How SpaceX Works

The gist

1. Materials cost just 2% of traditional rocket prices; the other 98% comes from markups and custom designs, making cost a systems problem.
2. SpaceX builds 80% of hardware internally to avoid stacked supplier margins of 15 to 30% per tier and speed up iteration cycles.
3. Running 40 or more Falcon 9 flights a year created learning curves like car manufacturing, making each flight cheaper than the last.
4. Five cultural habits guide execution, including attacking one bottleneck at a time, deleting unnecessary requirements, and treating every failure as data.