Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied.
He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
We're witnessing a bailout and downloading of costs, at scale. Whether or not one buys into whatever the vision of these companies are - it's clear, there's interdealing.
Tesla theoretically now owns a chunk of xAI... whose valuation will no doubt increase due to the internalized SpaceX acquisition. Append to this a future IPO, as discussed in the artice, presumably an eventual premium of 20-50% (reasonable, 14% purely for the ibankers when this will happen)... yields to an interesting bailout situation.
To me, the real question is why. The $2B from Tesla can't possibly move the needle for any party involved in this transaction. If this were to be work 50x as opposed to a potential 50% upside (hell, make it 2x for argument's sake) it still doesn't compute. So what's the actual reason.
> Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US
So would most of EU car makers in Europe. China is not playing by the same rules and everyone with car manufacturing domestically is slamming them with tariffs.
How isn't China playing by the same rules? Every country subsidises and supports industry it thinks is important, surely nothing would stop Germany from investing into Volkswagen and BMW or the US from investing into Ford the same way China invests into BYD?
Environmental regulations around rare earth minerals needed for the batteries. China loosens them thus making it cheaper to mine which starves out all global competition that actually has tighter regulations which protect the environment.
Then of course there is cost of living and salary; both of which are lower in China compared to where most legacy auto manufacturers are.
So China can pay their employees less and pollute the environment more in order to create an affordable, very high quality vehicle.
I can understand a small amount of tariffs to help "even the playing field" but not the 100% tariff or whatever was proposed against BYD
Hm, how are tariffs state subsidies? They're a tax on some products to give other products a competitive edge, but that feels different from a subsidy?
And what does that have to do with China playing by different rules than the west?
If not for the tariffs, the domestic company would have to charge lower prices to make sales. Thus tariffs provide domestic companies with additional revenue from domestic consumers.
Tariffs and subsidies both help companies succeed, but they're not the same thing. For one, tariffs can only really help your country's companies be competitive within your country. Subsidies can help your companies be competitive globally.
He's broken pretty much all the other financial rules.... for example, the amount of blatant self-dealing he gets away with is staggering.
As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats.
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX
Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.
With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
Why would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment.
Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
It has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public.
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
It's all BS. There is no viable way to put industrial levels of compute into a space based platform that can work within the severe thermal, power, mass/volume, radiation, reliability, and economic demands. It is just stupid smoke blowing to separate idiot investors from their money. J-school grads don't have a clue what they're parroting about.
it wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible
Google, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume.
yup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass.
Was doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be
AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.
Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.
The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun.
Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.
The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.
Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.
Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.
I've been thinking about this recently as I hear it often. Would people who want to buy a car in the Tesla price range really choose a slightly cheaper Chinese EV if those were available?
Personally I have a hard time believing this. But even if you had similarly priced Chinese options, I would guess the main reason for buying a Tesla is not just because you want an EV. While a Tesla will be a reliable baseline EV, surely the reason you (or at least I) would buy one is for the supervised self-driving feature.
Chinese EVs self-drive too. You can buy level 3 cars today that are cheaper, have more features, better build quality, and better reliability. Having just been in China.. yeah it’s not close they are way ahead of us and the gap is growing fast.
BYD are just affordable and maybe reliable, regarding maintenance their spares are hard to come by and are almost as hard to work with as Tesla and other brands.
I've done plenty of work on my own Tesla. It's not hard to work on at all. Parts are not even very difficult. There are plenty of 3rd party shops (such as one I went to when I needed to replace my windshield.) I really wonder why people continue to think this. It's not 2016 any more.
Tesla body work is extremely expensive. Aluminum, extensive welding instead of fasteners, substantially reduced modularity due to castings, specialized tooling just off the top of my mind.
Body work is expensive no matter what car you're working on. The presence of paint ensures it. The OP was talking about "maintenance" and body work doesn't fall under that category.
No, but I live in a country were Chinese cars have been sold since the 2010s and spare parts are still an issue. It might be an issue with their sales partners here, but many sell other brands from Korea and Japan and have no issues with them.
It's "ironic?" considering Tesla launching in China is what created the necessary supply chain to turn BYD into the powerhouse it is today. Tesla's greed will become their own demise.
Tesla cars made in Shanghai are sold in Europe and other places. That is helping them be competitive and they haven't had much price pressure until recently. Just because the Chinese have their own internal competition and deflation which drove their prices down aggressively doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build there. Also the idea the Chinese couldn't figure it out without an American company coming there first to show them is pretty silly.
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
The only rational reason I could come up with is that the pool of potential Cybertruck buyers is not as saturated as for S/X, which have been around for quite a while.
The Trump administration has gone so far down the path of fascism and crime that I'm convinced they don't simply want to be in power indefinitely -- they need it. Otherwise, the moment a law-abiding president gets elected, there will be criminal charges against all involved. And there's no statute of limitations for murder.
I believe this country will need massive investigations and criminal trials to heal. I am concerned with what happens in between, but this is reality as I see it.
No chance in hell Democrats do a single thing to these people when they're out of power. If anything it'll be a Democrat justifying more ICE shootings so as "not to look weak on immigration"
> I believe this country will need massive investigations and criminal trials to heal. I am concerned with what happens in between, but this is reality as I see it.
Trump learned his lesson and pardoned every Jan 6 terrorist. If he leaves office, he is going to pardon every single person in his administration for anything they did from 2025-2029. There will be no investigations and no criminal trials. They all know this to be true.
Unfortunately liberals seem to care far more about "unity" than justice in any sense. They have been letting conservatives get away with damaging our country repeatedly throughout the decades and always welcome them back with open bipartisan arms. Maybe we could have nipped this in the bud if the confederate states were forced to de-radicalize like Germany was. Instead literal traitors to our country were right back to running for national office again and have been sowing dissent literally ever since. How many Democrats just voted for even more ICE funding for fucks sake?
There were investigations. There were indictments (including four of Trump himself). Here we are. What we learned is that the only constitutional remedy is impeachment (which was also tried twice). What has disabled all the checks and balances is the knife-edge Congressional majority, the takeover of the judiciary, and the purging of the civil service. Changing the President stops the active craziness but doesn't address the underlying problem.
I should have put it differently. I'm afraid that maximum what will be realistically done will be similar to the situation after the Biden got elected. And that didn't help.
> I always thought it was hilarious that a company called Danger lost everybody's data. The connection to Microsoft only makes it better.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.
Good point. During that era, a lot of the legacy devices like the famous Nokia brick, the dev work on those was done with actual physical devices.
The smartphone stuff, a lot of that development was running in emulators, which likely reduced the time-to-market.
I distinctly remember seeing devs working on future phones in emulators, but most of the devices we sold were just upgrades to existing devices.
That was probably the moment when Nokia and Ericsson and RIM should have been paying attention to what was happening just south of Microsoft in Bellevue. But none of those three companies had a significant presence in the area at the time, AFAIK. The Silicon Valley folks were flying in every single day. I'd argue that this is what killed Sprint too; they were five hours from anyone. The predecessor of AT&T Wireless was so close to T-Mobile, you could drive from one HQ to the other in under fifteen minutes and you could stop off at Microsoft on the way over.
Definitely an example of the synergies that are possible when you have a couple of tech titans who are less than 90 minutes away from each other via Southwest Airlines.
My impression is that Chinese consumer products haven't been hijacked by the "design above everything else" mindset. The priority is to make things work at scale.
American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.
For real? Every car has looked the same for past 10-15 years. Crossover SUV no matter the brand or big ass truck with flat front. Not to mention the monstrosity that is the Cybertruck that should never have been allowed on the road.
Americans are too culturally isolated from other countries and cultures to build empathy. I think Americans have main character syndrome at scale, and these comments are obvious when read through this lens.
This may surprise folks who don't live in the U.S., because Americans describe their country as a nation of immigrants and say things like "I'm Italian" and "I'm Irish" when describing their identity. Yet these same folks haven't set foot in Italy or Ireland, don't speak the language or have awareness of present-day concerns from those countries.
I think it's worse than that. There's a general unwillingness to engage with uncomfortable things. Can't really build empathy if there isn't space to talk about problems.
the entire readership of this website is clueless, it’s an echo chamber. Unless you write a thoroughly detailed contra comment you get downvoted. If you say Elon is good you get downvoted. I do not want to source my comments, I work a job! Maybe Elon is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Maybe I don’t want to drop how I know something because my employer would be very mad.
You can no longer get the full picture because all the guys with alpha (investing term) left and post on Twitter/X now. All rando accounts without their faces. Anything interesting for AI is on there now and you can chat with the actual researchers too, you don’t need to bump into them at a shoes off party after work.
There’s a lot of very uncomfortable discussion on Twitter/X if you can stomach it, you’ll end up with a much clearer picture of the world. There’s a lot of dumb stuff on there too! You have to sift through it.
HN hit its Eternal September. There’s still some really great technical stuff you can find on here though. I don’t know how long the decline has been but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Thanks for the explanation -- I also had no idea what this meant.
I am disturbed that in-group code has been normalized as a way to state socially abhorrent positions out in the open, as if it offered plausible deniability.
Deploying a model on an NPU requires significant profile based optimization. Picking up a model that works fine on the CPU but hasn't been optimized for an NPU usually leads to disappointing results.
I don't think this is correct. The difference between well optimized code and unoptimized code on the CPU is frequently at least an order of magnitude performance.
Reason it doesn't seem that way is that the CPU is so fast we often bottleneck on I/O first. However, for compute-workloads like inference, it really does matter.
While this is true, the most effective optimizations you don't do yourself. The compiler or runtime does it. They get the low-hanging fruit. You can further optimize yourself, but unless your design is fundamentally bad, you're gonna be micro-optimizing.
gcc -O0 and -O2 has a HUGE performance gain. We don't really have anything to auto-magically do this for models, yet. Compilers are intimately familiar with x86.
While the compiler is decent at producing code that is good in terms of saturating the instruction pipeline, there are many things the compiler simply can't help you with.
Having cache friendly memory access patterns is perhaps the biggest one. Though automatic vectorization is also still not quite there, so in cases where there's a severe bottleneck, doing that manually may still considerably improve performance, if the workload is vectorizable.
Yeah whenever I’ve spoken to people who work on stuff like IREE or OpenXLA they gave me the impression that understanding how to use those compilers/runtimes is an entire job.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.