yes, there are clearly unfair trade practices here. EU has been making money for Google and Amazon, but the US are not using our services. I hear the best solution to this are tariffs: EU users have to pay to use gmail until enough US users start using EU email providers and we rebalance the services trade!

You make a great point. But just to stay on the example of cars: besides the innovation on EVs, there’s this horrible tendency to consider cars as tablets on wheels, both in the sense that you can forget about repairing them by yourself and in the sense that they are now increasingly becoming low-margin hardware to run higher margin subscription services. If anything warrants high valuation for a car company it would arguably be the innovation on EVs, rather than the SaaS model.

I hope the idea of Car Software As a Service dies before becoming too widespread. But if it doesn’t, maybe car companies wouldn’t become “Tech” companies, just more shitty subscription vendors. And their stock should be valued as such, not for the largely unwanted “Tech innovation”.

By that measure shouldn’t Disney be considered a Tech company too? Or I guess banks and insurance companies.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but maybe the article (at least the small part I can read with no paywall) is on to something, Companies that sell access to technology or rely on technology to sell something else (he does give the example of e-commerce) should not be “Tech” companies.

The part I didn’t get to is where the author draws the line to tell what companies ARE Tech. I guess OpenAI or Google would qualify. They sell services but they are services they invented and made, with considerable researxh and investment. But what about Amazon or Netflix?

Agree. The MO is totally different: funding for bis research would be cut, he would be fired and then deported very publically.

With Grok looking more and more like the only one working for Musk with enough (digital) balls to stand up to his boss, that might be better than the alternative of “Big Balls” and the rest of the Digital Oblivous Goons of Elon

Hahaha, good point. On the other hand, “cheap” depends on the perspective. From Musk’s it’s an incredibly cheap way to get a big payoff…huge ROI!

“Hey we said ‘rapidly’, nobody said anything about it still working when we’re done”