> It is amazing that someone is willing to pay $3 billion for SnapChat, but nobody is willing to pay $6 billion for Hyperloop (which was Musk's estimate, althou

> It is amazing that someone is willing to pay $3 billion for SnapChat, but nobody is willing to pay $6 billion for Hyperloop (which was Musk's estimate, although many people took issue with it). No, it isn't. Reports/rumors indicate that Facebook, Google and Tencent were interested in acquiring SnapChat, a real service with real users, for $3 billion or more. Facebook, Google and Tencent are multi-billion dollar businesses that have reasonable justification to be interested in a company like SnapChat, even if the amounts they were supposedly willing to pay for it may seem unjustifiably rich to many. Hyperloop doesn't exist. It is a concept. The OP is criticizing venture capitalists for not wanting to invest in making such a concept a reality. It's easy to criticize venture capitalists, and a good amount of criticism is valid. But the OP doesn't seem to understand how venture capital works. Venture firms are not businesses that produce capital in the same fashion as Facebook, Google or Tencent. They raise their capital from limited partners ("rich people", institutions, etc.) and are tasked with growing that capital through investment. They realistically would not be able to raise this capital if their funds were entirely unfocused and they stated an intention to bet hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on mere concepts. Venture capital has already experienced significant changes over the past decade and there is good reason to expect that it will continue to change as trends evolve and the ongoing experiments in monetary policy play out. But anyone expecting venture capital to become the source of funding for concepts that require seed funding to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars is going to be sorely disappointed. In short, the OP's apparent distaste for venture capitalists is misplaced. Those who expect [insert some idea] to be financed to the tune of billions of dollars might as well blame every person on the Forbes billionaires list, every CEO of a major corporation or bank, and every Western politician for the lack of funding because they're arguably just as responsible as the khaki crew on Sand Hill Road.