>1) If the rumors are correct that they are looking to raise 4 Billion at a roughly $40 Billion valuation.

Was under the impression Snapchat was given a $3-5 billion valuation.

I find it hard to accept that Snapchat is worth the same as Tesla and SpaceX combined.

In other words, is [a 400-employee company whose core product works only on cell phones to show annoying ads to teenagers as they send each other photos, and whose annual income is barely $100m] worth the same as [a 15,000-employee company that produces autonomous electric vehicles, with a net income of a few billion/year] and [a 5,000-employee aerospace company that builds self-landing rockets, with income of a few billion/year] combined? I don't bloody think so, especially given what an asshole Evan Spiegel has been in public lately.

If anything, this is a sign that we're in a soon-to-pop bubble. If Snapchat ever goes public, it deserves to die the same slow death on the stock market as Twitter did earlier this year, or a violent pets.com style death.

A company is worth the percentage it captures of the value it creates. You alluded to it in your comment--Snap has a much lower headcount and an order of magnitude less operating costs, so if anything it kind of makes sense that they'd be valued at a relative premium.

Also, you may not like Snapchat, but to say it deserves to die when it both a) employs real people and b) clearly serves a market need is such a terrible thing to wish for.

I like Snapchat; it's a great service. However, if they keep introducing more ads while demanding ridiculous valuations, my generation will stop using it.

It would be great for Snapchat and Twitter to be turned into nonprofits like Wikipedia.

Tesla and SpaceX aren't worth that much for much the same reasons you've outlined - they have massive capex requirements, high employee overhead and retention costs, and really real technology risk (it's literally rocket science).

At least they have something they can sell afterwards...

If I sell you a Book for a million dollars, I make 1 million dollars. If I sell a million books for a dollar each, I make a million dollars. My Company is worth a million dollars. It makes no difference to the quality or what i am selling.

That's not how valuation works, and that's not how revenue models of companies work. Please make less useless comments.

> whose core product works only on cell phones to show annoying ads to teenagers as they send each other photos

Rather than trying to call something stupid before you know what it is, it would probably help you to look into Snapchat some more. Other than the fact that it's only on your cell phone, how is any of this different from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?

Anyways, the reason I believe Snapchat stands out here as a profitable service is exactly what you said. Snapchat is really fast-paced -- while a lot of time goes into most people's Instagram posts, it's not worth the effort for a photo someone will see for 10 seconds max. Like Twitter, this enables rapid use. It's not unheard of for people to send/receive hundreds of snaps a day. Plus, Snapchat is perfect for advertisers. All you do is roll out some filter and probably half the people using the app on that day will try it out. Combine the two and you'll seen realize that not only are users voluntarily sharing advertisements, but they're also doing it often 10+ times a day (and viewing those same advertisements hundreds of times). Yes, more people might see a single ad on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, but it won't be ingrained into their mind to nearly the same degree as it could be with Snapchat. That's the kind of value that could put them ahead of Tesla or SpaceX.

It's pretty clear to me that people value Snapchat. Imagine totaling up the time voluntarily spent on Snapchat. Capturing that value...that's another question but there's a lot of economic value provided by Snapchat (as in people chose to use Snapchat over doing something else).

I've never used Snapchat and only barely know what it is (an even shorter lived instant messaging thingy where messages disappear and gamification techniques are used to keep you enganged?)

I wish we could get some visibility as to how many Snapchat users are adult content creators. This is a segment that everyone seems to ignore, but I think we would be surprised to learn its scale and the amount of money flowing through it. It's also probably the group of users which most use Snapcash and driver huge numbers across all metrics.

Hot much underage porn does Snapchat carry. What's the potential liability on that given (in UK) ISPs are starting to filter porn by default.

Snapchat's rose in the mass media as the app children were using to send images of their body parts. Not just that, mean/bullying messages and "pranks" too. Of course you can do those things on other apps or through other media, just Snapchat's transient messages seemed designed for it.

It's force of the platform: A reaction to parents asking to overview the teenager's activity on the mobile phone – "Can't show you the messages I've received or sent, dad, they're timebombed!" Actually I've never gotten over the idea that Snapchat was for porn, especially since their icon looks like the shadown of an exhibitionist opening his coat...

I would be very interested to know this too, but of course it's all technically against the ToS[1] and so I doubt Snapchat will ever even acknowledge it, much less give numbers on it. Don't want to offend those delicate advertisers!

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/debug/snapchat-porn-banned/

(The article is over a year old, but not much has changed since then.)

> the Google founders have done a great job of managing their companies while maintaining voter control.

They moved aside and let Schmidt be CEO for a while though, because Page was not ready.