# Carbon fiber needs its own manufacturing methods

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/carbon-fiber-needs-its-own-manufacturing-methods/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Naman Pushp](https://realalpha.app/people/naman-pushp/) · Naman Pushp is founder and CEO of Airbound.
- Host: [Ashlee Vance](https://realalpha.app/people/ashlee-vance/) · CEO, Core Memory · Wrote the best-selling biography Elon Musk; covered tech for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and The New York Times.
- Show: Core Memory
- Episode: [He's Taking On Amazon With A New Kind Of Aircraft](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/), Nov 4, 2026
- Moment: 1:14:11 to 1:18:59 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/carbon-fiber-needs-its-own-manufacturing-methods/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4451

## Quote

> “So what we are doing is we are getting into this arduous journey of figuring out the **zero to one of manufacturing** with carbon fiber”
> — [Naman Pushp](https://realalpha.app/people/naman-pushp/) at [1:17:07](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4627) · Core Memory

## Takeaways

1. Part-making labor is a bigger cost than raw carbon fiber.
2. Metal manufacturing methods don’t translate to carbon fiber.
3. New production techniques could make carbon fiber commonplace.

## About this segment

Naman Pushp argues that carbon fiber’s cost comes mainly from making parts, not the raw material, and that metal processes are the wrong comparison. The material needs new design and production techniques to scale.

From “He's Taking On Amazon With A New Kind Of Aircraft”, Nov 4, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/)

## Transcript

From the transcript Core Memory publishes with the episode.

[1:14:17](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4457) Great question. So I think there's two different layers to this problem. It's worth thinking about carbon fiber, the raw material, which I'm not even talking about the cloth. I'm talking about the raw threads used to make carbon fiber. And then there is making a final carbon fiber part out. When you look at the cost of these threads, they are expensive, don't get me wrong, but they are about 10 times more expensive per kilo than steel.

[1:14:44](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4484) Which like steel is really, really cheap, right? And I think for the scale of carbon fiber, A, you can make an argument that when this ramps up to steel level scale, this will get to similar cost to steel. And the other thing is because of the aggressive weight advantage you can get with carbon fiber. I think you can actually outcompete steel on cost even today with select parts because you are just putting less stuff in it, right?

[1:15:07](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4507) Something that would need 10 kilos of steel we can make with one kilo of carbon fiber and that is much cheaper than 10 kilos of steel. But that's not actually where most of the cost lies. When people say that carbon fiber is expensive, they actually say that making a carbon fiber part is expensive because it needs a lot of human labor in the process. It's got its own issues. My view on this is that carbon fiber is genuinely hard to manufacture with.

[1:15:39](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4539) But I genuinely believe that steel is even harder to manufacture with. Right? Because it's worth just thinking, like, what have we actually done with metals? And it's genuinely insane, right? Like, between Like, tell me, which one seems more reasonable and easy to manufacture, right? Taking this material, liquefying it to over 3000 degrees Celsius, injecting it, and also making sure that, you know, all of this is in an environment without any oxygen, because that fucks things up.

[1:16:16](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4576) Injecting this inside a mold, which again, without any oxygen inside, You need to also ensure you're able to evacuate all of the air from it because if there's an air bubble, it'll screw things up. You need the material to cool consistently and at a very specific rate so that it crystallizes the way you want to. It then solidifies and then you inject it from the mold and you're doing this multiple times a minute.

[1:16:43](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4603) Is that easier or is taking a cloth, putting some glue on it, Pressing it on a surface and letting it cure in an oven easier. We think manufacturing with metals is easy because we have been doing it for the past two centuries. Processes like this. Just describe casting of metals is just second nature. Nobody thinks about how difficult and complex this really is. So what we are doing is we are getting into this arduous journey of figuring out the zero to one of manufacturing with carbon fiber and recognizing that carbon fiber is its own material.

[1:17:24](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4644) If you ask a woodworker to work with metal, he will not be able to make anything for you out of metal. And I think the problem is today because carbon fiber is so new as a material, we're not asking carbon fiber engineers to work with carbon fiber. I'm sure everyone you spoke to is working with metals right now. These are engineers that were trained to design and make things out of metal. And if you show them carbon fiber, they're like, God, this is a shitty material.

[1:17:49](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4669) The same way that if you show a woodworker steel, They'll say, God, this is a shitty material. We need a completely new skill set to be built around carbon fiber. And we need to create new production techniques, a new design language around the material. And that is the only way that we can really make it manufacturable. Do I believe that we can fully automate carbon fiber to the level that we have automated metals and steel?

[1:18:14](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4694) I think we absolutely can, but it will take time. There will be new technologies that need to be developed for it. I just believe that the The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is very well worth it. I believe in a world where, just like how you see steel and metals everywhere around you, there's not a single part of the world you can go to where you don't see metal somewhere. I believe the same thing will happen out of carbon fiber.

[1:18:41](https://realalpha.app/v/vACBrKGKdH4/?t=4721) That, you know, if we have this conversation, maybe, you know, three decades later, you'll be chatting to me on a carbon fiber mic or, you know, this boom will be made out of carbon fiber. Like, there'll be things in this room that are made out of carbon fiber.