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Comment by lifeformed | Hacker News Reader

A company like Apple has a quarter trillion in cash laying around, they could jump start fusion and control near-limitless energy in several decades. I wish there was more of a visionary drive among institutions for intellectual curiosity and pushing the boundaries of humankind. And yes, I know why they don't... shareholders business plans risk blah blah blah. Reality is just so BORING. Maybe one day we'll find a way to make life's ultimate pursuit something more interesting than an optimization function on some integer in a bank server.

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It is odd that you mention this, unless your name is Karl and were at lunch last Wednesday :-), because it came up as something that companies with big cash hoards might actually be thinking about. Consider the notion that at some point a feasible fusion power plant design becomes "known". Then its a question of money to build one or two or 10. And a company like Google or Apple, with a large cash hoard could jump in, build some plants, power their infrastructure on their own plants and sell excess power to the grid, we even gave a name to the company "Google Power and Packet" :-).

The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it. This idea, that the future will have sudden insights that will take tremendous capital to exploit to create unassailable leadership positions, is not one I had considered. Fusion power, space opportunities, Etc, might be areas where things suddenly create an entirely new need.

Would the idea not be easier if they continue to do what they do, be the largest solar energy producer? Apple Energy should continue to invest and sell Renewable energy where they make sense. And see any excess power to the grid, forcing all of their partners, Mobile Network, (e.g All of Apple iPhone Contract subscribers energy usage are on renewable energy), Foxconn, DHL, TSMC, Memory and NAND Fab, Materials, LCD / OLED Screens, Camera, etc All part of the Apple Ecosystem, from Design, Manufacturer, Assemble, Shipping and Delivery, and iCloud usage, Campus, Back Office, Retail are All on Renewable energy. At least in the form of Credit, that should be the 100% Renewable Energy Goal Apple tries to Achieve. In the scale of Apple manufacturing supply Chain and solar energy pricing, buying Energy from Apple "should" actually be cheaper than non-renewable energy. Imagine the tag line, Every bit of Apple is renewable.

But like everything Apple these days, they are just slow. Their Datacenter expansion already started late, and now with all the set back they are also much further behind. Similar to their Solar Energy which depends and linked to their DataCenter Expansion. And instead of spending money on their CDN ( Which they finally get around to doing so ), built their World Wide WiFi Network, ( iPhone users can enjoy free WiFi access like in Apple Store, but in far more places ), they decided to spend BILLIONS in making TV series and Drama.

Robert Bussard shopped his wiffleball fusor design to Google a few years back in a talk that's somewhere on YouTube. Fascinating stuff.

Link: https://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8

The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it

They already are, in the cheapest, riskless way possible: those massive cash stashes are sustaining, or even boosting, their valuations.

When a company grows too big, it's in its best interest, as in investors best interest, not to spend a few billions on an initiative that could lead nowhere.

Ah but cash is dangerous, in a proxy fight it can be used to fund a leveraged buyout. Harder to do with various share classes restricting voting rights but even so.

Consider SpaceX, its a growing business that took what, 10 billion in capital? That is below the 'material' threshold for some of these companies holding 100 to 300 billion dollars in cash equivalents.

I think the point was not that a company like Apple ought to invest their billions into ongoing fusion research, indeed the exact opposite: it might be more rational for a company like Apple to hide their billions under a mattress, so that they can make a single, economy-controlling investment on the very same day that profitable fusion power becomes merely a problem of capital.

on the very same day that profitable fusion power becomes merely a problem of capital.

Wouldn't that be too late? Or, put it this way: it is already a problem of capital. If you have enough, you can explore all technology tree branches till finding the one that leads you to it, even in parallel.

There's no guarantee that any of the technology tree branches have profitable fusion power in them. I'm reasonably confident that controlled fusion with net energy gain is technologically possible. Determining whether it can be profitable is a lot harder. Profitability depends on what every other competitor can do, as well as what your own technology can do. That's why extremely well-proven technologies like coal-fired electrical generators can become unprofitable when competing technologies improve.

If there were a global carbon tax, it would give fusion an advantage against fossil fuels, but that would also be to the advantage of fission and renewables. In the absence of a global carbon tax, is fusion going to be cheap enough to displace fossil fueled power? We've had the technology for emissions-free electricity for decades, but it's difficult to profitably compete with fossil-based generators enjoying unpriced externalities.

Maybe for companies, to aim for fusion is asking too much.

But what about a commercial "DARPA" ?

I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is?

But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well.

So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal.

But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-Parc was guarranteed to at-least break even?

Your comment made me think of Bell Labs.

From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.

Or Xerox PARC. There have been other attempts (like Interval Research) as well.

Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.

For some companies asking for fusion isn't too much. Fusion startups include (among others) Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion, Helion, and TAE (formerly Tri Alpha). The latter has over $500 million invested.

And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.

Google is investing in fusion energy: https://ai.google/stories/applied-science/

Unfortunately, the irony is that the only way companies get a quarter trillion in cash laying around is by making investments that they understand. I suspect Apple has no way of making good investment decisions in relation to fusion energy.

This ignores the "disruptive technology" aspect. Consider that most of the largest corporations are very young. Even Apple is only half a century old. 2 decades ago, they were doing completely new things that no one had ever done before. No one "understood" mobile computing before it took off.

Companies get a quarter trillion in cash by doing something really well that others aren't doing. Nuclear fusion powered perpetual motion machines certainly fit the bill...

They just made the Macbook 3mm thinner. That should count for something.

> That should count for something.

It does. You jest, but competition is fierce and little things matter; also, sometimes making even a small improvement require a technological breakthrough.

They have all that money because they make good investments. In the pursuit of fusion, a quarter trillion spent by Elon Musk goes a lot farther than a quarter trillion spent by a lottery winner. It's not just about how much money you have, but who you give it to and for what that determines its value. Just because we are used to indistinguishable standardized consumer products that cost X doesn't mean investing works that way, especially when the certainty of the venture is not assured and is partially the responsibility of the investor to make sure that the money is being directed properly.

I think they would better spend their money on Elysium-style refuge. Fewer people means they wouldn't even need fusion, solar, wind and hydro would be enough.

The problem might be that patents are only valid for about 20 years. That might be the time required to perfect the technology and reach the break-even point.

During those twenty years you'd certainly continue to easily produce more innovation and refined designs that would result in more related patents that would provide a healthy buffer between what you can do and what your competitors are capable of.

There's no time limit on trade secrets and those might be more applicable.

Why not print the money required for this kind of research? why does it have to be tax payer money? or private money?

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