[paulftw]

> Perhaps they get around that valuation with 100M/year in patent licensing.

Patents expire after 25 years, so at 100M p.a. deal for investors is spend 1B to get $2.5B back, two decades later. I'm not sure that even beats fixed interest. Even with continuation it's still around 10% return.

As others have pointed out O(1B) is same as O(1).

[pravda]

>Patents expire after 25 years,

Twenty years. At least in the USA.

Carry on.

[aetherson]

And they start from time-of-approval (or filing?), not when you first put together a salable proof-of-concept, so for patents like which are not trivially possible to implement, you won't get all 20 years of it.