Waymo is Google's big, speculative in-house R&D project. It's pretty big. They're in for $20-$25bn so far, and it'll require that much again before viability^.

Waymo is Google's big, speculative in-house R&D project. It's pretty big. They're in for $20-$25bn so far, and it'll require that much again before viability^. That's over a decade, and it is pretty risky. Meanwhile, besides search, most of their big successes were acquisitions: adwords, youtube, android, docs... all acquisitions at core. All extremely cheap, in retrospect. Tesla joining the elite "tech company" ranks has made for some good juxtaposition. They are a "textbook" company, because the textbook more or less assumes that firm = manufacturing. The way they were financed (pre-insanity equity markets), the way they consume capital, etc. Apple, Alphabet, FB, etc aren't like this. ^if