upvote
> All of Musks business stuff highly depends on first mover advantage.

Do they? Out of all of them, I think only one of them really depends on, or even benefits from, first mover advantages: Starlink.

Tesla famously gave away all their patents, and is also being overtaken by Chinese companies with cheaper batteries because batteries are the expensive bit; SpaceX rockets are theoretically well protected because national security regulations >> patent law, but even there lots of Chinese clones popping up; TBC and Neuralink and SolarCity are going nowhere fast; Grok wasn't even the first in its field; Twitter/X is not only in heavy decline but was also always trivially cloneable and the clones are now an open source ecosystem of semi-distributed alternatives; xAI has shown ability to make data centres while pissing off locals but the market for those data centres is other AI companies who also commission their own data centres but found themselves scaling much faster than xAI did.

(Starlink's first mover advantage is "this orbit already contains a satellite").

reply