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Comment by nyxtom | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this - I believe - is the entire premise why we have no bubble this time around. It's because these companies are indeed on the bleeding edge of scientific discovery. The brightest minds in research work at these companies. The research and development that comes out of these companies, that create new open source work, and spawn out new markets in analysis, intelligence, economics - all of the work from these companies fuels growth for every other business out there who use any part of the technology stack to drive their business model. Just my 2 cents

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I'll give you Facebook, and MAYBE Twitter. But WhatsApp is a messenger service, a space where tons of others have come and gone. I'm not sure what bleeding edge they are sitting on in regards to scientific discovery.

Facebook is worth more than all the major auto manufacturers in the world combined. It is worth more than Boeing and Airbus and General Electric combined.

Where do they make the majority of their money? Is it advertising? or is it investments that they have made with public money? I am curious what their profits look like that their valuation is 328 Billion dollars.

If you aren't being merely rhetorical just google for Facebook quarterly earnings

That's because the VW stock price crashed because of "Dieselgate". The VW AG's assets alone are worth €381.935 billion and they achieve a far higher revenue of €213.292 billion (VW AG) vs $17.928 billion (facebook).

There are 1.2-1.5 billion vehicles on the streets worldwide. Roughly 1 billion people use WA and roughly 70% use it daily.

There's clearly value because lots of people use it. You don't need any technical breakthroughs to create value. Possibly to monetize it but not to create it.

Btw. the underlying technology is pretty cool imo but that's besides the point. I mean they had what 30 engineers when they were bought (for about 500 million users)? Erlang yay.

No one is denying their proliferation, we're debating their "bleeding edge scientific discovery". What was the percentage of internet users that were on AOL IM during its peak?

It was the only messenger available for MOST platforms, including the then-dominant BlackBerry. It provided feature parity with BBM, including guaranteed delivery of prompt failure notices, which was a bigger deal then. It's why my friends and I started using it years ago.

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