There’s been plenty of debate in India over whether the country’s startups are focusing on incremental business models as opposed to getting into sectors like deep tech and manufacturing, but Elon Musk had once given some perspective on why manufacturing should be a choice for smart people.
Back in 2014, Elon Musk had offered a compelling argument for why bright minds should consider careers in manufacturing. He had highlighted the intellectual rigor and complexity involved in building the machines that build other machines, drawing examples from his own experiences at Tesla and SpaceX.
“Very often, people think of manufacturing as just some rote process of making copies,” Musk observed. “Which actually, it isn’t,” he added.
“Manufacturing is building the machine that makes the machine. And if you think the machine is important, well, building the machine that makes the machine is also extremely important,” he said.
Musk also said that manufacturing at scale was often harder than creating a single prototype. “More often than not, what I found is the manufacturing is harder than the original product. For example, at Tesla—we can make one of a car very easily. To make thousands of a car with high reliability and quality and where the cost is affordable is extremely hard.” It’s maybe 10 times harder than just designing and making a prototype, maybe more. (At SpaceX), it may be approaching an order of magnitude harder to manufacture rockets and launch a lot of them than to design one in the first place.”
Musk then set up a challenge for smart people. “So I really think a lot more smart people should be getting into manufacturing. And it’s kind of fun. So, it’s…I don’t know, it’s sort of got a bad name for a while, but it’s really interesting.”
Manufacturing hasn’t been the most sought after fields in several decades, especially in India. The country’s top entrepreneurs have gravitated to internet-based business models, and have done pretty well for themselves — India now has the third highest number of startup unicorns in the world. But increasingly the world, and particularly China, is moving towards deep-tech businesses in fields like AI, robotics and EVs. And if India is to remain competitive — as Union Minister Piyush Goyal says — it would need to get its hands dirty with fields like manufacturing if it wishes to compete.