Elon Musk has a track record of calling hard problems early.
In a February 2026 interview, he warned: “Those who have lived in software land don’t realize they’re about to have a hard lesson in hardware.”
By late August, SpaceX confirmed it was bringing the casting of gas-turbine blades and vanes in-house — the single biggest bottleneck for new natural-gas power plants needed to feed AI data centers. Musk said the move could bring turbines online up to 18 months faster.
Today he put it even more bluntly: SpaceX has “a super cracked team that is outperforming the rest of the world by an order of magnitude in mass to orbit — and even we find it very difficult.”
Hardware doesn’t care about demos, funding rounds, or slide decks. The teams that actually build the hard stuff keep winning.
What a legend.