I mean, this sounds like survivor bias in action?

Google also bought Motorola for 12 billion and Microsoft bought Nokia for 7 billion. Those weren't success cases.

Or more similarly, WeWork got 12B from investor and isn't doing well (hell, bankrupt, according to Wikipedia).

> Google also bought Motorola for 12 billion and Microsoft bought Nokia for 7 billion. Those weren't success cases.

A lot of that was patent acquisition rather than trying to run those businesses so it's hard to say a success or not.

I see what you are getting at, but it is important to understand the context for my example and the argument I’m making.

I’ve explained various points at length in other comments: (i) why I selected this example (simply to show that folk wisdom or common sense is less reliable than market-driven valuations) (ii) how a funding round is influenced by markets even though it isn’t directly driven by a classic full market mechanism.

Something I haven’t said yet would be a question: how can an outsider rigorously assess the error in a funding round or acquisition? To phrase the question a different way: what price or valuation would an oracle assign based on known information?

One might call this ex-ante rationality. Framing it this way helps remove hindsight bias; for example, a subsequent failure doesn’t necessarily mean it was mispriced (sp?) at the time.