Designing a rocket is trivial.
There are tons of books you can read, and if you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. Real easy. But making even one of these things and getting it to orbit is very hard.369
It’s the same thing for cars. It’s easy to make a car prototype; it’s hard to do car production.370
This is underappreciated. People think there is a “eureka” moment where you come up with an idea and that’s it. They believe design is the hard part and production is just making copies. That’s completely false.371
At Tesla, we learned a valuable lesson. The production line will move as fast as the slowest and least lucky part of the entire production line. Let’s say there are ten thousand things that have to go right for production to work. If you have 9,999 things working and one that isn’t, that sets the production rate.372
Things move as fast as the least lucky or least competent supplier. Any natural disaster you care to name has happened to our suppliers. A supplier had a factory burn down. An earthquake. A tsunami. Massive hail. A tornado. A ship sank. A shoot-out at the Mexican border. I’m not kidding. That delayed trunk carpet.373
So when scaling SpaceX, we spent ten to one hundred times more effort on designing the manufacturing system than on designing the Raptor engine.374 We built the rockets first and the factory later, because building the production system is the harder thing.375
Design is overrated, and manufacturing is underrated. There is 1,000 percent, maybe 10,000 percent more work that goes into the production system than the product itself.376 Especially for a product with new technology. The difficulty of manufacturing is proportionate to the amount of new technology in the product.377