Comment by aspenmayer
2 days ago
It will be chaos for those working at Meta and those invested in them too much without an appropriate hedge. I doubt I will notice much, to be honest.
Even if Meta tanked, unless Messenger/Whatsapp stop working, it’s kind of beside the point how much their stock trades for. Everyone will just use whatever has or keeps the most public interest, whether that is Meta-owned or something else.
The worrying aspect is that for Meta to really tank in value, the shit has to have already hit the fan, and it probably would not be isolated to Meta.
My point in my prior comment was that Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo just by doing what they’re already doing. Cloudflare too, in a way.
I meant that if meta actually goes under, since they are clearly a decent part of S&P 500, it might create a spiraling effect similar to lehman brothers which can affect the world economy and thus you and me both.
They better get their shit sorted.
> Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo
The problem is that their products are getting worse and worse. Signal is already taking a huge share from WhatsApp (ads and AI chat bots, really?) and Messenger.
TikTok absolutely obliterated Instagram. Facebook is sliding into irrelevancy, and most importantly, they have a lot of failed products like Oculus, Metaverse (wtf is it anyway), LLAMa, etc. Now they are sliding into even more irrelevance and burning money even faster trying to poach extremely expensive OpenAI folks. My conspiracy theory is that Facebook ads earning numbers are somehow a scam.
After so many bad decisions on their part, so much waste and bad execution that I can't see them surviving the next 5 years.
They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast, or they would have done if not for antitrust concerns under Biden. They can afford to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to rockstars for well over 5 years, and acquihire their way to acquiring the next big thing. I think they’re probably appropriately valued alongside other trillion dollar companies, but they will likely find that it’s less lonely at the top than anticipated.
Signal serves IC interests too by requiring phone numbers.
> They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast
No, what they could do in the past is not at all how they can operate today. They can't afford to pay the rockstars anymore, they went through multiple rounds of layoffs. They can't afford to drop the stock too low also. Basically they are in a corner, and I love it. Fingers crossed that within the next five years they shake up upper management and Zuck is out.
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