David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It’s like the first 99% and then the second 99% that takes 10 years. Self-driving is one of these really tricky types of problems where it’s surprisingly easy to get started, even though it seems like it would be an impossible thing. But then there are edge cases everywhere, weather, road conditions, other drivers, novel road layouts, night driving. It takes this massive amount of work for a production system to actually happen. Then the question is, what business do we build? What is the product here? And there was what Sebastian wanted, which was highway assist, the lowest stakes, most realistic, let’s make a better cruise control. There’s what Eric Schmidt wanted, which is crazy. He proposed, oh, let’s just go buy Tesla and that’ll be our starting place. Then we’ll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars. David, do you know what it would’ve cost to buy Tesla at the time? I think at the time that negotiations were taking place between Elon and Larry and Google, this was in the depths of the Model S production scaling woes. I think Google could have bought the company for $5 billion. That’s what I remember. It was $3 billion.…

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