Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk's industrial empire [video]
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First, his Gigafactory to produce batteries. When the other big automakers get into the electric car mindset, who are they going to buy batteries from? Musk who owns the single largest and high-tech battery factory (that produces on an enormous scale), or other battery producers who have less economies of scale and higher prices? Obviously, lower prices win and Musk ends up selling batteries to his competitors...genius.
Second, when other manufacturers get into the electric car game they are going to need nationwide chargers. Did you think that the Tesla and Supercharger of proprietary connectors for no reason? Since Tesla will have a huge nationwide system before anyone else, Musk will license the rights to use his chargers. Again, making money from the competition. Competitors will not have the ability to compete on charging when they release cars because Tesla will already have an established network.
As for SpaceX...thats a whole another post for another day.
Link to last 10-K: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0001193125140...
Tesla will definitely make a killing on batteries. I actually think the supercharger network is going to REMAIN proprietary as a competitive advantage for Tesla vs. other electric car companies. As someone who's done research in this in the past, there are already well-established standards adopted by the IEEE and companies like GE for charging. This is obviously to encourage the adoption of the technology.
However, since most electric charging networks are run by private companies or utilities, we may have the "roaming charge" issue that telecom had once upon a time. In other words, if you lived in Texas and got your electric charge from your local utility as part of your monthly bill, you may have to pay "roaming charge fees" for charging in California.
But if you're on the Tesla network, the "fuel" is part of your purchase price. This is Apple-level walled garden tactics and it demonstrates the foresight of Elon Musk and his team. What an incredible entrepreneur.
Apple's walled garden strategy works because the devices are cheap and relatively throw away. Cars are not.
This isn't just entirely for a competitive advantage, although I'm sure they plan on licensing as you mention.
The fact is none of the existing DC charging standards can handle nearly as much power as Tesla's system can. CHAdeMO can handle up to 62kW (but most are 50kW or less), and some of the new Combo chargers have demonstrated (but not implemented) ~100kW. Superchargers can do 120kW right now, and Tesla has claimed they will up this to 135. As with so much of what they do, the existing state of the art is just so far behind they had no option but to roll their own. Everything else that exists currently is simply too slow for recharging during long distance trips (which nobody else cares about, because no other BEV has anywhere near the range)
I think he's just thinking from first principles and it's the rest of us that have convoluted reality with a panoply of suppositions and just-so stories. People like Musk only seem like they have a "reality distortion field because we're seeing his simple conclusions through the lens of our own distortions. (It's us that have the 8-steps, in a tortured circle.)
"Competitors will not have the ability to compete on charging when they release cars because Tesla will already have an established network."
is dramatically wrong. They will absolutely compete on charging, stubbornly so, and probably leveraging politics in the process. The major energy companies will also get into the charging business (much like the oil companies did with gasoline stations), and they too will fight with Tesla on standards, and attempt to set their own. The one guarantee is that the energy industry, filled full of extremely powerful companies used to dominating and getting their way, will not simply go along with Musk because he got there first (ditto for Ford and GM). That's not to say Tesla's standard will or won't prevail (or whether several will win out), but rather that there will be a long fight over it, and the competition will be belligerent.
But I defend my point based on this: Would you buy a car that has an established charging network, or a car with only a few chargers nationwide? Of course, the established network since there is less worry about "filling up". This is a direct mirror of today's issue with electric vehicles: there isn't a large charging network. Tesla has been competing against other vehicles that have no range anxiety. Similarly, if GM produces a car to use only a GM charger buyers will feel this anxiety and tend toward an easier solution. Therefore, it would only make sense for GM to license the rights to use Tesla chargers since GM can quell range fears and still make money off the car sale.
As for a standard in charging. This is going to be a long fight. The energy and auto industry (minus Tesla) has the political power and money to force a standard many times over. The question becomes: accept a standard because it exists and was funded well (feature phones), or choose something new because it is supremely better (iPhone 1).
Who knows, I enjoyed your response. It made me rethink about this.
I would see car chargers going the same way. From now on, if you want to play in this market, you're going to have to face down Tesla's advantage in the charging network. This is Tesla building a moat to make it harder for competitors, but as with all moats, it is not unbreachable - with enough resources, a competitor can achieve a minimal viable network which gets them a foothold in the market.
It is not a certainty that Tesla's battery manufacturing facilities can lower the price of batteries to achieve the < $30k per-car price point. I'd imagine a single factory that also sells to other car makers will solve the existing problem with scale. Currently, making/procuring 10k batteries a year is probably a big factor in making them so costly. It is almost universally true that manufacturing in larger numbers will bring down the price (probably not in a linear way, rather logarithmically).
In fact, Nissan's Tennessee plant can already manufacture 200,000 battery packs per year. They have been in the game of producing new battery chemistry technologies since 2009, when they started work on a technology partnership to bring Lithium NMC batteries to production vehicles.
If you take him for his word and since he believes in breaking down a problem into its individual components and improve it the the only reason he is building the battery factory is because he saw the opportunity and the potential to make a batter and cheaper battery.
And on the issues of charging stations is he needs them anyway and it's not like there's a standardized connector for quickly charging a car so he made his own, he would have done the same it there was a connector but it wasn't any good, however i doubt he would have done it if there wasn't an engineering advantage.
I am wondering if there will be a new type of batteries soon or maybe we'll get improved capacity by slapping a software layer that manages charging/discharging.
* tons of energy is lost as heat * volatility of the chemical storage mechanism occasionally causes that heat to get released as an explosion
I'd love to see Musk's solution end up in a massive increase in battery performance.
Source: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/157525-new-sulfur-based-b...
I can't believe it's been 30 years.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Tesla Motors and a believer in the vision and how Tesla's going about achieving sustainable transport for the world. But I am also a huge fan of accuracy, and having founded some startups and co-founded some startups and worked for a bunch of startups that I did not found or co-found, I try hard to get the story right and not give people the impression that it was all me. I wish Elon didn't do that. I wish he insisted 60 Minutes get the story right, even if not convenient. I don't like a manufactured story, especially when it's supposed to be nonfiction television journalism.
"[Paypal] acknowledges that Mr. Musk is a founder of the Company and its predecessor X.com. The Company agrees that, within ten days after the effective date of this Agreement, all references to 'founders' of the company will be removed from the Company's website ... the Company shall refrain from stating who the founders of the Company are or making statements quoted in the press that undermine Mr. Musk's status as a 'founder' of X.com."
I love what he's done for Tesla since taking over. There's real potential in the products the company has to offer, and I own a bit of TSLA myself. But at this point, Elon Musk doesn't need a "lone hero" story to change the world, and I'm not sure I agree with the decision to craft it.
[1] http://evworld.com/pdf/eberhardvmusk.pdf, scroll to p.42
I think he's aware and quite pleased at all this image building as a "RL Iron Man", because it does wonders for the success of the companies. It's this kind of spirit that made apple's success, not the salary of the engineers.
Salary paid in dreams.
That's something that would look great in a marble facade.
I'm all about sweat equity, but that payoff better be substantial.
Substantial payoff? Mine is getting to work in launch operations, no matter what the position is.
I've worked at far more grueling places (Citadel).
You're considering money the only value of my time. Happiness > $$$ after a certain point.
I can make $100K-200K/year running infrastructure to serve ads better, or do something that actually matters (going to Mars). How I spend my experience is up to me.
So yeah.
Director Jon Favreau says Musk was the perfect man to study for his fictional billionaire superhero.
Full Disclosure: every time I buy a stock, it subsequently takes a dive.
They discuss "you decided to start a car company", but it was started by two other engineers, and Musk came in as an investor first, and joined the company later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors It would have been nice to see Musk give some credit to the original visionaries. He's still very responsible for Tesla's success, but it wasn't JUST him.
Same with PayPal, it would have been nice for Musk to say "I stared PayPal with a few friends to..."
This report sadly gives nobody else any credit in the development of this empire.
Here is the full complaint: http://evworld.com/pdf/eberhardvmusk.pdf
Sounds like someone who was very popular in Cupertino, too.
Another area of the interview I found telling was when Musk described 2008 and how he essentially lost all his money, got divorced, and almost faced a nervous breakdown. Musk isn't some billionaire playboy, he's a brilliant man with the conviction to take bold risks that could change the world and he's experienced the highs and lows of that journey. I'll admit I was a Musk fan before watching this interview, but now I'm even more impressed with him.
Musk has also accumulated tales of his immaturity as a business leader -- trying to switch PayPal to Windows, for example -- but if 2008 was a turning point for him, then he went through it a lot faster than Jobs.
Of course plenty of other people who have gone through crises and come out the other side much more fit. The entrepreneur's hero's journey?
Aerospace, especially space, is tightly linked with government spending, period.
Also, does the fact that Musk bet his entire fortune means he's a freeloader on corporate welfare?
A few large companies and governments were his obvious targets. Just like large defense contractors exist on "public" money.
Exactly. The military-industrial complex lives mostly on public money.
That's what I said. Is there some other point that you're trying to make? Getting a government contract isn't taking donations. You deliver a service or a product and you get paid for it. The US government spends a lot of money. Cray Supercomputer sold systems to the government too, for example. I imagine that if Elon wants to build his electric jet someday, one of his best business planes would be to build electric jet drones for the US government.
Sorry if you don't agree with the decision but at this point we're just debating politics.
Without an opportunity and potential like SpaceX, all the public money would have are cases like Solyndra.
The reality was, NASA needed SpaceX as much as SpaceX needed NASA.
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Cached because wired seems to have disappeared the original:
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa
Interesting to note that when he said that, in the third quarter of 2008, he was in the middle of a complete implosion across everything in his life. Adds a very dramatic quality to it.
I think most of us on HN are building the future for a world that lives in the past and I think it's beautiful. We're trying to craft something that doesn't exist yet... but can.
Not many professions do that.
But I also remember reading somewhere that the ADA was pushing for electric cars to emit noise for deaf and hard hearing pedestrians.
I read a similar one except it was regarding blind pedestrians.
I'm not sure how a silent vehicle would affect deaf person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds
Umm... LG? They have an enormous operation already supplying GM and Renault, two big rivals.
(Also for Viagra... not sure about that one.)
"If Elon Musk wanted to revolutionize the car industry, why didn't he figure out how to recycle the materials of the existing cars into Tesla somehow? Instead of making more new cars? Sure, the new cars are more environmentally friendly and sustainable but that doesn't solve the existing waste problem."
Musk is a bit of a throw-back right to the 19th and 20th centuries in this regard. Humanity could do with more folks like him if we're to see real progress in our life-time.
Here is Musk, improving human life, clearing our air and probably taking us to Mars one day and on the opposite, we have scumbags waiting to make a quick buck and working actively, bribing legislatures to make Tesla a failure.
edit: link
I wonder what their conversion rate on this is.
Luckily with some poking around you can find the m3u8 playlist URL in the HTML source in plain sight: http://ipad-streaming.cbsnews.com/media/mpx/2014/03/30/21153...
As for CBS. I don't want your g@$
That kind of phrasing annoys me deeply, it tries to spin scientific consensus as if it's a disputed issue.