Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse is a joke not shared by investors
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Amazon and other large companies created new products with small fractions of the funds that Meta is proposing spending. As illustrated nicely in the All In podcast, the only thing that compares in magnitude is the Apollo space program.
We know what Facebook is and does. Pioneers need to put all the chips on the table and risk them all in order to get to make the next leap.
You can make the argument that nobody deserves such huge decision making power, but if somebody should then the person who shipped a service used by 2 billion people is for sure the first in line.
I am still rooting for expropriation of all billionaires but if it's not possible then the next best option is to let them spend and bet the company with the highest possible frequency. It's a much better outcome compared to transitioning into politics like Trump or Musk.
It would be crazy not to go after the VR market now that the PC and smartphone markets are spoken for, cementing Microsoft, Google and Apple as leaders forever, or at least until war or climate change destroys the global economy.
Right now, Meta has assets of $180B, and there are $2.7 billion shares outstanding. That means each share owns $67 worth of stuff -- about a quarter of which is cash in its bank accounts. That's ignoring whatever actual money it has coming in. Considering its future earnings, its current price of $90 is actually pretty good.
What good is that if you can't actually access those $67 per share worth of assets? The fact that they could, in theory, one day distribute it. It means that somebody else is willing to buy that share off of you -- knowing that somebody else would buy it off of them.
Essentially, that $67 is completely illiquid, but real. And the market makes it liquid, even though the actual underlying asset could remain fixed indefinitely.
It's kinda like getting a loan whose repayment date is "eventually". As long as you don't think it's just going to up and die, it's worth something -- as long as it could, in theory, be repaid.
The liquidation angle also doesn't really work because large companies generally don't liquidate themselves, and either way, it would be for way less than the value of their material assets.
The way I make sense of it for regular stocks is because big (e.g. Adobe) can come and buy someone smaller (e.g. Figma) which will distribute cash to me. This works because there is an end to the game of hot potato where the holder wins.
This however, doesn't work for Meta. If you want to acquire Meta, the *only* shares that matter are Zuck's supervoting shares. If you buy all of them except Zuck's, you don't really have anything. If you only buy Zuck's, you have everything.
So why should I be paying to buy anything except Zuck's shares? Nobody ultimately wants them, except to sell them to someone else.