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Which private enterprise has the power to run a hundred billion project that isn’t funded by the government. Not one.

Think of all the high-rise apartments (which so many on HN claim to want) and large commercial complexes that are constructed purely by private enterprise.

AT&T Park, Levi's Stadium (over $1 billion), and the new Warriors arena (over $1 billion) were privately funded.

Uber, Google Search Engine, Facebook, etc.

None of them have done anything on this scale, have they? They’re valuable because they don’t make investments like this. Their work is on a long lever so they have great margins over massive volume.

I’m pretty sure Uber has terrible margins :)

Haha, or potential for great margins, right. It's not one big project that costs $100 bil, right. There's very little incrementality to HSR, etc.

Google has spent over $200 million on land alone... in the valley alone... just in the past month.

I heard that it seriously depleted HQ's petty cash fund. (But seriously, these were, in fact, all-cash deals.)

Yeah, but they don't do that every month. And $200 million is 1/500 of 100 billion. This is like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and buying a McLaren P1. Or spending all your money as an L7 at Google vs. going to space yourself.

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