Arthur Kroeber

Let's try and figure out what is the next –

stage of technological development that people really aren't working on yet.

Let's work on that and then maybe we can get in on the ground floor.

And so what they came up with in large measure was a renewable energy, specifically electric vehicles.

So

They started having a pretty comprehensive set of subsidies and other kinds of industrial support for companies like BYD to produce electric vehicles.

BYD is basically a private company.

This worked okay for 10 or 12 years.

And BYD got pretty good.

And particularly what they started to figure out was the supply chain.

So they got very good at making the batteries work.

But still, when you got to 2018, 2019, BYD was still not that exciting a company.

Most people in China really didn't want to buy electric vehicles.

They seemed really inconvenient.

The sexy cars were like the big SUVs that the joint ventures were putting out and so forth.

And then in 2018, the Chinese government made the decision that they would allow Tesla to come in and build a wholly owned gigafactory in Shanghai.

They had never approved a wholly owned automotive company before.

They started cranking out cars in 2019, which became immensely popular.

And it seems like one of the things that happened was that the Chinese companies by 2019 had gotten pretty good at the underlying technology of electric cars, specifically the batteries and then the software systems that govern the cars.

But they were terrible at consumer design.