Yes, I’ve seen those numbers. The practical potential downside impact is small.
About that AI bubble:
SpaceX says its AI application total addressable market (separate from AI infrastructure) is $22.7 trillion (of which they have about 0% share, presently, since they don’t do much AI for actual revenue).
Tesla and SpaceX are AI also-rans.
- Tesla autonomy is being lapped by Waymo and far underdelivers on their decade of big talk.
- xAI lost their top people and says they need to rebuild their AI (“was not built right the first time”).
- Despite the need for an AI re-start, xAI was acquired by SpaceX at a valuation of $250 billion.
- But, because xAI can’t actually do AI, SpaceX has an option to buy the AI company Cursor for $60 billion (recap: spend $250 billion on xAI and then another $60 to have an actual AI company).
- Again because xAI can’t do very useful actual AI, they are leasing their data center capacity to more capable AI companies Anthropic and Google. (nothing wrong with that, it’s just not AI, it’s leasing real estate and hardware, like a data center REIT).
But, Tesla and SpaceX have 10s of billions of dollars, so they should be able to purchase some kind of technology that they are unable to build in-house, such as AI. For example, if Tesla buys chip fab expertise from Intel because Tesla doesn’t have that capability. Or if SpaceX buys AI from Cursor.