Blake Scholl

Why does it take six months?

Elon has this thing he calls the idiot index, which is like how much does something cost as a finished part divided by the raw materials cost?

And we have this thing I think is actually far more important.

I call the slacker index.

And the slacker index is how long it takes to get something divided by how much time it actually takes to make it.

And I'll give you a story.

We were ordering some of these turbine blades for our first prototype engine.

And it cost $1 million for one engine's worth of blades.

And it was going to take 180 days to get them.

And these are 3D printed parts.

I was like, OK, how long does it take to actually print a part?

Well, about 24 hours.

Okay, what are we doing the other 179 days?

We ended up saying, we're just going to buy all the production equipment ourselves.

Turns out it was an inventory.

We could get it in a couple of weeks.

We could just print the parts.

For the price of two engines worth of parts, we could buy the machine and make them ourselves.

Wow.

But the whole supply chain is messed up like that.