I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.
> It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants.
I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
I'm not a fan of musk, but I think the fundamentals have turned on Tesla. Cheaper chinese EVs are coming out in two of the biggest 3 markets and traditional auto makers are catching up in the US. A replacement level CEO would probably be making similar decisions.
> Cheaper chinese EVs are coming out in two of the biggest 3 markets
I expect this to be ephemeral due to geopolitics and the local politics. Chinese domestic consumption is lackluster compared to their production and they are “product dumping” on the rest of the world that have domestic manufacturing and varying levels of preexisting market protectionism. That and China’s belligerent geopolitical alliance increasingly clashing with the West and in their regions means that stiff(er) tariffs are imminent.
Outside of maybe the UK, I don't think Europe is nearly as dead set on the adversarial relationship with China and you can't buy retail Chinese EVs right now in the US.
The demand reduction is also a problem for Tesla.
But one thing Chinese EV companies have is existing products in the lowest market segments. Tesla is giving up on a car cheaper than the 3 and I don't think that's a particularly unique Musk decision. American public companies are allergic to low margin products.
The US is only really deploying broad sanctions on technology that might have applications in military and security competition. And sanctions are proving hard to really enforce if the entities involved never use dollars.
EU defense and government contractors might not have a lot of agency, but plenty of other businesses do depending on the country.
> I don't think Europe is nearly as dead set on the adversarial relationship with China
Market protectionism is sufficient to provide pushback on Chinese product dumping in Europe in the medium term. However, as the global order deteriorates and countries have to pick sides most of the EU is unlikely to choose to align with a Russian ally.
They've been extremely selective in their targeting of Chinese firms accused of selling weapons to Russia. And last year Macron directly said europe has no interest in backing the US's position on Taiwan. I think as the global situation deteriorates, they are likely to want to focus on situations closer to the continent. I haven't heard if they are planning on stopping BYD from opening a factory in Hungary.
Opening a factory is a different matter. If the factory contains significant capital (ie isn’t just glorified assembly) then much of the manufacturing capacity is domestic as is the labor which is a method of avoiding tariffs that host countries tend to favor. The calculus is different at that point and could only affect the imported parts or raw materials if applicable. In a pinch such manufacturing can be nationalized and repurposed.
Most countries don’t have enough domestic auto production to care enough not to buy cheap Chinese EVs. Most people don’t think about politics when they can buy a nice car for $20k.
> Most countries don’t have enough domestic auto production to care
Countries without domestic production are also not major consumer markets, and when aggregated into major trading blocks like the EU their most influential member states do have domestic production and a strong protectionist bent so I expect they’ll also be strong armed into a protectionist umbrella. It also makes sense for Europe as a whole to not have its domestic production product dumped into oblivion as globalization crumbles.
That really isn’t true. Australia is a major consumer market, SEA has money to buy things even if they don’t make many cars outside of maybe Thailand. Ceding the car markets of just the non major countries is enough to create huge waves in the industry. The EU and the USA can lockdown its market with Japan, but that’s about it.
Australia is more than nothing, but a country with 26 million people and about 1.2 million new car sales annually isn’t tipping the scales of the global market too much. They’re also geopolitically aligned with the USA so the medium to long term outlook is negative for China trade relations.
> SEA has money to buy things even if they don’t make many cars outside of maybe Thailand
Every region has money to buy things and their business isn’t worthless, but SEA isn’t a big consumer market yet and isn’t going to be making up for the loss of/reductions in the big consumer markets. There’s only so many sales that the region can absorb even if we don’t factor in the fact that the region is adjacent to and frequently the target of Chinese military belligerence recently and for centuries. There is increasing regional geopolitical alignment with the USA albeit at arms length.
We definitely aren’t making enemies in SEA, but we are not close enough friends yet that they are willing to take a hit on getting cheap cars from China. Australia also, they are basically the only country that will follow us anywhere to war (eg Vietnam), but even they will buy BYD over Ford if the price is right.
The board prepared the package and shareholders voted on it. Most of the targets were hit. Then an activist investor sued claiming that the board is beholden to musk and did not disclose that. The court agreed. Before a plan to vote on moving to Texas, the deal is now up for vote again with the court ruling attached.The stock price is also now below some of the targets previously achieved.
If you are a shrewd investor, you have to balance the impact of the options on your assets vs the signal you send to not just musk but any future CEO. But realistically, shareholders probably don't believe news that Tesla is going under, know that he rarely hits his goals for getting to market, and probably liked musk's leadership when the stock price rose.
On one hand the judge admits the company was teetering on insolvency, and one of the most shorted stocks, then turns around and says generating $600B in company value was “not ambitious or hard to achieve”.
She also questions whether Elon was really necessary to the performance of the company.
Not sure about Tesla or automotive, but in electronics manufacturing a stop ship will usually stop the line shortly. Your inputs could be used elsewhere so you don’t want to build up unsellable WIP stock.
They're likely continuing manufacturing for everything except for the part of the line where the interior drive controls are assembled, depending on how much stockpile space they have (which should be a lot with how big GF Texas is). If they already have a fix that they is just a modification they would continue full line manufacturing then stage the completed vehicles for when the modification is ready.
Chances are they _really_ want to make a fix that can be done at service centers, so that they don't need to ship all the CT awaiting delivery back to the factory for the fix.
Tesla at least has in the past continued manufacturing vehicles knowing that they need rework or are missing a part, and will then do that work while they are sitting in the inventory lot or at the service center before delivery.
The current president is quite left wing, at least by US standards. He was also president before. Then was charged with corruption. Then the chargers were annulled. I don't think you are going to get particularly unbiased answers about him from a predominately US website.
Turkey and India have more aligned interests. This is just a foreigner doing political agitation for a more business friendly regime under a pretext of "freedom of speech".
I haven't seen anything about the larger architecture, but I think the value of grok is going to come from it's cheap access to twitter data for RAG etc.
reply