Firstly, the 97Bn was for the non-profit, not for the company. The company is being valued in funding rounds closer to 300Bn. I think it may be true that OpenAI has no moat, but if it has no moat then all of these AI companies are overvalued (including xAI) and Elon should just stop bothering to throw his money at it. I would say Elon probably actually doesn't have much of an advantage here. In both SpaceX and Tesla he was able to do something no competitor could do - raise cash. Car companies simply couldn't invest in tech research to build self-driving to compete with Tesla. SpaceX consumed enormous amounts of cash before anyone saw value. That is a unique skill that Elon had over the 2010s.
That is not an advantage in a race against Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. he's competing against all the biggest companies in the world in this race. He's not going to be able to outspend them if the economics look at all sensible.
No, spacex projects are extremely $ efficient. The total project cost of starship is like 20% of the SLS.
> he's competing against all the biggest companies in the world in this race.
No, this is a not a pissing contest on who has the most $. If it is about who can come up with most $, then the entire race is already over as the CCP has access to trillions of $ CASH.
