
Intel’s $15 billion acquisition of Mobileye is all the talk in the auto industry today. The biggest question is how do they value the company at 30 times its projected revenue for the year? It’s a historic acquisition in term of size and valuation. For comparison, Tesla is valued at $40B, about 4 times its projected revenue for the year.
The answer is that Intel sees the acquisition as bringing in-house the “entire package” of autonomous driving. CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in an email to employees today: “this acquisition essentially merges the intelligent eyes of the autonomous car with the intelligent brain that actually drives the car.” The eye being Mobileye and the brain being Intel.
The fact that they are willing to pay $15 billion to accomplish that is quite interesting and somewhat validates Tesla’s own new approach which aims to do same thing since discontinuing Mobileye’s system in the Autopilot. In fact, Tesla considers its in-house efforts an improvement over the Mobileye platform. expand full story