They're essentially circumventing market mechanisms (which would require a whole lot more people than just Zuckerberg to think that such a project was a good idea) and wasting a bunch of resources because they've been overcompensated for their other successful projects.
That's the point. Market mechanisms will only fund things that will obviously succeed in a short time. A market cannot innovate or be creative. A single person, with a proven track record of being ahead of the curve, can.
>and wasting a bunch of resources
The tremendous excess of resources we enjoy today comes from allowing a large number of people to explore ideas without first proving that does ideas were guaranteed successes. Not only can we easily afford to waste resources, we can't afford not to.
Yes, that is why I believe we should distribute resources so that as large as possible a number of people continue to have that opportunity, rather than concentrating so many resources in one man's project.
This is clearly a very different situation to for example the case of 2 companies with 5000 employees or 4 companies with 2500 employees, or even 2000 companies with 5 employees. Those cases would all allow for much more variation in approach, and this in turn would allow much greater scope for market feedback from consumers to affect the development of the products offered.
One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control.
I think this sort of research done by large corporations is a big reason for the US's success. Just look at Xerox's PARC[0] where so much was incubated that couldn't have been if Xerox just focused on short term profit seeking.
Glynn research institute.
For that matter celera, which arguably shows that the market will fund things that will obviously NOT work in a short period of time; anyone with half a brain could have told you that they were unlikely to be able to 'patent half the genome' but it's like greed and not understanding the narrative dominated.
The market can't self regulate if only very few megacorps have an iron grip on it and can stamp out any threat immediately.
Should we have prevented Amazon from investing into AWS? The meta universe seems like the next social platform and it's related to the facebook mission of connecting people virtually.
It's not about preventing it outright. It's about constrain resources to bias towards the invested-in company actually being profitable to allow other companies to compete with them on a level playing field.
> If this was investor funded couldn't Mark fund this himself?
If Facebook didn't make as much money then Mark wouldn't have as much money to invest. Which IMO would be a good thing as it would mean that wealth would be more distributed which would likely lead to it being used more wisely due to the wisdom of the crowd. Mark could probably still launch such a project (and I have no problem with that), just not with "hiring 10,000 staff in Europe for an unproven project" level of resources (which I do have a problem with).
How is this determined? Are market mechanisms not working in stock trading either? Seems like they are delivering decent profit numbers for their investors, compared to other companies.
This is IMO completely the wrong benchmark. Are they delivering value to society? Yes some, but IMO not nearly in proportion to the amount of wealth they've accrued. Your free to make your own judgement about that, but if you agree then you also agree that market mechanisms are not working in this case.
How is this determined? I am trying to see if there is some actionable chain of reasoning here, or if people are just stating the top 5 companies in the public markets qualify? Is it a certain net profit margin? A combination of various factors?
The funny thing is Facebook (or Meta I guess) could fall of the face of the earth tomorrow and humanity would not really be impacted other than temporarily losing WhatsApp groups and having to migrate to a different chat program.
That's my personal judgement.
The actionable response would be progressive taxation on corporate profits which would stop companies getting quite so large, and force (or strongly encourage) companies that wanted to continue growing beyond a certain point to split (which would have the effect of spreading control/power over the economy around).
> The funny thing is Facebook (or Meta I guess) could fall of the face of the earth tomorrow and humanity would not really be impacted other than temporarily losing WhatsApp groups and having to migrate to a different chat program.
Isn't that exactly the problem though. So much of societies resources going towards something that isn't ultimately that important. The opportunity cost here is huge.
[1]https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190507005765/en/Man...