Mark Zuckerberg Is Going to Kill His Company
ez.substack.com
ez.substack.com
Burn it to the ground
Return it to the shareholders, and let them find their own efficient use for it.
i.e. pay a dividend. Yes, he would be paying a lot of it to himself, but maybe his personal investment staff can put it to use for him.
Most corporate managers would rather set their money on fire than pay a dividend. MZ is no different. Normally a hostile takeover would fix that problem, but he's got himself so wedged in there with the voting shares that a takeover may be impossible.
1. On the basis of how much you expect a bigger sucker than yourself to pay for it.
2. On the basis of yield on your investment, aka dividend / share multiplied by some "reasonable" number, e.g. 15 which implies 7% interest rates.
Since there seems to be fewer gullible investors, on the basis of dividend earnings, Meta is worth exactly zero. Time to pay a dividend or burn the cash. Which to even gullible investors looks bad.
The classical answer is "the value of all future dividends, discounted to the present." #2, in other words.
The expectation was, even if it pays no dividends now, when it's really successful it'll start.
Or often it's #1, as you said.
Apple pays a dividend: 0.59% yield at current price. Microsoft pays one, 1.17% yield.
They both recognized a long time ago that they couldn't promise the shareholders that the company would invest the money better than they could.
Even Facebook doesn’t have the capital to shortcut decades of R&D on all the components that will go into making that a reality.
There is no reason to think it will take two decades to increase the field of view.
It would need to last at least 4-5 hours and probably have a 5G modem. I don't see that happening any time soon. That's to say nothing of the software side.
People don't get it because the headsets are big and uncomfortable and the graphics aren't very impressive or realistic. But they are getting better.
I think that is someone comes along in the next few years with something like the new Spectacles but with a 90 degree field of view and less than $500, it could become extremely popular.
Or suppose next year an Apple headset has an application with very realistic graphics for mixed reality or VR "teleporting" where realistic faces and bodies appear in your house. Or you go to some club or something and it looks completely realistic.
To me this stuff will take off when the graphics and software get a bit better, better field of view, cheaper. But it's a matter degrees at this point.
What could very well happen is that AR/MR completely blows up in the next three years, but with some other company making a slightly better and cheaper glasses or whatever and a totally open metaverse platform. That will prove that he was going in the right direction, but no one will admit they misjudged the goal.
The point, IMHO, is: like Genghis Khan, Zuckerberg is an empire conqueror rather than an empire maintainer (*). Everything MZ built up to now has been unreservedly secondary and reactive with respect to a preexisting state of things. To his credit, MZ was able to untap the full value where previous owners couldn't. But there was never a holistic vision how things should be in the steady state. At a personal level MZ seems to lack a lot of the skills necessary to keep the system going in steady state.
Now MZ claims that he sees a new area for conquest, but there's no preexisting kingdom there, just wilderness. He was never good at wilderness situations before, hence he's unlikely to succeed. The End.
Stale and sterile may describe the psuedo-innovation that much of social became by 2020.