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I remember in the late 90s and early 00s, reading many a diatribe about how Microsoft was done. They then went on to grow by 10x and are almost hip again.
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
To me, being a futurist brand guy that's well positioned to capture value in the growth of the transition to EVs, development of space, and AI is a pretty fantastic position. And unlike Microsoft, Elon still has big bets to make.
Speaking of which, have you made any bets?
The shift to software-as-a-service significantly increased the amount they could get away with charging for Office. Azure is a new business in the last 10 years and accounts for about 1/2 of Microsoft's profits.
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The advantage of the software industry over hardware is that hardware is bounded by the laws of physics and the costs of making things and moving them around. This brings on a lot more recurring costs— replacing worn out equipment, transportation costs, and the costs to continue to produce more product. Starlink cannot be a money maker without finding ways around entropy and the costs of putting satellites in orbit. Microsoft was and still is doing software. Sure software has development costs, and needs a few plugs and patches, but it doesn’t really cost anything to ship software (and it’s mostly downloaded from a server these days anyway). Software doesn’t wear out except totally on purpose via the company no longer supporting it. This makes growing and making money as a software company a bit easier. If you can keep market share as the default option for most office software, you basically print money by not doing anything to fuck that up. If you’re selling a product, you have to keep the costs down while not losing either quality or market share. It’s not impossible, but harder.
It does, but the downside is that your entire industry can be commoditized by a few people (fewer than people think) or completely destroyed by your competition exiting the market and just releasing their product. Effectively every area Borland was monetizing 30 years ago is completely free now.
Yeah, microsoft's product doesn't wear out naturally, but the other side is, how much more could they have taxed the industry if linux didn't exist? On the other hand, open source hardware has never really gone anywhere.
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Software makes it harder and easier to make money. Profits scale a lot more. But it’s a lot harder to get to initial profitability because the competition to be the one who scales is more fierce.
In the physical world every real estate developer can make a building with positive unlevered free cash flow (harder to create a yield above capital costs but fundamentally the project will have profits).
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The product was stickier than people expected. Turns out 50-60 year olds who are often the boss now don’t feel like saving $100 to learn how to use google sheets. Which means everyone else has to use excel. Even though the products are incredibly similar. But the learning curve was enough to prevent switchability. The product would have obviously been toast if it operated on pure value creation like if it was Coke versus Pepsi and Pepsi was free and Coke costs a $1.
I agree, many billion and trillion dollar empires are built on companies finding the cost of migration unbearable.
Microsoft probably should've sold Office for $1 for the entire 1990s.
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Google Sheets is vastly inferior to Excel for a lot of functionality.
Indeed -- I'd venture that there is no longer in fact any product competitive with Excel in the general business market!
This is a vast improvement (for M$FT) from the 80s/early 90s when there were quite a few spreadsheet options with different pros and cons.
@sliders1234 :
Thing is it's free water vs dollar coke -- both will hydrate you, but one is clearly a different sort of product. (you will note that even though this is in fact the case, Coke sells a lot of Coke!)
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The brilliant innovation was in Azure and especially Office 365, in leveraging their dominance in Office desktop application software to provide a superior and indispensable cloud-based service even as desktops starting becoming less relevant. This made them well-positioned to tax not just computer industry growth, but some fraction of all economic growth, basically the new IBM.
Yeah, they figured out how to tax every white collar job in the developed world like $100 per year, indefinitely.
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I don't think Elon's position in EV's or space is as good as Microsoft's was in computers, and for that matter I don't think EV's or space in general are going to be that big of a deal. I don't have an opinion on AI yet, but then again I don't understand why people are acting like OpenAI == Elon Musk. Does he still have a stake in it? Why was he using "give me my compensation package, or I'll leave Tesla to found an AI company" as an argument?
I have 2 outstanding bets with fellow motteposters about Starship ever making it to orbit. If you absolutely insist, you can join in, I think I can take 1 or 2 more, but I'd like to diversify. You think they'll ever make it to the moon? What about robo-taxis?
I think his early investment in OpenAI shows vision even if he did leave them for dead for not bending their knee to him.
Also, because FSD is amazing? It's pretty reliable! I mean it needs to be, like, 4-5 orders of magnitude more reliable and it's unclear if they can achieve that with their current tech stack but it's still one of the most remarkable AI achievements ever to have a car that can drive itself for an entire day, using only cameras, in any arbitrary environment and maybe only kill one pedestrian. I would absolutely say they're well positioned to capture a portion of an AI market.
I don't get it. Did he get it from them? Has it been a part of how OpenAI got to where they are today? Otherwise what does it have to do with them?
Also if FSD is so amazing, why is he not using it as an argument in quarterly earnings calls, and instead keeps promising actual self-driving at some point in the future (next year, for sure this time!)? Why has he gone so far as to say Tesla is worth nothing without (actual) self-driving?
All I'm saying is the CEO of the company that developed and deployed FSD has an obvious edge in AI and is well positioned to capitalize on it.
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Out of curiosity, why not do put options against $TSLA?
Tesla’s history is a graveyard of short sellers. They could be right eventually but it’s been a bloodbath so far.
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Unless you're going to take a decade-dated one at which point you get annihilated on fees, the whipsaw effect of a meme stock run by somebody with a history of overpromising random in-vogue ideas makes it hard to leverage against.
Ha. Amusingly, I had a friend who was consistently betting against Tesla on short-term puts but he forgot to renew them at some point this last go-around and that was right before the recent huge collapse happened.
Still too hard to bet against Elon.
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Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
I guess the flipside, though, is what the alternative is supposed to be. Like, let's say I conclude you're probably right, and Musk is probably going to fail. Why is that information useful? Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so, beyond bragging rights on the Motte? If he succeeds, I think that's probably a very good thing, and if he fails, I'd agree that's almost certainly a bad thing, but if we knew for sure that he was going to fail, right now, what should we do about it?
Auto-driving seems believable to me, though I imagine regulation's a fairly dangerous threat to any company attempting to do so.
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SpaceX is so far the only really "cool" company that Musk has. Maybe Tesla used to be cool, when EVs were new and they could shatter acceleration records while talking big about "saving the earth." Now they just seem normal- lots of other companies make EVs now too, and we've all had a chance to ride in them and see "OK yeah it's pretty just another car." It's decent but no where near enough to justify it being one of the most valuable companies on earth, ahead of other companies that produce way more money.
SpaceX can still trade on that "we're going to mars!!!!" sci fi aspect. But I think their real value is launching spy sats for the military, and maybe eventually ABM missiles like Brilliant Pebbls, or straight up weapons like "Rods from God." For that, they can pretty much name their price to the military and the US taxpayer.
Ignoring the whole Cyber Truck Fiasco, can the other EV cars be considered competitive with a Tesla from a branding perspective?
https://posts.voronoiapp.com/automotive/Global-BEV-Market-Share-Tesla-Retains-its-1-Spot-for-2023-733
The biggest competitors seem to be Chinese EV cars which sell to a mostly Chinese market. I haven't looked into it much but I have seen several videos about the poor quality of Chinese EV cars. I don't think they will catch on in the Western market.
Factor out China and Tesla is still well far ahead of the competition as of last year.
Their brand is nowhere near as strong as it was 10 years ago. Rivian is the new "cool" EV company, while Kia, Hyundai, Ford, and GM offer perfectly good normie alternatives. They had the dream of being apple, selling for twice the price of anyone else, but I don't see that happening.
I got curious so I found some better stats:
So Tesla has maintained consistentl sales of units of cars in the past 8 quarters while the other players are growing. 52% is still a lot but it doesn't seem like Tesla is able to really grow it's customer acquisition rate. EV in general is also slow to catch on. But in comparison to another individual company Tesla is still far ahead.
In comparison to Apple in 2024:
But this was a drop from when Apple basically had 100% of the market since they were basically the first popular smartphone. I think the fact that EV has a strong competitor in just regular cars (EVs are not that much better than regular gas cars, while smart phones were vastly superior to flip phones) coupled with many other players entering the market before Tesla could grow too big makes your summary correct.
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Cars are just too expensive to be iPhones. Apple hit that perfect price point where people are willing to pay $1000 vs a $300 Android because of the OS, convenience, style, brand and lack of desire to switch, and that means huge margins for Apple. People are not willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla vs $35,000 equivalent tier other car. That’s real money, which many car buyers literally cannot afford.
I think many people would pay that premium if the car could drive itself, but they just can't crack it.
Sure, but regulatory factors mean that most manufacturers will likely be able to develop or buy capable self-driving tech at around the same time, and there’s no real reason why it wouldn’t work in ICE cars either, so Tesla wouldn’t necessarily have a great advantage in that event.
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It seems to me like SpaceX is the stand-out success (reusable rockets are a big deal!) so there's a sort of natural gravitation towards it, perhaps particularly on here. But I think you raise a good point! In the spirit of answering your questions, here's my somewhat reflexive thoughts on the other stuff:
So, overall, based on my assessment, I'd say SpaceX is a huge W, Tesla a solid W so far, Boring company hasn't had it moment yet and may never, and Twitter probably a good thing on balance but the jury's still out on the end results for Musk.
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Well I think most people expect Twitter not to be that valuable.
Tesla is still one of the largest valued companies in the world. It is profitable car company. The latest FSD is amazing. The big question there is whether Elon will still be there if they try to screw him on his earned comp (after a terrible ruling by a Delaware judge).
Also it isn’t as sexy as talking about literally space travel.
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Yes! I wanted to bring it up in this comment but it ended up slipping my mind. This discussion is useful in figuring out where Elon's strengths and weaknesses are. Like you said, from the replies it seems like Falcon 9 and Starlink are his strong points.
Well, the only "short" I'd urge people to do is to avoid falling on any swords for the guy. He (rightfully) won a lot of goodwill with his takeover of Twitter, but I'm worried people are too defensive of him. It might all be very silly in the end, I doubt preventing the establishment to have a gotcha on the contrarians will work, even if it's achievable... but, I dunno, I feel like this will end up being a pretty big egg on some people's faces.
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Everything Musk does depends on the government being fairly friendly. The government is the big customer for SpaceX and Starlink (note that the FCC cut off some grant funds recently). The government is behind a lot of the push for electric cars and solar energy (both Tesla). The Boring Company would make its money from government if it ever made any. Twitter doesn't depend on the government but he makes no money from it thanks to the Left, Inc. boycott. This kinda leaves him in a tough spot -- he depends on government friendliness but he and the Democrats have a somewhat hostile relationship and they are willing to punish him for it. The Republicans, on the other hand, are less likely to push for electric cars and solar energy, though they're fine for SpaceX.
I feel like solar/batteries, specifically, are exempt from a ‘f you, greenies’ push by republicans because government solar programs are so often about giving middle class people free money.
The majority of Republicans with solar seem to be off grid and not eligible for the absurd subsidies given to California Democrats.
"I have solar and get paid $.5/kwh to use the grid as my battery!" <-probably leftist.
"I installed it myself" <-probably conservative.
"I'm off grid and power my home with a salvaged Tesla battery and some microcomputers I had laying around" <-there are two wolves inside you: they are both far-right libertarian congressman Thomas Massie.
This is probably one reason why IRA subsidies now require home inspections from "energy efficiency experts", other than the usual "jobs for the folx" pork.
Edit: this also applies to heat pumps, on a scale of "brags his $25k install is saving the planet", "installed it himself", and "is a real HVAC tech"
I've seen the first from people of both parties.
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Lots of middle-class suburban homeowners get solar as a home improvement, many of them fairly red. As a minor datapoint, I drive all over DFW frequently and see about as many solar panels on roofs in Tarrant county(light red) as Dallas county(deep blue), and only slightly fewer in Denton county(deep red). Exurbs aren't eligible for solar subsidies, just the tax credit, but I still see plenty of panels in exurbs. It's often a reasonable financial decision to install solar panels, even if they're a retarded basis for a power grid.
That's interesting. The majority of people I know here who did solar before the subsidies were fringe Christian survivalists (great folks, very practical, always good for a 5 gallon bucket of 1999-dated dried beans).
Now it's the Subaru and Prius crowd getting paid to put prayer flags on their roofs.
Think I ruined a "friendship" with one when the power went out at his place during the day, and I laughed at him because his grid-tie solar couldn't even power his own house. I may as well have been Mohammed spitting on his pagan idols.
The subsidies and large tax credits are part of what makes it a reasonable financial decision; the thirty percent credit gets to you immediately and you still have the low payment, for one thing.
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Maybe the neocon or Whig wings, but the minarchist and libertarian wings are quite willing to end subsidies.
They're pretty small. Fact of the matter is subsidies for at home solar- which probably benefits Elon Musk more than solar power plants- are fairly popular among the republican base.
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I forget who said it, but some Carl Sagan type science communicator/futurist predicted that whoever mines the first asteroid will be Earth's first trillionaire.
You know what, a quick google later, and it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Make of that what you will.
Casey Handmer writes some on why he doesn't think this is feasible here.
TL;DR: Transport's costly enough that there aren't many things that would be profitable. But for these, the market demand would quickly be saturated, meaning the price would go way down, so there wouldn't be the enormous revenues.
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