ChatGPT is an extremely successful consumer product. Looking at Search traffic alone indicates they clearly have large brand value. Usage doesn't just depend on just benchmarks for most consumers.
Well now that the Donald is running the US and is about to cut subsidies for electric vehicles, add tariffs to aluminum and steel, now maybe the markets may see the light, I am not holding my breath though.
If all cars are more expensive, and all manufacturers have lower margins Tesla will have lower margins too. For the stock price the competition won't be other car manufacturers but other industries.
It would be a "subsiding tide lowers all boats" kind of thing.
I've been thinking, when I younger and living in the UK, all sorts of things (including some with the word "tax" in them) were denounced by the local right wing as "stealth taxes".
Trump is talking about tariffs as if they're a tax on non-Americans, but they're paid for by Americans who import stuff, which is basically all Americans given where your oil, aluminium, and steel come from.
Just because costs are higher for its competition doesn't mean that people are going to be buying more Teslas. Last I checked, Tesla was already down 40-60% in sales at its major European markets. They're getting absolutely slaughtered by BYD in China.
I mean as long as people are still buying cars, Tesla becomes more cost competitive. But in the short run it's not for consumers as much as it is for investors.
You may be right that Tesla will struggle internationally and the car market as a whole will struggle in USA
That comparison also shows that a recognizable brand alone can easily be worth more than 100 billion; Coca-Cola also has competition that offers similar products and zero tech advantage, but they still managed to keep their number one spot for decades.
Two bets with the same expected value can have wildly different variance.
The OpenAI bet is clearly that they build AGI and become the worlds first $10T company. At this valuation you only need to think it’s P > 0.1 for it to be a reasonable bet.
The choice is not between that. It's between which of the two businesses can deliver outsized growth & returns back to the investor in their time horizon.
OpenAI's real moat is all in their know-how about developing LLM architectures and training them. That stuff can be expected to be very hard to replicate, no matter how hard anyone tries. The best case for OpenAI is actually if the DeepSeek R1 improvements are genuine, and OpenAI can adopt them to make their upcoming models even more capable than they would be otherwise.
Start with China spending ~$2 billion to start DeepSeek by training in on OpenAIs outputs, and more to falsely claim it was an independent operation on only a $5million [0] . It did initially create a problem in the markets, and put out a bunch of bad assumptions. But the mere effort put in to undermine it shows it is in the front — OpenAI is the one out front with the target on it's back.
Will OpenAI be brought down? Maybe. But they do have the lead, and are running like they mean to keep it. The future is not yet written.
What’s the conversion rate on any single typical ad hosted by Google? Yet it all adds up to make a lot of money, for Google and (presumably) the advertisers.
Indeed it matters. A popular website is only financially valuable if the site owner runs ads on it, as Google does. Without ads, ChatGPT's consumer business model is not much different from WinRAR with its soft 60-day trial period. Sure, some % of its users upgraded to the full thing. Everybody else had humbler use cases covered by the free functionality (the 60-day expiry was famously not enforced).
Once zip/unzip technology became commodified (either by being baked into the OS or open-sourced as happened with 7zip), paid 3rd party tools were no longer needed and WinRAR's business disappeared.
As more advanced AI features get bundled into apps that users are already using like Google Search, FB, etc. there will be less incentive to have a separate ChatGPT subscription (even if it's slightly better, it won't matter to most people).
How much of that community would jump ship on change of ownership? Not that Altman is any better than Musk but Musk has certainly created a more negative publicity about himself recently and thus more distrust or people of certain political stripes unwilling to use his products (scientific community probably leans that direction).
