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The billion dollar valuations of silicon valley startups may cloud your judgement a bit. 220 mil is a lot. Most companies won't be worth this much. Except for
by LeonM 6y ago
The billion dollar valuations of silicon valley startups may cloud your judgement a bit.
220 mil is a lot. Most companies won't be worth this much.
Except for the US, guns are mostly sold to governments (policy, military) so the gun market isn't that large, and there is lots of competition.
- SilasX 6y agoBut still, that means several of those highly-valued SV companies could afford to buy most gunmakers in existence...
- mrweasel 6y agoApple could just have bought the music industry when they launched iTunes. The value, and in some cases the profit, of tech companies are weird outliers in the business world.
- TecoAndJix 6y agoI'm now trying to picture what an Apple handgun would look like
- zepto 6y agohttps://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoThey would change the magazine design every few years and it would only fire Apple ammunition.
- junipertea 6y agoI would be a big fan of planned obsolescence for guns along with proprietary, not easily available ammo, actually.
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoUnfortunately ammo is easy to make. Many people make their own to varying degrees of complexity.
- yoz-y 6y agoChanged the charging cable once, after 9 years. People still bring that up. Lightning has been around for 9 years already. (Sorry if the changed magasine design was about something else.)
- joshspankit 6y agoIncorrect: They also changed the 30pin standard while keeping it 30pin. Many people found that they could not charge or play music with their new iDevice when plugging it in to a factory-wired (and non-removable) 30pin cable in their car.
- joshspankit 6y agoThere have also been multiple iOS updates that block 3rd party chargers through software even though those chargers use the lightning connector.
- bitwize 6y agoEven if detachable magazines were legal (which it now looks like they soon will not be, with the possible exception of grip magazines in pistols), an Apple firearm won't include one. If the gun ever jams you have to take it to a Genius Bar to get it unjammed. Because it features Touch ID, it will be the only firearm to comply with Biden's proposed smart gun requirement at the time the requirement passes, and thus the only legal gun in America until other manufacturers follow suit -- but a gunOS mandatory security update causes the gun to squirt water instead of firing ammunition.
- baybal2 6y agoAn iGun will only fire specially made square iBullets with DRM chips
- mrweasel 6y agoWell, it can only shoot at other iGun owner, so that kinda limits it’s usefulness.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago> square bullets But only at the Turks!
- Ancapistani 6y agoThanks - I had a good Puckle at that one.
- SilasX 6y agoWait, really? I had to look that up. From their share price chart, get AAPL as being ~0.33/share then vs ~133 now and market cap $2.2T, which backs out to ~$5-6 billion in mid-2001. I can't easily find the valuation of Sony BMG or EMI at the time.
- nostrademons 6y agoYup. The largest ones could afford to buy a mid-size country. (AMZN revenue = $386B, AAPL revenue = $274B, GOOG revenue = $182B, Norway GDP = $366B, Vietnam GDP = $340B, Chile GDP = $245B). Note also that SpaceX has more accurate ballistic missiles than the U.S. and Russia (PeaceKeeper CEP = 40M, while SpaceX routinely lands rockets upright within a ~10M radius on a drone ship), and Google has more data than the CIA & NSA (why else did the NSA try to wiretap them?). The microchip revolution put enormous capabilities in the hands of those organizations that know how to code effectively, such that Silicon Valley startups can often do things that were the sole province of national governments for decades.
- dsr_ 6y agoSurely one would expect to pay at least a few times annual revenue for a country?
- noitpmeder 6y agoNot if you use a community adjusted ebitda valuation.
- nostrademons 6y agoThat's revenue <=> GDP, and roughly earnings <=> tax revenues. I believe those are equivalent comparisons: revenue and GDP both include all internal transactions, while earnings and tax revenue reflect what's available for management/government to spend at their discretion. If a tech company were buying the country, market cap would be the appropriate metric, and market caps for those tech companies are in the $2T range, more than enough to pay a few times annual GDP.
- ISL 6y agoAgreed with the sentiment that modern companies are capable, but disagreed on the rocket comparison -- the comparison is difficult at best. One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?) and has milliseconds for course-corrections, the aspires to come to a gentle halt and can close some feedback loops over and over again for thousands of milliseconds. Edit: If you wish to make a weapons comparison, one might note that SpaceX can launch the mother of all MIRVs over and over again. The lower cost-to-orbit changes the economic calculus of rods-from-god, opening a possibility of a conventional-weapons bombardment from the other side of the planet for the first time.
- rob74 6y agoYeah, they could, but why would they? There are lots of less controversial fields to invest in...
- Covzire 6y agoCompanies that attack and manipulate 1A to their advantage in every place they hold power have no reason to support 2A, that's definitely true.
- tdy721 6y agoIf they have a liquidation event, or just do a stock trade? IDK... Valuation !== Value
- pvarangot 6y agoYes if they buy with stock, and if the stock doesn't tank when they announce their intentions. So, no.