Elon Is Building the Most Valuable Factory on Earth

Steel is going up on Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are building in Grimes County, Texas. This summer the site was forest. Now, according to a drone photographer who films it every week, the foundations are going in, a row of huge cranes is working and the first steel columns are standing. Elon Musk says it will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth, by far.

The bill is big enough to match. Texas state filings put the whole plan at up to $119 billion, and the spending starts long before a single chip has proven it works. So who's paying for it, who gets the chips, and why would anybody make a bet like that?

In this video I break down:

- Why Tesla designs its own chips but still waits in line at the big chipmakers in Taiwan and Korea to make them

- The price: almost $17 billion for the first stage, according to SpaceX, and Elon's forecast that the plant would be worth over $1 trillion at full output

- Who pays for what: a test plant of roughly $3 billion