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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

An $18 billion valuation for a company with dramatically accelerating losses, currently at the rate of over $20M per month. What could possibly go wrong there?

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Really? You're going to trot out the age-old HN aversion to loss-making? It's time for HNers to learn that ambitious companies that know how to invest resources SHOULD be making losses. IPOs are fundraising events. The capital is expected to be invested into the business to drive further growth. When companies lose the ability to invest at acceptable returns, then you might see them shift the balance to profit-making.

Valued the same as Tesla. Is there anyone here who would rather own Twitter instead of Tesla five years from now?

Personally, I would shy away from both of them. If you really want to be in one of these companies, at least Facebook has earnings and scale. I've never liked twitter and get no value out of it, so perhaps I'm the wrong guy to ask, but I suspect Twitter is headed the way of MySpace.

While I think you're quite wrong about the MySpace comparison, I also agree that FB is the safest social media play.

I don't think the use of the word "safe" or any derivative of it is appropriate with the shares of any publicly-traded social media company.

That said, even though Twitter's valuation looks quite rich at $26/share from a financials perspective (to say the least), I think some investors who have (or want) positions in social media companies are considering Twitter's demographic profile, which also happens to be Facebook's biggest potential Achilles heel.

The fact that Twitter is seen by some as a benefactor of Facebook's growing teen attrition may not be a wise rationale for a Twitter investment, but if you're hell bent on taking a cruise on the Titanic, why not rearrange the deck chairs to get yourself a view that's more to your liking?

It is, of course, not a mutually exclusive situation. But to your point about demos, if you look at the data it paints a different picture than what you've suggested. As an investor in FB (not that that makes me special) I read the Piper Jaffrey report that I presume you're citing. What it overlooks is that FB owns Instagram. Where FB is weak demographically, Instagram is strong.

Moreover, FB's value has never been strength among the youngest demographic. Sure, hooking a user early is great but hardly the only path to acquisition. Just ask my mom. Or, probably, your own.

And feel free to use whatever language you want. I stand by what I said.

> Twitter is headed the way of MySpace

Possibly. Once Instagram's number of users (150 million) hits Twitter's number of users (232 million) it won't be looking so good for Twitter, if Instagram continues to grow. Maybe Twitter will take over SnapChat (26 million users) though. Twitter just isn't gaining, they seem pretty stagnant, taking over a younger company could give them some growth.

The comparison to Instagram is interesting. I used to do some marketing on Vine. Our traffic from Vine dropped more than 90% in less than 1 week after Instagram introduced video. That's how fast a replacement for Twitter could gobble up its business as well. IMO, Twitter is better suited as a feature, not a product, and definitely not an $18 billion company.

$1.8 billion. 70 million shares at $26 a piece. Am I missing something?

They're selling 70M shares, aiming to raise approx. $1.8B. However, there are over 700M fully diluted shares. At $26 a piece this makes a total valuation of $18B.

Ah, thank you for clarifying!

what's your data for said accelerating losses?

"But for all its power and reach, Twitter gushes losses — $65 million in the third quarter, nearly three times more than it lost a year ago."

http://triblive.com/business/headlines/5012201-74/twitter-co...

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