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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? As I write this, Microsoft, the largest purveyor of enterprise software in the world, is worth roughly $340 billion. Oracle? Less than $200 billion. Hell, Amazon, the company that Dropbox runs on isn't worth $200 billion.

You honestly believe that any one of those companies, none of which has been around for more than ten years, could reach a market cap of $200B within 5 years? Either you are incredibly bearish on the dollar or we are officially in bubble times.

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Yes, seriously. Which company is anyone's guess, and some are more likely than others, but it's conceivable a single company from that list could achieve a $200B valuation on a 5 year time scale.

My point isn't really to take anything away from those companies. They're all very impressive. It's more that I am surprised that people don't seem to think that $200B is an incredibly large amount of money. It's more than three Ford Motor Company's. Or $80 billion more valuable than Cisco Systems, in many ways the backbone of the entire internet. It's just an incredibly large valuation to achieve for any company let alone in a five-year time frame.

Major difference between public market valuations vs private market valuations.

Particularly, liquidation preference & anti dilution.

There is no such thing as a $200B private market valuation. For a company to have that large of a valuation, it pretty much has to be a publicly-traded company by definition.

If the argument is that somebody bought 0.001% of the company for $2,000,000, therefore 100% of the company is worth $200B, that's just a bridge too far.

> You honestly believe that any one of those companies, none of which has been around for more than ten years, could reach a market cap of $200B within 5 years?

That's not the bet. The bet is that they will, in aggregate be worth $200B.

    "Proposition 1: On January 1st, 2020, these companies 
    will be worth at least $200B in aggregate."

Edit: Can't read. The parent is in response to the grandparent, not the bet.

He was referencing my statement above, not the bet.

Thanks for the correction. Edited to reflect that.

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