I'm wondering where the loss is coming from. I'm skeptical that it's all coming out of the cost of infrastructure and workforce. I know they've had some company acquisitions in the past, so I wonder how that is coming into play.
400 million a year to Google and then who knows how much more on AR/VR stuff.
Well, they do have 1859 employees. If you say on average they're paid $50k each (totally made up estimate, would love for someone to give me a better one), that would be almost $100mil a year in base salary alone.
I would 2.5x that estimate and with benefits etc, round it up to total cost $200k per employee.
Keep in mind it's highly unlikely that all of those employees are engineers, probably lots of sales/marketing/customer service people. Still, with benefits and stuff I'd estimate maybe 100k per on the low end.