In another article about Tesla VW CEO described them as having ‘essentially unlimited resources’. I guess spaceX probably falls under a similar category. Unlimited resources + not wasting ANYTHING is a killer combo.
Lots of places seem like they should have unlimited resources. I would have thought VW would be pretty high on that list - but they have their resources tied up. SpaceX / Tesla seem to be more free to use their resources in daring ways.
There's tons of places with effectively unlimited money. But very few places that have nearly unlimited resources. Some key resources are usually inversely correlated with money: decision-making latency and throughput, clear focus, and iteration speed. That's because money buys headcount, not good leadership.
Tesla can seemingly issue new shares and the public market just buy them all up at a huge valuation; I think that's what is meant by "unlimited resources".
That may be mixing up causality. One reason people love to invest is because they see what amazing things are possible. I personally would love to invest with SpaceX.
I don’t think you’re right about many others having unlimited resources. This situation is a novelty in the post-cold-war era. Admittedly in the Cold War military projects probably did have unlimited resources.
This made me chuckle. SLS is a bloated joke, survives due to political favoritism for job generation. SpaceX does everything at a radical discount by comparison.
He said ‘other competitors’ or something like that and I assumed he meant Tesla despite it being at the time of Apple launch - building gigafactories takes a lot more resources than anything Apple has done so far. Word is Apple won’t even manufacture the whole car anyway like Tesla does.
You inspired me to do some Googling and arithmetic. From the Apple website, an iPhone is about 0.5 lbs. There have been approximately 1.3 billion iPhones sold.
TL;DR: Cars are heavy. The total mass of the vehicles Tesla has delivered in the past six quarters exceeds the total mass of all the iPhones that Apple has ever sold.
I don't think you need 6 quarters. Using your numbers, 1.3 billion iPhones is 650 million pounds. At 4000lb each, it only takes 163000 model 3s to outweigh the iPhones - about 5 months of production, or two quarters.
The thing is, how much of that did apple produce VS TSMC + suppliers. I don’t think apple have any manufacturing capability at all. Tesla make a lot of things themselves - well the battery at least.
