If you want all happiness and butterflies, as well as elephants in your hand and whales jumping in auditoriums, or some tall tale of 50 megapixel displays and of how great it will be someday, you have come to the wrong place. I’m putting the puzzle together based on the evidence and filling in with what is likely to be possible in both the next few years and for the next decade.
And the one before that, the iPhone, was the most successful product of all time.
NeXT did receive venture funding (which obviously became the core os MacOS and iOS). Fingerworks, was also a key acquisition. I can't find any information about the funding Fingerworks received, but being a university spin out it seems likely that they received at least seed funding.
To put the conversation back in a grounded and reasonable list of arguments, let's start with the premise that technology != business.
So even if the tech that Magic Leap is creating is so great, by the time they go to market, they will be competing with an ecosystem already in place. Apple will have all the apps that have been built with their ARKit (not to mention their App Store monetization strategy). Sony, FB/Oculus, HTC and MS are already at the infancy of developing something serious there. If Magic Leap came out with a product today, they are already starting behind.
If we take in consideration price point, it even becomes a more challenging scenario.
Fingerworks, and any others, were acquired after risk factors went down. Never forget your own hindsight bias, where the pdf collapses to 1.
More seriously, the last time a company spent this much money in a vacuum it did not turn out well for them. I'd love to believe they have an idea worth billions but struggle to come up with any plausible way to imagine such a value without major dependencies on a much bigger ecosystem. (see Occulus Rift and the computer gaming industry as an example of inter dependence issues)