I doubt that's what happened. They had designs that were massively expensive to fab/package, had much worse performance than the latest Nvidia hardware, and sti

I doubt that's what happened. They had designs that were massively expensive to fab/package, had much worse performance than the latest Nvidia hardware, and still needed massive amounts of custom in-house development. To combat all of these issues, they were fighting with Nvidia (and losing) for access to leading edge nodes, which kept going up in price. Their personnel costs kept rising as the company became more politicized, people left to join other companies (e.g. densityai), and they became embroiled in the salary wars to replace them. My suspicion is that Musk told them to just buy Nvidia instead of waiting around for years of slow iteration to get something competitive. The custom silicon I was involved with experienced similar issues. It was too expensive and slow to try competing with Nvidia, and no one could stomach the costs to do so.