It reminds me more of Elon and SpaceX.
Elon's first 3 rockets blew up in his face. It was looking pretty bleak for spaceX for a little while. They kept forging through and now do multiple launches a year and are contracted to send up satellites and cargo to the ISS while they work on the ultimate goal of interplanetary travel.
Rockets had been made by plenty of other people with much more expertise in aerospace engineering than Elon. In fact, Elon knew almost nothing about rocket science before starting SpaceX. But he had the vision of a product and kept reaching for it no matter how many rockets blew up. Now sure, Elon had quite a bit more capital than Kim, but he was also working in a much higher pay-to-play arena then Kim is with silk. But at the same time, people thought Elon had a ton of cash on hand, but he didn't relative to the industry. Most of his net worth was tied up in the equity of his companies, but nevertheless he kept funding the company through the failures, even when he couldn't pay top notch engineers or recruit talent away from their secure jobs at Northrop or Boeing.
Now in hindsight, those rocket explosion taught his team very valuable lessons that lead to their ultimate success later on. But at the time, many people saw them as failures. It's easy to look back now and say "well of course SpaceX was going to succeed, reusable rockets are a game changer". But that wasn't the sentiment 15 years ago, except for the few people in SpaceX that really believed in the technology and process.
As for china, you can say the same thing about almost any product. China can knock off anything. But no reputable company in the U.S. or Europe (ie Nike, adidas, Patagonia, etc) is going to be able to purchase knock-off material and incorporate it into their product. Furthermore, China, in general, is extremely fearful of GMO's. In fact, some Chinese think that GMO's are a western conspiracy to cripple their crops and give them cancer. Any attempt to steal Kraig Labs tech and produce GMO silkworms in china would be met with a ton of backlash (even in a censored state).
And, no, everybody doesn't know what Kraig labs can do, or how they stably integrated the spidersilk gene into the silkworm genome in order to express it at the exact right moment. Thats why Kraig is having so many issues getting these patents issued. They are very adamant about keeping the process vague enough where other people can't exactly replicate their process once their patent application is published. I've read through all the patent applications, and all of the back-and-forth commentary between the company and the principal patent examiner. The examiner wants more and more clarity regarding the gene cassette but Kraig labs refuses to go into full detail. It is clear that Kim doesn't want to give away the secret sauce due to the lack of real protection patents actually give (especially in china), so he treats it more like a trade secret. It's evident that no one else has figured out what Kraig has done with spidersilk.
Some of the previous attempts by other scientists/companies were successful in producing spider silk, but not incorporating it into the structure of the fiber, that's why none of their threads showed significant mechanical improvements over regular silkworm silk. It's exactly why Randy lewis told all those VC's that Kim would fail at creating it. Now he's trying to figure out what Kim did with the help of Jarvis and Fraser. I think once production is up and running, they will finally give the examiner what she wants because they will at least have a production head start.
Sure, I'm pissed that there was a weather delay. I'm sure Kim and Jon are just as disappointed. But I don't see this as ultimate failure. I see it as Elon's first few rockets blowing up.
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