Bryan Johnson compares Elon Musk to early internet companies joining a new ecosystem. He contrasts Fitbit, which Google bought for $2.5 billion but couldn't leverage beyond the device itself, with Apple's ecosystem that thrives through developers and continuous data. Hardware becomes valuable when it enables third-party innovation and network effects.
So you see Elon as a kind of competitor or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty, or both. The fellow traveler. It's like at the beginning of the Internet. How many companies are going to be invited to this new ecosystem? Like an endless number. The hardware just starts the process. Back to your initial example. If you take the Fitbit, for example, you say, okay, now I can get measurements on the body. And what do we think the ultimate value of this device is going to be? What is the information transfer rate? They were in the market for a certain duration of time, and Google bought them for two and a half billion dollars. They didn't have an value add. There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device. They also didn't have increased insight with additional data streams. So it was really just the device. If you look, for example, at Apple, you have value in the device that someone buys, but also you have everyone who's building on top of it. So you have this additional ecosystem value and then you have additional data streams that come in which increase the value of the product.
