Whole Mars Catalog Profile picture
Jul 11, 2022 22 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Inside Apple’s eight year struggle to build a self-driving car

Meaningless demos, false hopes, map handicaps… and “the jogger incident” $AAPL

theinformation.com/articles/insid…
Apple is trying to make their system work without HD maps. that led to all kinds of issue in silicon valley
key takeaways
Tesla is the ONLY company not making demoware. $TSLA
they’re trying to “infuse deep learning”. Shouldn’t it have been infused since the beginning?
self-driving companies have burned $30 billion
Cook refuses to commit to mass production of the vehicle
Federighi is skeptical
Apple is burning a billion dollars a year on this
initial design was for a minivan

great, another self-driving minivan
apple wanted to make the car out of glass
Ive wants a fully autonomous car
While Tesla was learning from the real world, Apple was hiring contractors to pretend to be pedestrians and cyclists. $AAPL $TSLA
Apple’s cars cost 1 million dollars each due to tons of hardware including LIDAR.

That’s 27 times more than what it costs to produce a Tesla running FSD. So 27 teslas or 1 apple car.
when all of that didn’t work they hired the guy @elonmusk fired from Tesla lol
one takeover per minute
deep learning is not unproven, it’s the only way to solve the problem 🤦
then everyone started resigning
current design is incredibly ugly apparently
one car almost ran over a jogger
they shut down testing, added the crosswalk to their HD map, and resumed.
if you’re too stupid to see how far ahead Tesla is on this I don’t know what to tell you.

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More from @wholemars

Jun 16, 2025
So why is a pre-revenue company burning $100 million a quarter buying Palantir exactly? $ACHR Image
to build the AI foundation for next generation technologies

... okay ...
Palantir AIP, as I understand it, helps companies incorporate LLMs into their workflows

is that really the most important thing to scale up your non existent manufacturing footprint?
Read 4 tweets
Jun 4, 2024
Long time Tesla hater Lora Kolodny is out with a story saying @elonmusk redirected Nvidia chips from Tesla to xAI. I can tell everyone is going to be talking about this one, so let's dig in.

The first thing to know about Lora is that she has been working closely with Tesla short sellers like my stalker Aaron Greenspan for years. She even helped spread accusations that I had child pornography when Tesla shorts were trying to smear me back in the day. Everything she writes should be taken with a huge grain of salt and she has often been wrong in the past. This time is no different.

Lora's evidence for this story is an internal Nvidia memo from December 2023 which said "Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipping H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla"

The conclusion she draws from this is that Tesla is being ripped off at the expense of xAI. But it is already June now, so both companies have received the 12k GPUs. While she assumes that this is because he hates Tesla and wants to prioritize xAI, this is an assumption that excludes several more benign possibilities. For example, it's possible that Tesla was still setting up some of the existing H100s they received and were not ready to take delivery of more. It's possible that Tesla was under margin pressure and needed to spread out delivery over a longer time period to minimize the impact on cash flow. While many will rush to say Elon made a decision to harm Tesla we don't know all the factors that went into this decision and I'm not going to assume the worst just yet.

She then points to a memo that says their $10 billion in AI spending "conflicts with bookings and FY 2025 forecasts". But the Nvidia staffer who wrote the memo didn't realize that that $10 billion includes spending on Tesla's car inference computers as well as their own in house Dojo supercomputer.

Another point worth considering is that Tesla will use xAI language models in products like the Optimus robot and their in car voice assistant. Grok 1.5 vision looks like it could have powerful self-driving applications as well. So it is not just xAI vs Tesla — the models being produced will actually be useful to both companies.

From what I've heard, Tesla is building out training compute massively and is no longer as compute constrained as they were in the past. They have close to 40,000 H100s and are planning to expand to 85,000 by the end of the year. In addition their in house Dojo supercomputer is now in mass production and expanding rapidly.

From what I have heard from my sources at Nvidia, Tesla has ordered over 100,000 H200s from Nvidia that they will be taking delivery of over the next 12 months. Deliveries have already started.

Ahead of the vote on Musk's compensation, Tesla short sellers and their allies like Kolodny will be doing their best to make sure you hate Musk and think that he is ruining the company. The reality is that nobody except Musk could have pushed the company to deliver FSD 12.

Sadly many people will believe this story and repeat it as fact. But I have read Lora's story and see no solid evidence that Tesla isn't getting enough delivery chips because of xAI.Image
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Tesla likely has more training compute than xAI live today, and between their large Nvidia orders and Dojo there's a good chance they could actually stay ahead of xAI. They are not slacking in building out their training compute in the slightest
Needless to stay I was not contacted for my thoughts before publication Image
Read 5 tweets
Jan 7, 2024
Wow so you’re telling me that not only did this guy sell more EVs than any other automaker on Earth in 2023, launch 80% of payload to orbit

But he did it while on LSD, cocaine, ecstasy & ketamine? Just when you thought the guy couldn’t get more impressive

what a dumb smear job Image
Image
how is this different than how he acts when he’s sober Image
Read 5 tweets
Nov 30, 2023
Elon is right. The advertisers who pulled out of X should go fuck themselves.

This whole saga is everything wrong with this country today. We face real problems as a nation. Massive problems.

But instead of actually doing anything about it, we’re obsessing over trivialities. Celebrity gossip. Virtue signaling. I’m taking a stand against Elon Musk’s tweet! He’s so anti-semitic!

Give me a fucking break. You’re not helping anyone. You’re not making anything better. You’re just shitting on those who are actually trying. Trying to twist their words and smear them, not out of a desire to help the jewish people, but just because you don’t like him.

Instead of rebuilding America for a new century, we’re tearing each other apart.

Reject cancel culture. Let people speak. Let people say dumb shit and make mistakes without shitting your pants constantly.

And when you see companies doing this shit — caving into the woke mob, surprising free speech — stop supporting those businesses. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

If we lose our ability to speak our minds, we lose the ability to make things better.
And when Elon visits Israel — bringing more attention to an important conflict than ANY of these clueless journalists have done — they shit on him for that too.

“Oh, he just has to go because of his tweet, to win the advertisers back! Apology tour!”

Fuck the advertisers. If they were willing to do this once, they will do it again the next time Elon tweets something people get their panties in a twist.

That’s all he was saying. He didn’t go there to win those dumbasses over.
Then people are going ohhhh this was a huge mistake! He’s going to lose so much money now!

How many times have we heard this before. X is doomed! Call me crazy but I think everything will be fine. Try as they will to kill X, they have failed again and again and again.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 8, 2023
A lot of people talk about the rise of Chinese EVs, particularly BYD, as they start exporting more cars around the world.

In this thread, let's go down this list of the top 20 best selling EVs in the world in September and learn about them. Image
Up first is my favorite, the Tesla Model Y.

Starting at $44,000 in the U.S. and RMB 263,900 in China ($36,263 USD)

This isn't just the best selling EV in the world, it's the best selling car of any kind. It's fast, it's fun, it runs FSD.

121,258 units sold in Sept. 1.46M/yr Image
Next up is the BYD Song. The price is about RMB 186,800 or $25,000 USD — more than $11,000 USD cheaper than the Tesla Model Y. Image
Read 18 tweets
Aug 12, 2023
Friends, please join me in this Toyota solid state battery thread starting in...

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Read 15 tweets

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