Elon Musk says Chinese economy will surpass the US by two or three times

[beijingwalker]

Elon Musk says Chinese economy will surpass the US by two or three times
PUBLISHED FRI, FEB 28 202012:26 PM EST

Jessica Bursztynsky

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and Tesla Inc., speaks during an event at the SpaceX launch facility in Cameron County, Texas, U.S., on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019.
Bronte Wittpenn | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted Friday that the Chinese economy will surpass the United States’ by at least two-fold.

“A thing that will feel pretty strange is the Chinese economy is probably going to be at least twice as big as the United States’ economy, maybe three times,” Musk said while speaking at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida.

The two nations already are the world’s two largest economies. The U.S. dominates with $21.44 trillion in nominal GDP and makes up one-fourth of the world economy. China, however, is the fastest-growing trillion-dollar economy with GDP of $14.14 trillion, according to the Nasdaq.

Because China’s population is about four times larger than the United States, Musk said it would lower the barrier for China to surpass in economic size. The United States has roughly 330 million people, according to the U.S. Census, while China has more than 1.3 billion people.

“It would only require getting to a GDP per capita half the size the United States for their economy to be twice the size of ours,” Musk said.

China overtaking the United States economy would likely cause increased tension between the two countries working through trade tensions.

“The foundation of war is economics,” Musk said. “If you’re not innovative, you’re going to lose.”

While speaking on Friday, Musk repeatedly stressed the importance of innovation in the United States in order to maintain its competitive edge. When it comes to space, Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, said that the U.S. is at risk of falling behind.

“This is not something that was a risk in times past but is a risk now,” Musk said. “I have zero doubt that if the United States doesn’t seek innovation in space it will be second in space.”

CNBC reported last week that SpaceX is seeking to raise about $250 million at a $36 billion valuation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/mus...ill-surpass-the-us-by-two-or-three-times.html

 

[UKBengali]

He is not exactly saying anything that is not widely known.

 

[beijingwalker]

Elon Musk: ‘Radical Innovation’ Needed To Beat China Militarily
"The fighter jet era has passed," says Musk. The future, he averred, is "autonomous drone warfare."
By THERESA HITCHENS
on February 28, 2020 at 3:13 PM

Elon Musk with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Thompson at Air Force Pitch Day in November 2019

AFA 2020: China’s economy is going to eventually reach “at least twice” the size of the America economy, says SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, so the only way for the United States to remain the dominant military power is for the US to rapidly innovate.

“The foundation of war is economics,” Musk told an audience here in Orlando at the annual Air Force Association meeting today. “”In the absence of radical innovation, the US will be militarily second.”

Musk, who made his first fortune with Paypal, spoke on a panel with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Thompson, commander of Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), about fostering innovation. The two were reprising their ‘fireside chat’ at the service’s Space Pitch Days held in San Francisco in November.

Musk explained that China “has a lot of smart, hardworking people that are going to do a lot of great things,” in spite of the country’s authoritarian political system.

Musk’s words echoed those of Will Roper, Air Force acquisition czar, who spoke earlier today. Roper, who has said that innovation is the next battlefield, said that ensuring rapid, ubiquitous machine-to-machine connectivity is critical to winning the 21st Century war.

“If we can’t move at digital speed, we’ve lost,” he said bluntly.

SpaceX, Roper said, is one of only three industry “unicorns” — startups that have morphed into profitable firms — that DoD investment has helped to foster. The other two are data management firm Palantir, and Anduril Industries, an artificial intelligence startup with a primary focus on the defense market.

“That is the saddest thing I can say — only three,” Roper bemoaned.

For this reason, he said, the Air Force is putting a lot of emphasis on Air Force Ventures (AFVentures) which as I reported on Tuesday is pumping increased investment into commercial startups to try to drive innovative products that also bring military benefits. Over the past 18 months, Roper said, the Air Force has invested $360 million in commercial startups, that it has “turned into a billion” dollars via harnessing matching funds from private venture capital firms.

Over the next year, Roper told reporters afterwards, he hopes to see AFVentures pump more than $500 million into the dual-use industry ecosystem.

Musk, for his part, said the key to successful innovation is putting into place an incentive structure that rewards innovators, does not punish those who try to innovate and fail, but that does punish those who fail to try.

Musk said he believes the hardest part of innovation is not coming up with the idea or the technology– it is producing it at scale. One way of ensuring that an innovative product can be massed produced is to build the production line concurrently as you develop the design, he explained. This allows you to figure out what pieces of the product are easy to mass produce and what pieces are either really hard, or impossible, to build at scale. This knowledge, then, feeds back into the next design iteration until you reach a final design that is new and different, but also easy to mass produce.

This is what SpaceX did, for example, with its Starlink constellation, designed to create a space-based Internet using massive numbers (up to 30,000) of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit.

The Air Force is experimenting with Starlink under Air Force Research Laboratory’s Global Lightning program. under the exercises Roper has stood up to test out technologies related to the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) that is intended to enable Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

Asked by Thompson what he sees as the future of air warfare, Musk hesitated slightly before saying bluntly that the “fighter jet era has passed.” Instead, he said, the “really dangerous” future is “autonomous drone warfare.” He rushed to explain that this isn’t a future he wants, and called on the military to maintain “human in the loop” control over drones that were targeting anything but other drones.

Finally, Musk said that the “holy grail” of space the is full reusability of future rockets. While SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is partially reusable, the company’s goal is to build a fully reusable rocket — working under a program it calls Grasshopper. Such a rocket is key to enabling Musk’s long-standing dream of colonizing Mars, but he also argued that it is important for future US “leadership in space.”

“We’ve got to make Star Fleet happen,” Musk said. “We should want the sci-fi futures, the good sci-fi futures, to become real.”
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/elon-musk-radical-innovation-needed-to-beat-china-militarily/

 

[riscol]

Elon: US at risk of falling behind in space

He was not joking around