Amazon and Tesla/SpaceEx

Justin Greenberg
February 19, 2018

1 Amazon
1.1 Background
Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online book retailer. The IPO ended selling far
above the set price and although the company wasn’t posting huge profits the
stock was performing incredibly. Jeff took this success with no suger–coating
and told his employess to not look at the stock price, as focusing on the short-
term was not the goal, the long-term fundamentals was what Amazon strived
for. This foreshadowed the dot-com bubble crash and was a large reason why
Amazon survived; the CEO cared about the long-term fundamentals as opposed
to the short term economic climate. Amazon manages to survive on small profit
margins by being very private and not releasing sales figures, the Kindle for
example is sold for a loss, but is loaded up with advertisements which you have
to pay to be rid of. Ultimately I find Amazon to be a reprehensible company.

1.2 Automation
Amazon employs heavy usage of automation in every step of the business. They
are masters in disruptive technology and have been such since inception: book-
stores, publishing houses, bricks and mortar, media platforms, etc. Amazon
even competes with Space Ex, although privately, as almost all of Blue Origin’s
accomplishments are done with no press releases. I find the free market to be
an incredible force in fostering a healthy and progressive industry, but Bezos
clearly hates competition and buys them out at any chance, and if he cannot
he deals in the shadows until he can.

2 Tesla/SpaceEx
2.1 Background
Elon Musk is a South-African born American immigrant who is striving to
change the world through technological advances. His efforts have been spread

1
over three different categories: energy, transportation and space travel. Al-
though he has seen extreme financial hardship (especially during the economic
crisis that was 2008) he has persisted with unceasing confidence and serves
as an inspiration to all those who look to the future as a thing that one can
manipulate.

2.2 Automation
Tesla is moving towards automation most specifically in the area of self-driving
cars, but has notable achievement in the automation of production as well .This
week we watched a video entailing the production process of the Tesla car and
saw that many of the steps were handled by AI and robots. While the inspec-
tion and some other roles still were handled by humans, we saw the general
construction was handled by robots. I found it interesting that the head of the
factory mentioned that humans are smarter than robots; much in the way that
humans can solve something incredibly complex by attributing larger aspects
symbols through mathematics, we can also assign complex tasks to AI. This
does not mean that the AI is more capable than humans, as we can see in this
way that the robotics are an extension of humans capability itself.
A tangible use-case for the self driving car was put on display with the an-
nouncement of the Tesla semi-truck. This truck is faster, safer, more efficient and
importantly more economically feasible than the standard diesel-engine semi.
While many jobs could be at risk because of this development, the near-future
will still require drivers to be inside the vehicle. The long-term implications of
this could be that truck drivers will no longer be needed whatsoever, because
of this it’s important to have plans to retrain these people. As harsh as it may
sound we inch ever closer to a massive class of useless people, and if measures
aren’t taken pre-emptively we could see this become a crisis.

3 Conclusion
The takeaways I got from watching these videos is that
1) Current climate cannot distract you if you have a vision. These two
entrepeneurs fought through massive economic crisises and never folded. That
pereserverance is essential in success.
2) Automation is an unstoppable force that has been taking place over the
course of centuries. The real losers of automation are ludites. It doesn’t matter
if it’s good or bad for the future, all that matters is the role that each individual
takes place inside of it. I know the role that I will take.