Is that a lot or a little? How am I supposed to judge? It looks like SpaceX is well over $1B with a B in funding in total now. In comparison Blue Origin just gets money from Bezos, so "no" funding?
This $100 million is a follow-on to a $350mm round started this summer, bringing this year's total to $450mm. This puts them up to $1.68 billion in funding, including their $1 billion funding from Google and Fidelity in January 2015. Latest valuation is reportedly $21.5 billion.[0]
A conservative estimate of annual payroll on /r/spacex from this week was $700mm.[1] Each Falcon 9 costs about $62mm, though some of the oldest contracts are for far less and government missions are more (plus Dragon). Cash-flow-wise, payments are broken up over the separate phases of the contract. They have launched 16 rockets this year, 8 last year and 6 the two years before. (Not counting one failure in each 2015 and 2016 — though we know SpaceX earned at least part of its CRS-7 milestone payments by getting off the pad.)
Just for comparison, $19 billion is what the first operational fusion power reactor is budgeted to cost. Instead of Whatsapp, the world could have fusion power. Tell me that makes sense.
> Instead of Whatsapp, the world could have fusion power.
I'm sure if HN could combine savings from annual budget the $5 lattes and $2,000+ annual refreshes of the Shinybook Pro, we'd be halfway there. But hey, maybe the value provided in an affordable SMS replacement to a billion people isn't all that, right? It's just a replaceable app, why don't they get iPhones and use iMessage. /s
HN can be hilariously condescending - "I don't use this, it doesn't impact me, I don't understand it - therefore it can't be worth much".
> Tell me that makes sense.
WhatsApp provides massive value to its users, especially when they supported feature phones. What's the human value of a poor rural farmer sending a message to their child in the next city over "Your mom isn't feeling well, please send money for a clinic visit"? I bet it is more than the $1/year WhatsApp originally charged. Communication is a force-multiplier - someone smarter than me has probably already calculated the value WhatsApp has added to the world by merely existing.
I'm not a Facebook fan- I hate that Facebook changed the monetization model and are dropping WhatsApp support for feature phones in pursuit of features. However, Facebook paid $19 billion because WhatsApp was potentially an existential threat to Fb. Why don't you and a small team develop a fusion reactor and see how much GE/Saudi Aramco will pay - I bet it would be north of $19 billion.
Just as a side note, that's such a weird thing to compare against... What intuition does the average reader have about the price of container ships? If anything, I learnt that container ships are less costly than I would have guessed...
It’s probably a misunderstanding of common media units of measure. If an Olympic swimming pool or an Empire State Building are a valid unit of measure, why not a container ship?
Those are probably weird too, but most people have some idea of how tall tall buildings are (even if they haven't been to NYC), and likewise have probably been to a pool.
people i know are using it less because of how buggy/slow it has gotten and how hard the basic activity of curating your boards has become. i also now avoid clicking anything related to pinterest because they break the web and make it hard to visit the source website and view their site on mobile. Too many walls around that garden.
I once clicked on a recipe that was pinned to a Pinterest board and it would not allow me to view it without registering for an account. They lost my eyeballs forever that day and I'm sure there's many others like me out there. Given their target revenue model was presumably ad/affiliate referral based, keeping potential consumers outside the wall made zero sense to me.
Same for me. I think this might be the actual reason they're losing out. The moment they started requiring to log in to view stuff discovered through Google anyway was the moment I stopped using them, even though I actually have an account.
The funny thing is that you are obviously right about their problems and despite the fact that an anonymous stranger on a forum can easily answer this, the billion dollar machine won't change to save its life.
Exactly, been thinking this for years now. It's scary how fast a company can grow too big to actually do anything remotely new or change a small thing to save itself. Same actually how SpaceX came to be, stop tossing away perfectly fine rockets.
I am one of those guys. I don't really understand the value of pinterest. So a drop in performance made my exit far easier. I am probably not their target user.
A conservative estimate of annual payroll on /r/spacex from this week was $700mm.[1] Each Falcon 9 costs about $62mm, though some of the oldest contracts are for far less and government missions are more (plus Dragon). Cash-flow-wise, payments are broken up over the separate phases of the contract. They have launched 16 rockets this year, 8 last year and 6 the two years before. (Not counting one failure in each 2015 and 2016 — though we know SpaceX earned at least part of its CRS-7 milestone payments by getting off the pad.)
[0] https://equidateinc.com/company/space-exploration-technologi...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7fk828/estimation_o...
[2] http://www.spacexstats.xyz/#section-launchhistory