SpaceX has tremendous potential, but most of what will make them lots of money has yet to be proven--both technical and economic.
It's possible they'll never figure out launcher re-use, or get it working well enough to matter. It's possible they will and no one will care that space launch is now 10% what it was, and flight rates will stay the same, and they'll just end up dominating a relatively small and stable niche. It's possible the incumbents will quickly copy their techniques and push them aside. It's possible they'll fail in enough launches to drive off every customer and bankrupt the company.
I don't believe any of that, but it's possible and you have to take the uncertainty into consideration of value. Whatsapp has users and works and will continue to work. You know what you're getting there.
Yea but you could make arguments that whatsapp could suffer any number of ill-fated results. There's no business without risk. Technical risks are difficult but whatsapp has only shown that it can charge $1/year. $19 billion is a bet (and a risky one) that they will be able to squeeze more money out of those 700 million users.
Whatsapp was not bought only for its revenues or revenue potential, but also to protect against them turning around and using that userbase in a way that could turn into a threat to Facebook (whether themselves, or by selling to someone else).
WhatsApp could go MySpace overnight. Or I guess more accurately, go BBM. If they had a multi-day outage, how many users would they have on the other side?
The real answer was given by simonh elsewhere in this thread: the comparison is moot since they aren't publicly traded companies. The market is not saying that Whatsapp is worth double of Spacex.
It's possible they'll never figure out launcher re-use, or get it working well enough to matter. It's possible they will and no one will care that space launch is now 10% what it was, and flight rates will stay the same, and they'll just end up dominating a relatively small and stable niche. It's possible the incumbents will quickly copy their techniques and push them aside. It's possible they'll fail in enough launches to drive off every customer and bankrupt the company.
I don't believe any of that, but it's possible and you have to take the uncertainty into consideration of value. Whatsapp has users and works and will continue to work. You know what you're getting there.