Is it even meaningful for a company to be valued at ~$30B if it cannot guarantee survival & stability? In what sense of reality is this a “unicorn”?
*
Fed is printing infinite money
So $30 billion is not $30 billion
AirBnB offers the potential of high upside
Do you park your 'free, Feb printed money' in the bank, and then at some point its value is less than it started
Or do you park it in AirBnB or another IPO, where it might go to zero, or it might go ten times
Everywhere IPOs are booming. Because money is being printed and there is nowhere for it to go for a good return
Nobody rational with a significant amount of their wealth in a $30bn company hasn't already taken some chips off the table. Whether through cash bonuses, loans, tendered shares or secondary sales.
A $30b valuation is a very rational valuation if you assessed there was a 50% chance of a $0 valuation and a 50% chance of a $60b valuation.
EDIT: Yes, I understand the math of (ensemble-averaged) expected values. My point is that such a calculation (for a high variance distribution) is useless/pointless/stupid/<adjective of choice> (basically a bad model) for anyone for whom their AirBnB investment is more than a small/marginal part of their portfolio. In particular, it’s a dangerously misleading number to anyone who has a large fraction of their personal wealth invested in AirBnB (including employees & founders, or potential retail investors who might invest directly in the company at IPO, rather than through index funds)
Refer the St. Petersburg paradox.