I'm interested in where you came up with the "literal" worth comparison.

Perhaps what you meant to say is that, "I personally feel that this new steel alloy is worth more than whatsapp, and, I would be personally prepared to pay at a valuation of 1 million times greater than the whatsappp valuation. So, going back in time, if I had a choice of owning 10% of whatsapp for a $10,000 investment (valuing whatsapp at $100K), or 0.00001% of the company producing this alloy (valuing it at $100B, or 1 million times as much as whatsapp, I would take the 0.00001% for my $10,000 instead of the 10% share of whatsapp for $10,000).

Is that literally how you feel?

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Congratulations, you illustrated his point beautifully.

Why? Are there really that many use cases for titanium? I used to make nuclear submarines, I have actually designed a bunch of things that use super alloys that cost 10x what titanium costs. But even then, the fast majority of things I designed used "regular" steel or aluminum. There just aren't that many applications where you need something like that.

You need the combination of caring a lot about weight, strength, and size. That's not that common. The only time you need a better material is when all three of those things are inflexible. Otherwise I can make a bigger part, or switch to steel, or switch to aluminum.

I wonder what you would have said about aluminum in the 1880's, back when it was a useless novelty for the wealthy.

After all, the fast majority of applications are satisfied just fine by cast iron, brass or pewter. At the time at least.

Aluminium was a useless novelty because we were unable to manufacture lots of it back then. Something to do with electrolysis requiring lots of electricity, I believe, and there weren't a huge number of electric powerplants operating in 1880.

The Hall-Heroult process did not exist, regardless of powerplants. Aluminum was more expensive than gold because it could only be produced by non-electric vacuum smelting. (While there was not a "huge number" of generators there was enough electric infrastructure in 1880 to support electric cars.) If the HH process existed a decade earlier it would have been used a decade earlier.

Krschultz was being small minded by saying that titanium is expensive, exotic and not useful compared to the cheap metals we have. While forgetting that we didn't always have those metals cheaply.

I was going for sarcasm, but oh well. And you could argue that the HH process would have been invented earlier if electrical powerplants has been invented earlier; the simultaneity of these two historical events is remarkable: the world's first public powerplant opened just 4 years before the discovery of the HH process.

I do not think you can make the comparison. The article is about a science paper, and you are talking about the company Whatsapp. Facebook had already explained why they bought it at this cost. The kind of Titanium here (Ti6Alv4V) does not seem to be that good, so "it seems" we should not be too optimistic here (but I'm just a developer, correct me if I'm wrong).