[hrunt]

If the problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China, then I have some bad news about being a robot company. China is already farther ahead in both technology and volume of humanoid robots.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...

[1]https://www.unitree.com/g1

[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...

[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...

[overfeed]

If you think of Musk companies as vehicles to extract money from state and federal governments, then everything falls into focus. Carbon credits, government launches and the Quixotic quest for Mars, and soon Tesla robots sold to the DoD and DHS. I'm only half-joking.

[vannevar]

Fair point. It's hard to support Tesla's valuation as a car company, it may be even harder to support as a robot company. You have to wonder what might have been if they'd spent that Cybertruck money on battery research.

[direwolf20]

Is there anything China isn't far ahead in? Maybe capitalism was a failure.

[sgentle]

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?

[throwawaypath]

>Maybe capitalism was a failure.

China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.

[barbazoo]

Or in a more charitable light maybe capitalism just isn’t the only system that’s capable of reaching certain technological development.

[chvid]

Marketing, sales, finance.

[octoberfranklin]

Free speech.

[Der_Einzige]

LLMs...

[tonyhart7]

You acting like china isn't capitalism

[ruszki]

Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones. They are not there yet. Of course, the general populace doesn’t really care, and the vast majority of the market is not driven by this, but still.