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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

For context, that's a fleet of five space shuttles when adjusted for inflation. Somehow I have some doubts that a photosharing application with no revenue is actually worth five space shuttles.

Sure, they may have a lot of users, but so does the company that makes the paper I wipe my ass with.

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> Sure, they may have a lot of users, but so does the company that makes the paper I wipe my ass with.

If you use Charmin to wipe your ass, they are owned by P&G, which has a market cap of $230B.

Procter and Gamble produces a whole lot more than toilet paper. They're one of the three or so megacorps that makes almost all of the consumer household goods sold in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Procter_%26_Gamble_bra...

Comparing them to Amazon might be a bit more accurate.

EDIT: my napkin math turns out to have been closer to "toilet paper math" because it was completely wrong. See child comment for details.

Interestingly, Charmin as a brand has revenue around ~2.5B[1], which when multiplied by P&G's P/E ratio of ~25[2] gives you a rough idea of the brand's value as part of the parent company's market cap: 60B.

So, the paper you wipe your ass with is worth about 3 snapchats.

[1]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/188710/top-toilet-tissue-... [2]: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3APG&ei=t77jVOC5DMeoiQ...

The E in P/E is earnings (profit), not revenue. Your valuation is probably an order of magnitude high. Also your first link uses the vague "sales" which could mean end retail sales, in which case revenue to P&G would be even lower.

There's no way Charmin is worth $60B.

Good point. Edited my comment to reflect it was bad math.

And if you use University of Phoenix diplomas to wipe your ass, they are owned by Apollo Education Group, Inc, which has a market cap of 2.83B.

When you compare them to space shuttles, sure. But when you compare them with WhatsApps, it's actually somewhat reasonable to value them at around 1 WhatsApp.

I blame Zuckerberg for screwing up the WhatsApp to dollars exchange rate, not others for extrapolating. Given Facebook's previous attempts to purchase them, I can easily see them selling to Facebook for above that $19B valuation.

Once you remove Facebook from the equation, the valuation becomes just as absurd as you make it out to be.

Perhaps the market is in for equilibrium on the other side? Both Snapchat and toilet paper serve useful temporal utility, disappear almost immediately, and rarely contain anything but shit. Kimberly Clark (the maker of some of the most popular toilet paper brands) is currently worth $40bn according to the public markets.[1] Given that Snapchat is only worth $19bn, I wonder if perhaps Kimberly Clark is in for a deep correction.

[1]http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KMB

Heh. I'm not sure space shuttles is the right unit of measurement. Five space shuttles doesn't sound like much at all.

But you could build about 25 Hoover Dams for 19 billion dollars...

Why? Snapchat provides utility to hundreds of millions of users. A space shuttle basically only benefits the astronauts on it, and the NASA engineers who get to pat themselves on the back. The so-called "science" they do is generally worthless.

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