Jason Badeaux

And when was the last time you tried to go to fill up your tank and you couldn’t because there was no fuel? The 70's? That was one of the worst existential crises our real economy has faced since the Great Depression. This is a far more frequent occurrence on the electricity grid: nodes can’t function individually, unlike how cars and boilers can.

Electric lighting, for example, did not simply replace candles and oil lamps on a 1-to-1 basis, but instead opened up entirely new residential, commercial, industrial, artistic, and scientific applications. Refrigeration did not just replace ice boxes on a 1-to-1 basis, but instead found new applications ranging from air conditioning and... See more

The first major [blockchain] breakthrough was bitcoin, which invented digital gold. The second was Ethereum, which introduced general-purpose smart contracts. Helium presents the most ambitious new use case for blockchains we’ve seen since Ethereum.

A system is a public utility if it is permissionless, rent-free, and does something useful.

Tesla’s innovation strategy — which focuses on transforming the auto industry as a whole — offers enduring lessons for any innovator, especially in terms of how to win support for an idea and how to bring new technologies to market.

Dahn and his team solved this with a single crystal NMC 532 cathode. This has much higher levels of manganese (30%) and cobalt (20%), which makes it more efficient. Also, rather than being loads of crystals squashed together, they have been formed into one cohesive crystal, which means there are very few falts for degradation to take hold, which... See more

Over time, the Gigafactory will grow and hopefully fulfill Elon Musk’s dream: achieving complete vertical integration for all Tesla products.