alt Hacker NewsPeople said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off):
- when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube
- when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram
- when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp
The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics.
Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions.
Replies
We don't really know how much money Google sunk into YouTube before it became (presumably) profitable. It might have actually not been strongly coupled to economics.
You listed only acquisitions that paid off and not the many, many more that didn't though.
There’s no comparison to what’s going on now vs those examples. Not even remotely similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias?wprov=sfti1