> There's no question that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures," she said. "There's a convergence of what we're all trying to accomplish in the future."
Accomplish a ludicrous valuation above all else?
Accomplish a ludicrous valuation above all else?
Whereas in reality automotive companies do not organically have rocketry divisions.
The only thing I can think that makes any sense at all is Teslas coming with Starlink terminals built in. That seems like a stretch though.
So I guess the "Musk plays 4d chess" view would be that there are obvious synergies between humanoid robots and AI.
Ugh. Honestly, that makes it seem worse than the purely cynical financial engineering takes.
There's perhaps a chance that some part of it might happen someday, but right now the main thing is to distract attention from Tesla's lack of model development and SpaceX's much-vaunted AI business being based on reselling datacentre space at a loss.
[0] This assumes Anthropic and Google actually keep paying for at least 1 year of the signed 3, since they can cancel their contracts easily.
Once upon a time, Robotaxi and Optimus sounded like visionary futuristic ideas. However:
We now live in a world where Waymo exists, and autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promised. No huge latent market exposed. Aslo, Tesla is lagging behind.
We now live in the world where Unitree exists, and is shipping! Again, Tesla is on the back foot. The technology no longer seems quite so futuristic. Disruptors usually disrupt from down-market— that puts BYD cars and Unitree robots in the better position.
With a merger, the joint sci-fi future proposition is colonies on Mars. That one is likely to stay in the future for a long time. From a stock valuation point of view, the goal is for the promise to be forever in the future. That way, the investor thinks the upside is still to come. Once the promise is delivered, it’s time to cash out.
That's because they are still super expensive - more expensive than Uber!
That's probably partly because the technology is very expensive, but also because they have no competition. Both of those will eventually change.
If you are doing vertical integration, there are lots of common technologies and skills.
Electric motors? I imagine there are differences but the super heavy grid fins are electrically actuated (I have heard these motors were sourced from Tesla, though I don't have a great reference for that on hand). The thrust vectoring is also electrically actuated... again, I imagine there are differences of what's on the rocket and what's in the cars... but there are cross over areas of research and engineering.
Also, in a hand-wavy way, rovers share some traits with electric cars; again electric motors, wheels, steering, etc.
So while I don't believe a traditional car company is exactly trying to build space hardened/ready equipment in the normal course of business... it's not as far fetched as some combinations could be.
A majority shareholder.
- self-driving ai stuff (above the) cloud
- starlink connecting to cars instead of cellular (in addition to?)
- robots in space
Why? Well, as Cory Doctorow said at the talk I attended earlier this week, they do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because they can and no one will stop them.