Elon Musk: Manufacturing Is Underrated and Fun—Smart People Should Do It

Elon Musk: Manufacturing is fun—more smart people should get into it.

“Very often, people think of manufacturing as just some rote process of making copies, which actually it isn't.

Manufacturing is building the machine that makes the machine. If you think the machine is important, building the machine that makes the machine is also extremely important. And more often than not, what I found is that the manufacturing is harder than the original product.

At Tesla, we can make one car very easily, but to make thousands of cars with high reliability and quality and where the cost is affordable is extremely hard. I'd say 10 times harder, maybe more.

And then at SpaceX also, it may be approaching an order of magnitude harder to manufacture rockets and launch a lot of them than to design one in the first place.

So, I really think a lot more smart people should be getting into manufacturing. And it's kind of fun. It's got a bad name for a while, but it's really interesting.”

MIT AeroAstro, October 24, 2014