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Comment by brentm | Hacker News Reader

That isn't really something a publicly traded company can do without putting even more pressure on it's share price. Mark's also still very young, if he wanted to ride off into the sunset he could have done that a long time ago. I give him a lot of credit for staying in the drivers seat given the political pressure they've been under since 2016 and now this period. It would have been a lot easier for him to just checkout and hang out on a mega yacht all day.

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Mark doesn’t give a shit about share price, otherwise there would be buybacks right now. Meta still has a donkey which shits gold: even facebook still had 4% DAU growth yoy, while people make fun about fb using users to tiktok.

No, Mark wants a war chest and will increase investments for his meta verse.

But I would never bet against Mark.

The only people I've met who care at all about the metaverse are terrified of it (giving an advertiser live access to metrics like pupil dilation is creepy), or appreciate the opportunities that it creates to make fun of Zuckerberg. Are there people out there who intend to use it?

I remember when Facebook was invite-only. It was cool. Everybody wanted in. This... I think this is grounds to bet against Mark.

I'm not sure how much it matters that people aren't interested in the metaverse now. The question is whether it will be adopted once it is ready.

Aren't Apple and Microsoft making AR/VR stuff, too?

AR/VR is cool. I untangle DAGs in 2D sometimes and I'd love a third dimension to work in. I just don't need to decorate it like a cubicle and do it where others can notice that I have a zit on my nose.

meta has bought back 5% of its shares this year. Not sure where you got the idea that buybacks aren't happening. They even took long term debt for what I understand to be the first time in order to facilitate more buybacks.

> Mark doesn’t give a shit about share price, otherwise there would be buybacks right now.

You didn't read TFA, the earnings report explicitly saying the significant amount of buybacks they did.

> Share repurchases – We repurchased $6.55 billion of our Class A common stock in the third quarter of 2022. As of September 30, 2022, we had $17.78 billion available and authorized for repurchases

No buybacks, like this?

>But I would never bet against Mark.

I think that's part of the problem to be honest. People who have a reputation for never making mistakes tend to double down rather than acknowledge the mistake and back off.

Imagine going straight from your early 20s into a position where you're hailed as never making a mistake. IG, whatapp, etc all panned out. What happens when you finally do spend $2billion on a failure such as oculus? Do you note the failure and back off or do you start spending $20billion a year, change the company name and double down (to the power of 8)?

Anyway at least this instance of it is more harmless than Putin's example in global terms. It's still reasonably clear to me what's happening though.

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