"that being said, the market potential for a google is quite obviously higher than the potential for X i think. I can't imagine a future world where X is worth more than google, and if it is, it's almost certainly because they used that valuation to pivot and make something more worthwhile."
You can only say that with the benefit of hindsight. At the equivalent stage in Google's life, you might well have been equally skeptical of Google -- and a lot of people were, including at various times their founders and their VCs. It was widely known at that time that search was a bad business -- in fact, the assumption based on several years of prior data was that it was a loss leader for portals. Google itself didn't start with the keyword advertising model, they developed that along the way (in part based on work done earlier at Goto.com, which hadn't worked nearly as well for them).
Equally, at the equivalent stage in Microsoft's life, it was well known that PCs were a toy and that people wouldn't pay for software. At the equivalent stage in Oracle's life, it was well known that data belonged in hierarchical databases on mainframes, not in relational databases on Unix servers. At the equivalent stage in Cisco's life, it was well known that proprietary networks like SNA and DECnet were standard among people who paid for things and that the Internet was only a toy for academics. And so forth and so on.