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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Google a trillion dollar company going gangbusters toward its next trillion dollars?

Well currently they make about 1500 bucks a year of every american household just selling ads. Make much less on the rest of the world. So it really just boils down to what the upper limit on ad sales to the american consumer is.

The cloud business is also doing quite well. Waymo is generating revenue now as well. So not just ads.

Is it profitable?

Cloud is profitable. Waymo not, but is building. In any event, the grandparent was talking about revenue.

Which is completely meaningless. Anyone can sell a bunch of one dollar bills for 50 cents

That was the proper takeaway during Amazon.com’s preprofit stages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

A more sophisticated analysis would involve checking available capital vs run rate and whether or not there is a viable business underneath.

An even less sophisticated analysis would know that it doesn’t matter if their marginal cost > marginal revenue…

What next? Are you going to say look at where Apple was pre Jobs as evidence? So all they have to do is resurrect Jobs from the dead and let him take over Waymo?

There is a reason that “look at Amazon!” is meaningless

So how much is the American household spending on Waymo, in average? It's totally insignificant.

The value of Waymo isn't current revenue, it's whether it works reliably and whether it can be scaled.

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