No state owned enterprises in the history of the world has the quality you've just described - fiercely competitive, nationalistic pride, desperation.
China is now Soviet Union, but with horrendous demographics, mind-numbing debt, and wealth flooding out of the country. China is old and broke. China is fucked.
Unless you want to keep your head in the sand and pretend this is the soviet union all over again, you better start paying attention to how fast they are iterating.
>China is now Soviet Union, but with horrendous demographics, mind-numbing debt, and wealth flooding out of the country. China is old and broke. China is fucked.
Yeah this is the Peter Zeihan thesis but you know what, it might take a while for this to play out and in the meantime, China may not leave the arena until after they have taken out a large chunk of the western incumbents.
You're really gonna take a statement from a CEO that it's important for the government to intervene in order to protect his profits at face value? Elon's made some stupid decisions in the past but I don't think he's stupid enough to be honest. Not lobbying for protectionist measures even if they aren't needed would probably be some sort of corporate malpractice.
When it comes to getting advice on where the EV market is going, I am definetly going to listen to the guy who is the leader of EVs in the US. Would I take relationship advice from him? Probably not, but we are talking about the EV market here.
I - that's a truly stunning mindset I don't have words. Why would you consider the market leader of a market a reliable source for information on the market? Maybe this is obvious to me coming from a world where all banks have their own analysts and all but the idea of trusting a market leader is just insane. Information asymmetry is so important to capitalism he's obviously not going to provide the full picture. There are entire university departments dedicated to coming up with clever estimates for how much drugs cost to develop to justify high prices. This sounds like, would you trust a pharma CEO if they were providing advice on where the pharma market is going? Or a tech CEO on where the tech market is going? Elon is, as you clearly stated, the leader of EVs in the US. Why would you take his advice on the EV market!? The base assumption is that he's going to be quite strongly motivated to stay leader of the EV market, why would you think he cares about giving you accurate advice?
>Why would you consider the market leader of a market a reliable source for information on the market?
You seem to be ignoring how they literally created and led this market over the last 15+ years. I get how you are so blinded by your hate of one man that you completely ignore the facts on the ground but do you have to make it so obvious?
> Maybe this is obvious to me coming from a world where all banks have their own analysts and all but the idea of trusting a market leader is just insane. Information asymmetry is so important to capitalism he's obviously not going to provide the full picture.
This would be a plausible statement if it hasn't been disproven time and time agin over the last 10 years. See the entire short industry that got burned by their analysts. I was there on day 1 of the /r/Realtesla a subreddit dedicated to pushing the thesis of following industry experts and analysis. In 2019 they were convinced that Tesla was structurally bankrupt.
The hard lesson I learned after years of failed predictions based on analysis is that banks and analysts only have a snapshot of a current moment in time and do not consider the fast moving nature of innovation led companies.
They have gotten this wrong with many tech companies but especially Tesla. Just to give you one example: all the analysts and shorts were certain that Tesla would fail in 2018 due to their live up to the minute counts of materials going in and out of the factories. They had live video feeds of everything happening outside the factory. They failed to predict Musk using a loophole in California laws to set up a giant tent and get production levels increased. That changed the entire calculus.
Musk has repeatedly proven the analysts wrong and so I'd ask why would you continue to trust them? Their motivation is to get people to pay their fees yet it seems as if they suffer no major consequences for continually getting it wrong.
Going back to what Musk said(which you obviously didn't even bother reading): "If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world," he said. "They're extremely good."
You might be able to make the argument that he is self serving in his comments but this quote is a poor hill to die on.
I mean, if you're just going to ignore the core point then I guess feel free. The disconnect seems to be that you think it's somehow reflects poorly on Elon that he's good at his job! Being self serving is good, controlling information to maximize your leverage is good, these are good things. Especially in a competitive market! The stupid decisions I'm referring to tend to be ones like buying Twitter or tweeting nonsense that causes him to lose control of the narrative. I don't care whether he actually thinks that not having trade barriers means Tesla will be wiped out, all that matters is that lobbying for trade barriers is the right move for the business. Also what's your obsession with trusting people? Why would you trust analysts? Or any source of information? Every source of information is biased, incomplete, and useful.
They've been massively increasing their defense spending, though you're right, it's not a majority of GDP.
In addition, they've been trying to massively increase their military capacity, but throwing money at it only does so much: you also need young men, and there's not that many that think being in the military is a great idea, and people aren't having kids any more. At least in the old Soviet Union, there was no lack of young men being raised.
China is now Soviet Union, but with horrendous demographics, mind-numbing debt, and wealth flooding out of the country. China is old and broke. China is fucked.