Tesla owns so much data that it has collected(and will only continue to amass more in the future)from its customers that it is the very definition of a successful tech company. Economist is an embarrassment for journalism.
Data isn’t what makes a tech company successful. It’s the application of that data into a product. They have Autopilot as their seminal data product, but it is buggy.
The one who reigns the era of automation and AI will be the one who possesses all our data.
--I want to target my new car advertising campaign at any Tesla owner with FSD that recently had a wreck or near-wreck.
--I want to target my bloated overpriced techy product that will collect all sorts of personal data specifically at Tesla owners as they are clearly okay with this behavior.
Calling Tesla a ‘car maker’ is like calling Amazon a used bookseller.
One way to look at this would be the ARPU from data-intensive services like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. Typical orders of magnitude here is dozens of dollars per year per user; I think Amazon shopping is closer to $100 if I remember right.
I dimly recall some idiotic tech blog claiming that in the future, cars would be free because of the value of ad targeting based off of collected car data, which is hilarious:
- Cars cost three orders of magnitude more than any reasonable revenue per user from such ads
- Cost of a car per year (depreciation + maintenance) is, what, 2 orders of magnitude higher than that?
- There are cheaper ways to get that data, like...free smartphones? Yet nobody does that.
"Data is the new oil" sounds good, but it leaves out a lot of important details, like "how do you monetize that data" and "how much do you make for it?" If monetization is ads, the answer is "not much."
For example, you can generate weather data from a farm. That income doesn’t belong to the farmer but to the one who owns the land or the data.
Data has so much value addition. Grain doesn’t ..not for the farmer anyways. Income from value added data is taxable. Farm income isn’t.
We generally look at value from the pov of whether it can be taxed and whether it will generate employment which leads to more taxation. Money which creates value in a capitalistic economy is tied to employment and purchasing power.
Data can be reused again and again to create taxable goods. All food will become someone’s poop.
I am just making scribble points. But I am sure you can fill in the blanks.