from the
users, in which raise questions about Twitter's commitment to
responsible advertising. So the CCDH report confirms that
Twitter is displaying ads next to toxic accounts that promote
hateful views and falsehoods, despite the fact that these
individuals are well known for their harmful content.

(15:18):
And the findings highlight the need for social media companies
to be more accountable and responsible when it comes to the
content they promote and the adsthat they display.
Thank you so much for listening to the Elon Musk Podcast.
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(15:38):
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