I do feel sorry for Elon Musk. I would say to him, the government is a very negative experience, full of losers.  And that fixing it will take a lot more work than he can give in short spurts.  People who choose to work for the government are quite different from those drawn to the private sector.  Government is filled with entitled losers who want to make a lot of money off taxpayers without the risk of earning it themselves.  Therefore, it will require significant reform, which is just getting started with the Trump administration.  But it will take decades to unwind the mess that has been given to us.  And I can see that Elon Musk began his DOGE campaign with a lot of bright ideas.  But making the cuts permanent that he has identified isn’t as easy as it would be at one of his companies.  The government is full of parasites, and you have to play the long game with them.  Elon Musk can do the world a great deal of good if he focuses on what made him great to begin with.  He needs to be back at SpaceX every day, sending Starships into space every three weeks.  It has been evident that he has been absent from those companies; they have been experiencing a decline.  The job of a CEO is often not well-defined; they create the culture.  It’s not the work they do but the culture they make in their wake.  And SpaceX has slipped significantly since Elon has been frequenting the White House daily since Trump’s return to office.  It will take more than CEO stunts to save the government.  However, some business success on the frontier of innovation is the best way that Elon Musk can make the world a better place and establish a civilization to save by going to Mars. 

I thought it was astonishingly short-sighted for Disney-run ABC to characterize the Starship 9 mission that launched this past week as a series of failed missions.  The process SpaceX uses for data collection involves launching these Starships to see what works and what doesn’t, so that every configuration of the problem can be witnessed and designed, modified in real-time.  Drawing on extensive experience with this very issue in the aerospace industry, the world is fundamentally flawed in its approach to manufacturing processes.  And SpaceX has taken a noticeably different approach, one that is much more akin to the Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin many years ago.  The world has learned the wrong lessons and incorporated them into its management systems, and the entire industry is in desperate need of an overhaul.  And if Elon Musk wants to change and save the world, he can do it most effectively with Tesla and SpaceX.  The big secret is that you can’t put engineers in a room and get everything right the first time, which is the assumption in aerospace that began with NASA and the need to avoid any accidents that would become public relations nightmares.  When you can automate flights, you can afford to have launches to measure cause and effect, and approach the whole process of technology development much more aggressively.  Even though Starship 9, which launched at the end of May 2025, burned up during re-entry, as did the booster rocket, much of what SpaceX needed to achieve was successful, leading to the technical adjustments that need to be made at the engineering level. 

However, the way the industry operates now is very risk-averse, and, of course, the least risky thing to do is to do nothing, which is why things are so slow in aerospace and why cost overruns are so common.  And when ABC says that the previous SpaceX missions were failures, they are speaking from the vantage point of the administrative state —the kind of world that the government has created for us, with over-regulation and a world shaped by insurance industry lobbyists.  From that world, exploding Starships are a bad thing.  For the innovative SpaceX world, they provide a lot of information, and when you look at the rate of innovation that is needed to build Starships, you need to collect a lot of data to get repeatability outside of engineering tolerances, because until you see all those inventions working together, there is no way to know how stable a process is.  When it came to the NASA approach, you get lucky with a design and then never deviate from it, fearing the unknown, and that is essentially how they built the space program.  SpaceX is seeking complete, automated redundancy that remains reliable after thousands of trips.  To achieve that, SpaceX needs to be launching a new Starship every week, which is why Elon Musk has been so crucial.  Since he has been at the White House, doing good work that often goes unappreciated, SpaceX has been addressing engine bay leaks that have compromised spaceflight, and the Starships have been exploding.  Not a great way to have a space program.  However, the best thing about this most recent Starship 9 mission was that much of it had become so commonplace now.  The Starship was able to undergo stage separation and space flight, solving many of the problems it previously had, so now the other lingering issues can be addressed. 

The best engineering is to do things and fix things as you see problems emerge.  And for something as complicated as Starship, it will take Elon Musk to foster a productive culture among the many great people at SpaceX, guiding them toward corrective actions to address the numerous problems that must be solved for stable space flight.  It’s fantastic that we’ve had only 9 Starship missions and that they’ve made getting them into space so routine.  Now, getting re-entry right, with stable space flight, will be the key, and it will take a full-time Elon Musk to pull it off.  However, when it comes to cutting the deficit, given the current state of affairs, the first step in fixing the American economy is to achieve magnificent growth through new market sectors.  The SpaceX Starship is the best way to reach that point.  China, in their wildest imaginations, won’t be able to copy SpaceX, because they don’t have a person like Elon Musk to act as the CEO.  Just like other considerations of the administrative state, people cannot be swapped out.  Great people are irreplaceable; when they take vacations or are absent from work, things don’t run smoothly.  Exceptionalism comes from unique people.  Not process controls that allow losers in life to be just as good as winners.  Exceptionalism matters, and Elon Musk needs to stay on the cutting edge at SpaceX for it to continue its success.  And if he wants to save the world, he can do it best in the private sector.  DOGE will still be a good idea that will do good work.  But it’s going to be a slow boil.  What we need most is Starship, and missions going to space so routinely that people take it for granted, as usual.  And with the recent Starship 9 mission, that is becoming the standard.  Normal is launching the biggest rocket humanity has ever produced into space, routinely.  Now, getting it to do what we need it to do time and time again is the next challenge, which is very close to being completed. 

Rich Hoffman

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