I was consulting for an insurance company once. they even had examples of some of their employees to get insurance money for broken things, using their internal example pictures….
- missed payments on interests
- failed positive guidance on going-concern
- missed intermediate milestones (b2b contracts basically give you any possibilities legally wise)
Well history in IT repeats itself in cycles. look up #NoEstimates for good and thoughtful content about this topic, and various anecdotes for inspiration. then derive your own conclusions.
there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big things.
technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.
I think western mindsets overemphasizes time. What i could glimpse at chinese strategy from my taiwanese colleagues, they assume it’s more of a 200-500yr plan.
no need to wait, helicopter tech is good enough for nearly all situations, some billions would help enough, rather than investing those into some kind of pipedream. Cargolifter already tried.
i had a similar view, until i found COB LED stripes (with dimmers), with 20W per m (LED W, not equivalent, i have mounted a few of those 3-10m (!), and now can have dimmed 1% background lights and hospital style brightness as well.
In addition to that, acquisitions often break up (performing) teams, and burden successful IC with additional „enterprisey“ workload which they might not be suited for.