Crazy Musk, is stepping on Google to leap to the top of technology?

At the beginning of 2013, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk, who was physically and mentally exhausted, contacted his friend Larry Page and asked him if he wanted to buy Tesla.

Page admires Musk very much and agreed to almost all the conditions he proposed, including allowing him to continue operating Tesla for the next eight years after Google acquired Tesla, or until the third generation of cars is produced. come out. However, just as the two were bargaining, Tesla Model S sales suddenly improved. Musk was so pleasantly surprised that he immediately terminated negotiations with Google.

Page, who was still the CEO of Google at the time, did not offend Musk for this. On the contrary, in 2014, when he attended the TED speech conference, he said, "If he died, he would rather give up his billions of property." Donate to entrepreneurs like Musk who are changing the world rather than giving money to charities.” In his view, Musk’s idea of ??using Mars as humanity’s “second home” is as “bright” as Google’s many wild and world-changing dreams.

Over the past few years, Musk has built cars, launched rockets, and announced immigration to Mars. On August 29, in a live broadcast watched by 150,000 people, the brain-computer interface once again shocked everyone.

If Google had acquired Tesla, it might not be Musk but Pichai who is in the spotlight now.

In an interview with National Geographic, Steve Wozniak, a former close friend of Jobs, was asked this question: Who in the world today can fill the vacancy left by Steve Jobs?

His answer was Musk. He believes that Musk resembles Jobs primarily because of the motivations behind the products developed by the companies they founded and led. Both Jobs and Musk developed revolutionary and innovative products. Musk found that the market needed an electric car that could carry a family together. Jobs believed that the mobile phone experience before the advent of the iPhone was too bad.

Larry Page's motivations are very different. He hopes that Google can continue to change the world in ways that most people think are unimaginable. For example, it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the biotechnology company Calico to research technology to extend human life; it has developed a smart contact lens for diabetic patients, through which it can detect human blood sugar levels.

Jobs once told Page, "You have done too much," and Page explained that we should invest billions of dollars in making people's lives better. I would feel guilty if I just kept doing what I was doing before and didn't try something new.

Tesla is becoming more and more like Apple. On the 27th, Tesla’s market value exceeded US$400 billion. Even the three traditional car companies Honda, General Motors, and Ford couldn’t match the power of one Tesla. Space X also became the first business to send humans out and return them to Earth. airline. Recently, Musk demonstrated a high-profile implanted brain-computer interface. The science-fiction-like imagination contained in this technology seems to make Tesla even more of a "star" giant.

However, looking back at Google, most of the scientific research projects that have amazed the outside world in recent years have only received news of termination.

In 2015, Google Glass, which once triggered a global craze for wearable devices, was suspended less than three years after its launch. It was restarted again three years later, but Google Glass is no longer amazing;

In 2016, Google released a modular mobile phone prototype, which attracted a lot of attention at the time. However, within half a year, news came that the Project Ara modular smartphone project had been stopped;

In 2017, Alphabet Agreeing to sell Boston Dynamics to Japan's SoftBank, Boston Dynamics developed a series of robot dogs and robots, which caused a sensation because they were too bionic and often topped various robot rankings, but Google still sold it;

In 2018, X Lab developed a smart contact lens for diabetic patients, which can analyze blood sugar levels through the glucose in tears. After four years of research, the plan was stopped, and there was no follow-up news;

As Steve Jobs said, has Google done too much? Probably more than that. In 2019, Wu Jun evaluated Google in an interview. He believed that “Google today is a rather mediocre company. Although it has developed some very eye-catching technologies, it is far less helpful to people than in the past. . Google’s last greatest contribution to mankind was Android, and I can’t think of anything remarkable it has contributed after Android.”

It is worth mentioning that Android was acquired by Google.

More than twenty years ago, one of Page’s many crazy ideas was to download the entire Internet and study how websites were related. His mentor talked him out of the idea, but Page did it anyway, and eventually he and Brin built Google based on it.

Search is actually just an accidental by-product of Page and his team's "ridiculous dreams". They have had all kinds of wild dreams. At that time, Page liked to study automated cars, Sergey Brin was interested in data mining, and Scott Hassan’s imagination of colonizing the solar system made the entire team start thinking about how to realize it. Therefore, the space elevator became the founder of Google. Establishing a core project of the Google X Lab.

In the early years of Google According to Thrun's recollection, he once applied for $30 million from Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and executive chairman of Alphabet, to fund the project, but Schmidt directly gave him $150 million.

However, as more and more projects are cut off, we see that this model of relying solely on advertising revenue to support technology research and development is already facing challenges.

Recently, four U.S. technology companies announced their second-quarter financial reports at the same time. According to the financial report released by Alphabet, its total revenue in the second quarter was US$38.297 billion, a decrease of 2% from US$38.944 billion in the same period last year; Net profit was US$6.959 billion, down 30% from US$9.947 billion in the same period last year. On the contrary, the revenue and profits of Apple, Facebook, and Amazon all achieved higher-than-expected growth, and many indicators also reached historical highs.

The decline in revenue and profits, as well as the current trend of falling behind, make it impossible for Google to invest huge sums of money into technology research and development that will not receive returns in the long term, regardless of returns. In fact, as early as a few years ago, the "20% time" that Google once talked about in Silicon Valley has been strictly controlled when the company scaled back large-scale projects. Former Yahoo CEO Mayer, who worked at Google, also revealed that the "20% time" policy does not actually exist at Google.

Steve Yeager stayed at Google for 13 years. Before leaving his job, he criticized Google like this: "Profit gives us a license to survive, but it also gives us a reason to exist. If you can't Make your employees understand "why" they do what they do every day, and they will ultimately make decisions in financial and other aspects that are afraid of risk, afraid of innovation, and afraid of growth."

The sale of Boston Dynamics is an example.

In 2016, a video of a pedestrian robot getting up after being hit made Boston Dynamics famous. However, Google still chose to "abandon" Boston Dynamics. Part of the reason is Alphabet executives questioning Boston Dynamics' positioning and profitability prospects, and part of it is internal fighting within the company. After Google's original robot project Replicant was incorporated into Google X, Boston Dynamics' team has not been able to successfully integrate into any projects or departments.

From car sales to software-centered Internet services to autonomous driving, Tesla seems to be following Apple’s old path, and if Tesla follows Apple’s closed software and hardware ecosystem Taking the same route, coincidentally, it will also face Google directly, just like the entanglement of IOS and Android systems.

Google has been obsessed with self-driving cars for a long time, especially Page. He was obsessed with self-driving cars when he was starting his business. In his view, no matter how much investment is required in this technology, it will not be compared with the huge investment. The rewards are nothing in comparison. Since the launch of the X Lab in 2009, Waymo self-driving cars have driven more than 10 million miles on public roads, and in 2016, the project developed into the independent company Waymo.

This is probably the origin of the "wonderful" friendship between Page and Musk. However, when the world's service providers with the most advanced autonomous driving technology collide with new energy vehicle companies with the greatest consumption potential, a head-on confrontation in the autonomous driving industry is inevitable.

Autonomous driving may be the next battlefield for Google and Tesla, and in the long run, the cooperation and competition between the two sides for future transformative technologies seems to be more exciting.

Therefore, investing in Space X means that Google’s moonshot plan has taken another step forward.

However, today, Space X seems to have become a star company in the global commercial aerospace competition, but the “moon landing plan” of Google Financial success is also rarely achieved. This is worth pondering.

We can probably blame this difference on the people at the helm. Since Sundar Pichai became Google's new CEO in the second quarter of 2015, its quarterly revenue has surged by more than $13 billion, while Page has stayed out of the public eye since becoming CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet. In 2019, Page and Brin gave up directly and gave up their positions to Pichai.

Pichai does not have Page's fanatical admiration for technology. In his view, Silicon Valley's optimism has been affected by cautious sentiments, and the situation has changed a lot. "We're more cautious, and we're more thoughtful about what we do, but there's something deeper here, and that is: technology is not the answer to human problems." But looking at Musk, he seems to have no idea of ??"prudence" and is more willing to rush forward crazily.

Back in 2014, Page defeated Tim Cook and became the "Business Person of the Year" selected by the US Fortune magazine. His comment was: Page proved to the world that he is the most courageous in the world. CEO. The ‘moonshot’ projects he advocated have now become a regular pattern, any one of which can change the lives of billions of people and help Google remain at the top of technology.

Real breakthroughs require huge amounts of capital, creativity, and most importantly, patience. How much patience does Google have?