1. Musk has harmed Tesla. But that’s not the only problem it has.
It’s easy to blame Elon Musk’s politics for Tesla’s issues – if being a drug addled Nazi with a penchant for rash, inept decisions can be referred to as “politics”. But it’s not the only factor. The past year has seen it face tough competition for the first time, notably from the likes of China’s BYD. That company recently announced a new charging system capable of delivering 250 miles of range in just five minutes, which – if it pans out – would be a lot faster than Tesla’s superchargers.
Perhaps most important of all, though, the stock has been overpriced for years. At 100 times its earnings, even after recent falls, Tesla shares are priced far more highly than anything else in the automotive industry. To deliver on this value, Tesla would not just have to become the biggest carmaker, it would have to take over half the global car market. That was never likely, and it’s even more unlikely now that other car companies have caught up and overtaken Tesla in EVs.
2. Starship bloopers
Maybe there is a pattern here: perhaps companies headed by Musk start off fast out of the blocks, but then collapse under the weight of his egotistical demands.
Take, SpaceX, for example. You might have noticed it has been having a little trouble with Starship, the big rocket which is not only designed to be the super-heavy lifter of Elon’s dreams, but forms part of the NASA plan to get back to the Moon.
Unfortunately, Starship’s problems are more than teething problems. As this article explains, it ran slap bang into something that trumps (ho ho) even Elon’s self-belief: physics. To get rid of the momentum of an orbital rocket (17,500mph) it needs to handle some hefty manoeuvres as it reenters the atmosphere, before it lands vertically. That means it needs to be more robust and heavier, and – to add to the fun – it turned out that Elon’s much-vaunted engines produced nowhere near enough thrust to reach orbit with the claimed payload.
Ooops.
All of this could have been (and was) predicted from the start, and could have been avoided had the company used half-scale prototypes to understand some of the issues. But it didn’t because Elon. And here we are – not on the way to the Moon.
3. Different rules apply
I wonder if Tim Cook thought that donating $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund would mean the World’s Flakiest President™ would mean he would go into bat against Europe for Apple. If he did, he should probably ask for a refund because Trump hasn’t said a word about the latest mandate that Apple open up many of its systems to enable third-party devices to interoperate at the same level as its own. While John Gruber notes that the tenor of the announcements has changed – it’s much less bullish, more matter of fact – the core remains that “the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset—making devices that work better together than those from other companies—isn’t legal under the DMA.”
And he’s right! But I would rephrase it: Apple has made deliberately ensuring that other companies' peripherals cannot work as well as its own a core competitive asset. Where I suspect I disagree with John is that this is precisely the kind of thing that I think governments should stop when companies have large degrees of control over markets.
I love the way my AirPods work so seamlessly with my iPhone and Mac. But you know what I would love more? Not having to buy Apple headphones to get the same experience. I’d probably still buy AirPods, but I very much like the choice. Is Apple afraid of the competition?
4. Google sucks at search, but this search engine doesn’t
David Pierce loves Kagi, and so do I. It costs $10 a month, but in return, there are no ads, no AI summaries (unless you want to turn them on) and no tracking. It feels like Google did ten years ago, when the results you got weren’t dominated by stuff that Google wants you to see, rather than you wish to see. Recommended.
5. Saving human agency
This is just a lovely piece of writing. I’m not anti-AI, but a vision of the future which is the kind of gleaming perfection of AI visionaries – “all watched over by machines of loving grace” – doesn’t appeal to me. I like the messiness of our humanity.
6. A hidden danger of AI
Even though I’m AI-agnostic, there are clear dangers to the technology. They are not the obvious ones – use of energy, getting things wrong when you use them as a search replacement – because to me most of these can be solved in time.
Instead, the biggest danger comes from the complexity and opacity, which makes them vulnerable to manipulation, either deliberately or otherwise. And of course, if there’s one group of people who have become adept in manipulation, it’s the far right. The first step of this is usually a call to “remove bias”, and lo and behold, that’s what Trump is already doing by implementing directives on “AI fairness” – which means, of course, making sure AI spews out right wing talking points.
7. Gambling with young men’s lives
What’s the connection between gambling companies and the right-wing grifters offering easy solutions to young disaffected men? Both encourage blaming your problems on people like you. “If we want to reach those lost boys and turn them around, we need to stop lying about what makes them such easy marks for a very old, and very transparent, set of cons.”
8. When spectacle replaces reality
The Verge is doing such good work that barely a week goes by without me including them, but I couldn’t miss out on this article by Elizabeth Lopatto on how Musk and Trump built their own reality. What binds them together is the replacement of reality with spectacle: “The proclivity for spectacle is the thing Musk and Trump truly have in common, though the media they target is different: Musk is an online guy, and Trump was forged in reality TV.”
Essentially, reality is boring for them, so why settle for it? The problem for us is we end up living in the spectacle they create.
9. Sliding doors, Microsoft style
Bill Gates has revealed that Satya Nadella nearly got passed over for the CEO job at Microsoft. Gates doesn’t mention who was against the appointment – he says he was for – or who the other options were. But it’s definitely a sliding doors moment, as it’s easy to see how someone else might not have made the big decisions that Nadella has.
10. Yahoo in “still exists” shock
Yeah, I know, I was surprised too. What I always find interesting is how many products got bought by Yahoo and then floundered in limbo for long periods of time. Flickr, Tumblr, Huffington Post – all felt the heavy hand of Yahoo ownership, and all saw promising growth sink into the abyss. Good luck to them.