Hacker News Reader

> It can't grow like it once did

1 in 4 people on earth is using FB every day. They simply can't grow more too much.

This is the most fundamental problem. In order to justify a "tech" P/E multiple, it has to be the case that exponential growth in the future is justified. For any MAMA (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet) company, this is almost certainly impossible. This means it is time to transition to being a boring, reliable stock, probably with a substantial dividend. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is ready to do that.

PE ratios for big tech.

Google: 20:1 Amazon: 100:1 Netflix: 30:1 Apple: 22:1 Meta: 18:1

(For the financially illiterate like me who wanted to see what various ratios looked like. Meta (Facebook at the time) used to have a 7:1 ratio when they printed money before they doubled headcount while revenue flagged. If it weren’t for that hiring spree, they would be under 10:1 and not in the same class of “tech” multiples.

They go full Musk and colonize Mars so that they can achieve the exponential growth that investors expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com