Molly O’Shea@MollySOShea
Sequoia's @shaunmmaguire on Why Elon's TERAFAB is Underrated:
"I’m gonna sh*t on a lot of other investors for a second."
“I’m watching people come in with what I’d call 8th grade level education on the industry, trying to make definitive statements.”
"I’ve been obsessed with semiconductors since I was a little kid. I literally bought Nvidia shares in the IPO in 1999. I was obsessed with semiconductor fab as a kid, got really deep into the chemical processes that go into making wafers."
"People are assigning way too low a probability that it will work.”
Hill & Valley Forum 2026 (@HillValleyForum) / @elonmusk
. . .
“I think it’s underrated because I think people don’t think it’s gonna work.
Like I think a lot of people view it—and again, this is a systems-level problem—and I’m gonna just go get sh*t on a lot of other investors for a second. It’s been pretty wild for me as chips became all the rage again.
To brag for a second, I’ve been obsessed with semiconductors since I was a little kid. I literally bought Nvidia shares in the IPO in 1999. I was obsessed with semiconductor fab as a kid, got really deep into the chemical processes that go into making wafers.
If you think about the silicon industry, from the mid-50s to the mid-90s, the bottleneck was actually chemical steps. It was not lithography—it was making ultrapure wafers, which require 20+ chemical steps.
Then it flipped to lithography, and EUV became probably the hardest single step in semiconductor manufacturing.
But there’s all these investors that, three years ago, had never done anything in hardware, had never thought about semiconductors, that are brand new and think that they’re experts.
I’m not trying to say I’m an expert—there’s a lot I need to learn—but I’ve at least been paying attention to this field for a very long time.
And I’m watching these people come in with what I’d call eighth-grade-level education on the industry, trying to make definitive statements around what the bottlenecks are, what’s gonna be hard.
They’re basically just parroting each other.
It reminds me a lot of when people were trying to assess the likelihood of reusable rockets working in 2014, or Starlink working in 2019–2020, where everyone would tell me to my face: it will not work.
Or when people were saying self-driving will never work. Especially with camera-only—where Elon was a contrarian doing camera-only rather than vision plus lidar.
All these things fit the same pattern of people thinking superficially when they’re brand new to a field, then having strong opinions on how things are gonna work.
And I think that on TERAFAB, people are assigning way too low a probability that it will work. I personally feel confident that it will. Timeframe—there are questions—but I’ve thought through all the different steps.
Almost everyone, when you talk about TERAFAB, they’re like, ‘but what about EUV?’ And EUV is something they first learned about in the last 18 months.
It’s comical to me."
