> Perhaps they get around that valuation with 100M/year in patent licensing.
Patents expire after 25 years, so at 100M p.a. deal for investors is spend 1B to get $2.5B back, two decades later. I'm not sure that even beats fixed interest.
Even with continuation it's still around 10% return.
And they start from time-of-approval (or filing?), not when you first put together a salable proof-of-concept, so for patents like which are not trivially possible to implement, you won't get all 20 years of it.
Patents expire after 25 years, so at 100M p.a. deal for investors is spend 1B to get $2.5B back, two decades later. I'm not sure that even beats fixed interest. Even with continuation it's still around 10% return.
As others have pointed out O(1B) is same as O(1).