<<But of the two thousand companies, from just a few years ago, only three automobile companies survived.

Just to be a jerk I’ll point out that the number of survivors was more like a dozen, maybe 20, at least for long enough to interest investors. GM was an amalgam of several different companies: Chevy, Buick, Pontiac, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile. Even Hummer started out as an independent brand and was bought out by GM early in its (Hummer’s) trajectory. If you owned Buick you did’t get wiped out, you just got GM shares instead.>>

I live in suburban Detroit and I thought I would share an interesting story with the board but first bear with me
while I first provide some background information. Although much younger than me Tony Fadell went to the same High School
that I attended. Tony in his youth was a caddy at the Country Club of Detroit which was/is filled with major auto executives.
Tony went on to graduate from the University of Michigan and ultimately became a senior executive at Apple. He is considered
the Father of the I-Pod and Co-creator of the I-Phone. Before there was an I-Phone there was the I-Pod which was a huge
success but to quote from the recent excellent book Apple in China by Patrick McGee "Tony Fadell could hear the footsteps
behind him ...in a Silicon Valley culture captured by book titles such as Only the Paranoid Survive, Fadell began to worry
sustainability of these [I Pod] sales. 'You hear these heavy, stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry... they are
adding cameras, they are adding color displays. And they are seeing the success of the iPod and going, that's just music.
We can load music onto our phone and do what the ipod does, plus more!"

Fast forward to the really interesting part of the story from the vantage point of someone like myself who grew up
in the Motor City, Tony talks about how he would go for long walks with Steve Jobs and talk about if Apple made a car
this is what it should look like and it should have these features. So here is a guy who had I guess you could say a subservient
position as a caddy in his youth at a major Country Club in Detroit filled with major auto executives and he is talking
with one of the major innovators of the last Century about destroying the auto industry. As Don King would say "only
in America."

Tony eventually left Apple and was building a second home in Lake Tahoe (there are no inexpensive homes in Lake Tahoe)
and didn't like the thermostats available at the local hardware store. Long story short he invents his own and creates
Nest which he sells to Google for $3.2 Billion Cash.