[asperous]

Talking about X more generally, their Gimbal book is interesting:

https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Gimb...

I think their self-driving cars project is probably what X could be at its peak, incredibly challenging projects, high profit potential, well financed.

Projects like loon seem more like a project that a university would get grant funding to finance.

[aoki]

Think about the many hard problems to be solved. They had cost-effective high-endurance stratospheric balloons - decades of military projects never really got there. They had very detailed stratospheric wind models - decades of atmospheric science research never really got there. They had a flying LTE network. Each of these solutions was almost certainly too expensive and “niche” for any conventional funding agency to consider, but necessary for Loon to work.