So let me get this straight... SpaceX is worth half of WhatsApp? Does anyone else feel like they're living in Bizarro-world?
What % of AT&T's market cap ($175B) is its SMS business? What % of Lockheed Martin's market cap ($65B) is its space business? Think about the incumbents WhatsApp & SpaceX are trying to dislodge. Generally speaking the ones WhatsApp (now Facebook) are larger by market cap than the ones SpaceX is targeting. That reflects the fact that something everyone uses a little bit every day is generally worth more than something used by very few people, intensely.
To be pedantic, more like hundreds of millions of people monthly.
*This is equivalent to: There are tons of people who think space is cool or useful and do nothing because it's too expensive and that won't be true with SpaceX's costs in 10 years.
I seem to remember Elon saying this himself in a relatively recent announcement. I believe it was the one where they unveiled the human pod thingy to go ontop of the falcon, but could be wrong. Either way, they use modern design and manufacturing methods, where the competitors like ULA use methods developed in the 70s and refined slightly in the 80s.
The capital equipment probably is largely pretty specialized to not only the market they are in but their approach to it, and may not be that marketable on its own.
And, despite the name "human resources", regular employees aren't property, and their attachment to SpaceX may be fairly tenuous, particularly in the event of a change in management and operational style.
Even if each one of them was paying the $1 annual fee, that's still less than a billion dollars in revenue.
Also, often valuations are based on the number of employees. SpaceX has 3,000 plus billions of dollars in capital equipment. Whatsapp had 55 I believe and basically zero dollars in capital equipment.
I think that there is more to this deal than "Google gets 10% for $1 billion". There is no way SpaceX is only worth $10 billion.
Further, that's of little relevance to a minority investor like Google, as they can't turn around and say "let's sell to Lockheed now", and staff moves.
In terms of capital equipment, you have to consider how quickly that equipment depreciates and who might be interested in it. Is there even a market for X billion in whatever equipment SpaceX owns? The purchase price is irrelevant.
For many people, their Gmail id is their sole or primary id on the internet, used to identify them to scores of websites. It is their official online point of contact for various aspects of their online lives including their career, banking, social networking etc.
Facebook is their online social profile, which they spent thousands of hours curating.
Your Whatsapp id is merely your Phone no., (which was Whatsapp's main selling point). All interactions in Whatsapp are ephemeral in nature - Most people delete their conversations when their phone memory gets full. Compared to gmail and facebook, the switching costs are practically zero.
Yup. Toilet paper is a massive industry, too, worth a lot of money.
No snark, just reality.
This isnt a bad idea actually - "if you want access to WhatsApp-X, then you must use Space-X inet service"
What investors are looking at is potential. The upside for heavy-industry SpaceX is far more constrained than that of a social media company.
I'd argue that the upside of making launches happen at 1/10 the traditional cost, with the potential for easy reusability with minimal refurbishment (which will allow much more than 2x launch volume, and a much greater cost reduction) is larger than WhatsApp's to a hilarious degree.
More difficult as a business, maybe, and then only because it's a crowded market.
In terms of technology, messaging apps are hilariously less difficult than rockets.
The hardest thing I ever did as an investor was let go of thinking there's some correlation between the things I like and market value.
If whatsapp start charging or introduce ads I can't see why people would stick around, considering the Huge number of whatsapp users who also have viber/snapchat/basis sms also installed
It's possible they'll never figure out launcher re-use, or get it working well enough to matter. It's possible they will and no one will care that space launch is now 10% what it was, and flight rates will stay the same, and they'll just end up dominating a relatively small and stable niche. It's possible the incumbents will quickly copy their techniques and push them aside. It's possible they'll fail in enough launches to drive off every customer and bankrupt the company.
I don't believe any of that, but it's possible and you have to take the uncertainty into consideration of value. Whatsapp has users and works and will continue to work. You know what you're getting there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915524
EDIT: but to answer your question - yes, I very much feel like that.
Essentially, the value of WhatsApp is based more on what it could have destroyed than on what it could have created. Advertising is kind of funny like that, since it's not a product that consumers actually want. No value is lost to consumers by switching to a platform without advertising, even though the economic damage to advertisers can be huge.
I thought they were already profitable? But is that incorrect? It would seem disingenuous to claim that they lowered the price of space travel by 90% if they actually weren't even breaking even? hahahha.
SpaceX still has it's independence and fresh infusion of $1billion in cash. It would probably fetch much more than $10 billion if it sold out now, but I doubt Musk would want to do that.
Oh it says here that my dream to solve world hunger is worth north of a gazillion dollars.
Nothing at all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Inte...
ISS scientific value coverage in media sucks, I'll grant you that.
"The Portable Glovebox (PGB) was developed for the European Space Agency for use on the International Space Station (ISS); it can be transported around ISS and used in any laboratory module. The PGB confines accidental spillage of materials and helps prevent contamination of biological materials when the experiment containers are opened for observations, sampling, and fixations."
Yes. Figuring out design and use of lab equipment for microgravity conditions, as well as actually using it in further experiments, is definitely not beneficial for anything.
BTW. one of the important research done in orbit I recently learned about is figuring out how plants sense gravity. There were some cool results wrt. that, and this is the kind of research that is both important and hard to do on the surface.
Also, you seem to be confused as to the purpose of the glovebox. While there may be an experiment to test it, it is not an experiment, it is apparatus for experiments.
Yes I believe we are living in Bizarro-world.
Whatsapp got bought by Facebook, they will definitely not become the next Facebook and I sincerely doubt they'll ever become the next google. Try as I might, living without Google is hard, living without Facebook is stupidly easy.