"Even then I know of no investors - ZERO - who wouldn't take a 20x return on a billion dollar placement."
Sure, if there was any sort of guarantee it would work. When there's a serious chance of throwing your money into a black hole where cash goes to die, then I'm not sure the upside is worth it. And even then, if you can make 1,000 investments into Instagrams for the cost of one investment into Hyperloop, I'd do that every time. "But they'd take 1billion -> 20billion over 1million -> 1billion every day." sounds wrong to me. If you have the $1B to invest, wouldn't you want to spread that out, make 1,000 $1M investments? I'd imagine your return would be better with that than an outside shot you could hit 20x your money on one investment.
Right. But no investment has a guarantee of working. There aren't 1,000 Instagrams in tech. There are roughly 10-15 moonshot investments made a year out of thousands. So you can't find 1,000 instagrams.
Investment doesn't scale like that. You can "imagine" return would be better but it isn't is it? Look at VC returns. If you make 1,000 investments of $1million how many do you think make it to being a billion dollars vs just losing your money? How many of those investments need ZERO more capital along the way - if they need more capital you either get diluted out or you're putting a ton more cash in.
Instagram is a ridiculous outlier to build an investment strategy on. How many other Instagrams have you heard of this year? Yeah... not 1,000.
People investing in Hyperloop type investments don't put all their money on one investment either. If you're an investment manager at a pension fund having to find places to park $500BILLION you cannot be managing million dollar investments, they're meaningless. Even an Instagram doesn't move the needle. You have to place lots of billion dollar bets.
Sure, if there was any sort of guarantee it would work. When there's a serious chance of throwing your money into a black hole where cash goes to die, then I'm not sure the upside is worth it. And even then, if you can make 1,000 investments into Instagrams for the cost of one investment into Hyperloop, I'd do that every time. "But they'd take 1billion -> 20billion over 1million -> 1billion every day." sounds wrong to me. If you have the $1B to invest, wouldn't you want to spread that out, make 1,000 $1M investments? I'd imagine your return would be better with that than an outside shot you could hit 20x your money on one investment.