Comment by ben_w
8 hours ago
Or a bit of everyone else's.
To quote a message I wrote on a finance channel on telegram:
The TAM for "enterprise applications" at 28 T sounds both too much and too little: by the time the tech (and/or overall economy) allows it to reach that number, that number itself will look unimpressive, and this kind of scale seems to be reachable with ground-based more easily than with space based (at current energy prices, even that TAM is only about 2% of being Kardeshev 1).
Feels like Musk did vibe-economics for "how big is the global digital economy?", much like the claims about factories on the moon making data center satellites looks like he prompted grok with "if I tile the moon with solar powered factories and mass drivers to launch them, how many TW can it launch per year?"
> Or a bit of everyone else's
The world's GDP is about 100T. That would mean more than 1/4 of every expenditure in the entire world would go into buying AI or by AI providers into their consumables.
That number is just bullshit.
While I essentially agree Musk is BSing, TAM doesn't imply "we can actually get this entire market". The TAM for the food sector is *all food*, not what one particular alcopop manufacturer can sell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market
AI today can't do all desk jobs, I don't know how far we even are from that given the spiky nature of ML, but it smells like this IPO is using that as the justification for the claim.