“The cost for a false positive where we believe it's a moonshot, we run it for many years, and then it turns out not to be is very high, many tens of millions of dollars potentially. The cost of a false negative where it actually is a moonshot, but I rejected it, is zero. … It costs us nothing to say no.”
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
An audience member asked whether there were projects Teller turned down and now regrets. He said no, on the reasoning that there is no shortage of problems or ideas to draw from, so a wrongly rejected one can always be replaced.
Transcript
do I regret it, though? But
do you, but it was something that you reject, you never expected to try. So,
I want to be really clear: the cost for a false positive where we believe it's a moonshot, we run it for many years. And then it turns out not to be is very high, many tens of millions of dollars potentially. The cost of a false negative where it actually is a moonshot, but I rejected it, is zero. As long as you believe that there's an infinite number of problems in the world and an infinite number of creative solutions, we can always just go draw again from the distribution of moonshots. It costs us nothing to say no. So I say no and have no regrets even about the stuff we were wrong about. We probably don't do it fast enough.
Paul asks, what about moonshots and material sciences? Do you see any particular promising fields to inquire in that area?
Well, I mean, side rant, I'm super excited about the new material space. And I think people haven't played out in their minds because there's like such a fervor about the technology and everyone's like, and then we'll make a business out of it. Yeah, that's harder than it sounds. Look how many centuries it took for us to really refine steel. Steel completely changed the world, but not until it was industrialized in a bunch of ways. There are a lot of new materials that if you could make one flake of room temperature superconductor, that would be pretty cool. Nobel Prize, yay. That is not a business. That's like the first 5% of a business. How do you make, you know, thousands of tons a day of that material? How do you make it with very high ductility so that you could put it into like winding wires and things like that? All of the stuff that it takes, the other 95% of the work for new materials or otherwise, that's what it really takes to make a moonshot. So I'm super excited about lots of things like new materials, but I'm kind of focused on the hill after the one that people are focused on, which is how would we scale these up as they show up in the world, not just how do we find them in the first place. All
right, last quick question from the audience and a quick answer, hopefully. So other companies keep trying to replicate X and fail. What's the single hardest piece for them to replicate that you think most outside observers still underestimate?
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