Self made wealth is almost always a product of an entire community.
The reality is that wealth and "privilege" are a scale: no matter who you are in the world, there are both people above and below you, in terms of advantages.
Even then someone would say that it was still done from a position of privilege because you had a place to sleep, animals to hunt, and how dare you say you are self made - you at least had a job unlike many people in this fine country!
To me, "self-made" means being able to take the opportunities within the environment that you live in and make the best out of them. Yes, that usually means that you get some opportunities that other people don't get - but equally, there are opportunities that you don't get either. You can be a "self-made" white son of a billionaire. Or a "self-made" immigrant of colour. Alternatively, we can stop using the term "self-made" entirely and pretend that it doesn't exist. That's also a solution.
It's not a big enough industry to support their valuation. Many companies have developed clever equipment for the film industry over the decades[1] and none has been valued at $15bn for it[2]. As an example: Panavision sold for $622M last year.
They really need to (edit: continue to) be selling to consumers. That said, I agree completely about their quality and success.
[1] - Check out some cool stuff here: https://camerarevolution.com/
[2] - Kodak might have been, once upon a time, but I can't find a breakdown of their motion picture revenue so it's hard to say.
They're like the canary in the coal mine, a wakeup signal for the Silicon Valley that thinks they're still on top because design and innovation happens here, and China is only for lower-on-the-supply chain stuff. If companies like DJI replicate, and China gets a few dozen Samsungs and Sonys, which become global brands and symbols of high quality instead of regional brands, one of the shining sectors of the US will have been caught with its pants down by misjudging their competition yet again.
That said, they are one of the few phone companies left that allow consumers to unlock the bootloader, along with offering some stock android models with zero bloatware and monthly security updates.
Samsungs are worthless now if you can't install Lineage on them.
When we say the word “system”, it means a lot of foundation of system design and practices.
China companies lag in system design, this situation is very clear now; Still the root cause of this lag is related to the outdated government system.
Huh? I don't understand your point, as they DO sell to consumers, and are the best known drone brand as it is.
For example, the near monopolist laptop and phone hinge manufacturer RKX did not have a website up until relatively recently.
The same is true for the biggest slip rings manufacturer in China Jinpat - was virtually unheard of even among engineers in China. Everybody only knew them as the no name slip ring maker, but few knew that they control almost all the market for microminiature slip rings, and high performance ones.
The tech big players in China are actual tech companies, not websites.
That's why I view this as selling pick-axes to unsuspecting and gullible farmers who sold their worldly possessions for the great gold rushes of the 1800s. The people selling the mining equivalent knew the vast majority of them would never earn anything. The best most amazing technologically advanced pick-axes in the world can still be a disrespectful business model.
An Antminer isn't a license to print money. It's a device for hashing blocks.
This is like calling Sony a scam because they sell video cameras to aspiring YouTube stars who never make money out of their aspirations.
It matters, because there are plenty of scams out there, where people exchange money in good faith and receive a substandard good, or nothing at all, in return.
If Bitmain does that, provide evidence. If it doesn't, stop making libelous statements about them.
You may not like their product. I would never buy it. But it isn't a scam.
However, the vast majority of people purchasing ASIC miners think they're going to make money from them.
Another example: GPUs, some people bought em for mining, but independent of mining they accelerate games and digital content creation, and lots of other useful computation.
It's the true believers who think cryptocurrencies are going to save the world from centralized banks who are getting scammed.
One financial analysis of Xiaomi I read (it's in Korean, I couldn't find anything in English) is that it is in part a lending company funded by float from manufacturing partners. Xiaomi has a personal loan product which grew by 100x in two years to ~1 billion. Liquidity comes from delay between retail sale to partner payment.
Since when scooters, air filters, and vacuums turned "not a tech?"
American brands are more competitive with Japanese brands in China due a fluke: as all of them are made in human labor intensive factories (vs. using more robots), the quality of Japanese designed cars has gone way down to the point that Toyota and Honda aren't thought of as being very good cars like they are in the states.
And Bitmain? Is it tech wealth creation to sell pick-axes to desperate miners looking for a gold rush? This looks to me like instead, a zero-sum trade, wherein someone got rich, and everyone else was left holding the bag for a device that would be worthless in a few months.
Of all of those on the list, DJI looks like the most legit, self-made success story, producing a very high quality, Apple-like experience in innovative drone devices, devices now used extensively by the film industry.