Elon Musk repeatedly one-upped his execs on SpaceX’s first earnings call

埃隆·马斯克在 SpaceX 首次财报电话会议上屡次“加码”高管言论

Elon Musk spent SpaceX’s first earnings call making some out-of-this-world claims about the company’s business and future prospects, while his fellow executives kept trying to bring his ideas closer to Earth — providing a hint of what’s to come now that his rocket-launching, compute-leasing, satellite-based telecom is public. 在 SpaceX 的首次财报电话会议上，埃隆·马斯克发表了一些关于公司业务和未来前景的“天外之音”，而他的高管同事们则不断试图将这些想法拉回现实。这为这家集火箭发射、算力租赁和卫星通信于一体的公司在上市后的未来走向提供了一些线索。

The conference call, held Tuesday, was the latest in a years-long succession of Musk making outrageous promises that his executives then have to make more digestible for the investing public — like at Tesla, where a recent analysis by TechCrunch showed that the world’s richest man is increasingly focused on futuristic topics while his colleagues spend their time talking about the actual business of selling cars. 周二举行的这次电话会议，是马斯克多年来一系列惊人承诺的最新一例。这些承诺往往需要他的高管们进行“消化”，使其更容易被投资大众所接受。正如在特斯拉的情况一样，TechCrunch 最近的一项分析显示，这位世界首富越来越专注于未来主义话题，而他的同事们则忙于讨论销售汽车的实际业务。

Let’s start with one of the biggest ideas Musk floated on the call: that he expects SpaceX’s Starlink service to “deliver a majority of the world’s internet” in “less than 10 years.” Musk made the comment in the context of SpaceX preparing to launch the first “V3” versions of its Starlink satellites, which have much higher bandwidth than previous versions. 让我们从马斯克在电话会议上提出的最大胆的想法之一开始：他预计 SpaceX 的星链（Starlink）服务将在“不到 10 年内”提供“全球大部分地区的互联网服务”。马斯克是在 SpaceX 准备发射首批“V3”版本星链卫星的背景下发表这一评论的，这些卫星的带宽比之前的版本高得多。

Here’s what he said: It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but like, it’s not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. So this is, you know, important to bear in mind, and it’s not in like the infinity future. It’s, you know, less than 10 years. 他是这样说的：“人们可能很难理解这一点，但星链在某个时间点提供全球大部分互联网服务并非不可能，至少在我们获准运营的国家是这样，而这涵盖了绝大多数国家。所以，记住这一点很重要，这并不是遥不可及的未来，而是不到 10 年的时间。”

Contrast that with what chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said just a few minutes later, emphasis mine: The significant amount of capacity we’re able to add to the Starlink constellation from the V3 satellites will enable us to continue providing even better service — and it’s pretty great already — but to do so while serving more and more customers over the world. In fact, in the years ahead, we expect Starlink will represent a significant portion of global internet traffic, which Elon also talked about. 对比一下首席运营官格温·肖特韦尔（Gwynne Shotwell）几分钟后的发言（重点由我标注）： “V3 卫星为星链星座增加的巨大容量，将使我们能够继续提供更好的服务——尽管目前已经非常出色——同时服务全球越来越多的客户。事实上，在未来几年，我们预计星链将占据全球互联网流量的很大一部分，这也是埃隆提到的。”

It’s a far more lawyered-up claim to make, even though it’s still obviously ambitious. But that was not the only instance where Musk optimistically diverged. At one point, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen offered investors one of the few new financial targets discussed on the call. Johnsen was highlighting SpaceX’s relatively new business of renting out compute power to other AI players, which has helped the company generate billions in fresh, fast cash. 这是一个经过深思熟虑、措辞严谨的说法，尽管它显然依然雄心勃勃。但这并非马斯克表现出乐观分歧的唯一例子。在会议中，SpaceX 首席财务官布雷特·约翰森（Bret Johnsen）向投资者提出了会议讨论的少数几个新财务目标之一。约翰森强调了 SpaceX 相对较新的业务——向其他 AI 玩家出租算力，这已帮助公司产生了数十亿美元的快速现金流。

I’ll once again emphasize the big promise Johnsen made during his prepared remarks, and note how carefully he phrased it. It’s a very hedged and quite specific claim that he’s making. It’s clearly meant to excite investors while also leaving room for the company to avoid legal exposure if it misses the projection: 我再次强调约翰森在准备好的发言中所做出的重大承诺，并请注意他措辞的谨慎。他所做的陈述非常审慎且具体。这显然旨在激励投资者，同时也为公司在未能达到预期时避免法律风险留出了余地：

Looking ahead, we continue to see robust demand in all three of our business segments, but in particular in our cloud services arrangements. We see increasingly favorable economics with each agreement we sign, and as Elon mentioned, we expect the supply-demand imbalance in the compute market to continue. The current economics have translated into a less than one-year payback on our new capital deployments for compute. For example, in the first few weeks of the third quarter, we’ve already contracted an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue over a six month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year. We believe this puts us on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year, based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year. “展望未来，我们看到三个业务部门的需求依然强劲，尤其是在云服务领域。随着我们签署的每一份协议，经济效益都在不断改善。正如埃隆所提到的，我们预计算力市场的供需失衡将持续。目前的经济效益意味着我们新的算力资本部署可以在不到一年内回本。例如，在第三季度的最初几周，我们已经签订了额外 67 亿美元的云服务收入合同，这些收入将在今年 10 月开始的六个月内逐步增加。我们相信，基于今年 12 月的预期收入，加上 Cursor 的贡献，我们有望在今年年底达到 1000 亿美元的 ARR（年度经常性收入）。”

Musk, 20 minutes later, bulldozed that carefully constructed statement before immediately inflating it: To be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That’s… that’s what we would achieve if we basically did nothing. So like, you know, I think it may be higher than that. It probably will be higher than that. 20 分钟后，马斯克推翻了这一精心构建的陈述，并立即将其“注水”：“明确一点，12 月份 1000 亿美元的 ARR 毫无疑问。那是……那是我们即便什么都不做也能达到的水平。所以，我认为可能会更高。很可能会更高。”

Musk also riffed on another major prediction about overall revenue on the call, pumping up a goal that SpaceX laid out just two months ago in its IPO documents: It’s probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching a trillion dollars in revenue, not ARR, but revenue, have moved up from 2031 to 2030. So prior to the IPO, the financial projections we had were reaching a trillion dollars in in revenue in 2031. We now expect that to be in 2030. And there’s a non-zero chance of that being in 2029. 马斯克还在电话会议上对另一个关于总收入的重大预测进行了发挥，提高了 SpaceX 仅在两个月前 IPO 文件中设定的目标：“可能还值得一提的是，我们内部对实现万亿美元收入（不是 ARR，而是总收入）的预测已从 2031 年提前到了 2030 年。在 IPO 之前，我们的财务预测是 2031 年达到万亿收入。现在我们预计是 2030 年。而且，甚至有一定概率在 2029 年实现。”

The pattern kept repeating throughout the call. A shareholder question about progress on the “human landing system” that SpaceX is developing for NASA’s Artemis moon missions using Starship, prompted Musk to all but claim that the prototype rocket will be ready to fly people by the end of next year. He later said SpaceX would be flying Starship rockets once a day, or “possibly more,” by this time next year. 这种模式在整个电话会议中不断重复。当有股东询问 SpaceX 为 NASA 阿耳忒弥斯（Artemis）登月任务开发的“载人着陆系统”（使用星舰）的进展时，马斯克几乎断言该原型火箭将在明年年底前准备好载人飞行。他随后表示，到明年这个时候，SpaceX 将每天发射一次星舰，甚至“可能更多”。

Shotwell immediately followed Musk’s comments about human flight to clarify that SpaceX is still focused on NASA-mandated milestones, and offered a more vague (but still ambitious) goal (again, emphasis mine) that “we want to put boots on the ground, boots on the moon, in 2028.” 肖特韦尔在马斯克关于载人飞行的评论后立即跟进，澄清 SpaceX 仍专注于 NASA 规定的里程碑，并提出了一个更模糊（但依然雄心勃勃）的目标（重点再次由我标注）：“我们希望在 2028 年实现登月。”

None of that will happen unless SpaceX can prove that Starship can fly without failing and, crucially, become fully reusable. A huge part of making it reusable is the heat shield that keeps the Starship upper stage from exploding when it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. The company saw the best results from its improved heat shield on the most recent Starship test flight, which splashed down in the Indian Ocean last month and is still intact. But before the rocket stage had even been recovered, Musk was willing to claim on Tuesday that he’d “consider the heat shield problem solved at this point.” 除非 SpaceX 能证明星舰可以成功飞行且至关重要的是实现完全可重复使用，否则这一切都不会发生。实现可重复使用的关键在于隔热罩，它能防止星舰上面级在重返大气层时爆炸。在最近一次星舰试飞中，改进后的隔热罩表现最佳，该火箭上个月溅落在印度洋且保持完好。但在火箭级甚至还没被回收之前，马斯克周二就宣称他“认为隔热罩问题目前已经解决”。

Musk has made many wild promises about SpaceX that never came true, such as when he said in 2016 that he’d put humans on Mars in six years. 马斯克曾对 SpaceX 做出过许多从未实现的疯狂承诺，例如他在 2016 年曾说要在六年内将人类送上火星。