1) Founder still has majority voting shares, gives a lot more freedom.
2) I think the Metaverse stuff will pay off in the long run
3) They are making the changes necessary to compete with TikTok.
I am buying shares now at this price
2) They will be facing increasing amounts of competition ex. apple. The metaverse is more than the hardware. The first big player in this space will be a game company, possibly one we aren't aware of yet.
3) Not enough to change anyone's usage habits. Just slows down the inevitable.
4) Privacy and the ads environment will continue to hurt them. There's no answer to this yet.
Don’t drink the FB look-aid that tries to make it seem as if the metaverse isn’t already here. It’s Fortnite, Minecraft, and Discord and has nothing to do with VR and everything to do with virtual spaces. VR is FB’s attempt to buy their way into the gaming scene in a market that isn’t already dominated by existing players — PC/Console/Mobile.
I work at a startup that recently IPO'd and one thing that surprises me is the number of people who have gone through several rounds of promotion that have never worked at another organization. You can easily tell who is who by the level of maturity they have in their decision making. Even senior directors that have never work some place else have a very visible lack of understanding that "things are different elsewhere".
I realized the other day that Zuckerberg is one of these employees. He has never worked someplace else, has no idea what other ways of doing things exist, and has only ever known one way of doing things.
Having someone like this have majority voting shares tells me that a essentially a kid is still running the show. Zuckerberg got incredibly lucky in his first job as founder, but has never developed the skills to pivot an existing company into a new space. In every role I've interacted with from software engineer, PM to designer having only experience at one company is a huge negative in solving new problems, I don't know why anyone would think that somehow a CEO would be exempt from this problem.
Regardless of how you feel about these people, personally, it doesn’t make sense to paint him as being naive in any way about business.
I am bearish on FB for this reason. Companies with dual-class founder-dominated governance I think will increasingly see this where the founder fails to step aside for new leadership. More than that, FB more so than most other tech companies has constructed a cult of personality around its founder - even if the mechanisms existed for Mark to step aside it's unclear if the company can culturally withstand the change.
Think Ballmer-era MS, but except with zero corporate governance mechanism to replace him with their equivalent of Nadella.
I know we tend to worship founders around here but there are many instances where a founder is no longer the right leader for the company. My personal feeling has been for some time that Zuck is not the right leader for this stage of FB and seems to be doing more harm than good in the top post.
Now with all that said, I think there's a snowball's chance in hell that VR headsets become as ubiquitous as cell phones. It won't happen until AR. It's like TiVo and Netflix.
Them being ubiquitous or not doesn't change how inconvenient it is to not have vision of the surroundings. It's also not practical to use them.
This is probably out of the cards for a generation. (At least in the U.S. and EU.) What Facebook fights with, they'll have to build on their own, a handicap not shared by their peers.
1) Zuck doesn’t know how to innovate.
2) Facebook, now Meta, has achieved 100% of their recent growth through acquisitions.
3) The days of Meta being allowed to make big acquisitions are over. World governments have already started clamping down.
4) Copying TikTok features is just more evidence of 1.
5) Ad regulation is coming.
6) The Metaverse play seems comically distant, and shareholders won’t stomach losing $2.4b per quarter on a gambit while the core business declines.
7) Zuck has a majority of voting shares. I’m shocked you think this is positive. It’s an extreme negative. Zuck can prevent the company from course correcting.
But what about ten years from now? What if his wife or kids retain control and act against shareholder interest? Giving different voting rights to share is a terrible idea in the long run.