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Comment by tatsuke95 | Hacker News Reader

>"You could scrape together at least this much about any public company"

Point to another public company that has a P/E ratio as high Facebook that is missing earnings estimates. Nobody is claiming the company is going to fall apart tomorrow, but if growth is slowing already then they certainly aren't worth $100BB, or anywhere close.

I don't know how bad this really is, and we are still in a shaky economic climate. But if we assume that the information being reported is true, this is pretty bad. As the article suggests, they're applying some "quick fixes" to crank up the ad spends. Is that the best they can do?

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SalesForce is public and has P/E of 9500. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM

The reason they don't miss earnings is that the expectation is so low. It doesn't matter, they're the 'cloud'.

That number is wonky from today's earnings report.

According to GAAP rules, CRM's EPS was negative, so their P/E is undefined.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CRM

http://www.webpronews.com/salesforce-earnings-company-beats-...

Probably not the place for this, but I wouldn't touch CRM with a ten-foot pole. Read through the earnings report and look at all the fancy, non-GAAP accounting tricks they use, like booking deferred revenue. Remember when Zynga played those games? Pretty shady, in my opinion.

But, I'm no expert.

Facebook hasn't missed any earnings estimates. This is just a rumor, reported by a company I've never heard of, that they might. You can presumably find rumors of that type about almost any company.

And that's exactly what we're discussing: a rumour. You're right that this may prove to be completely out to lunch. If so, I'll eat my hat.

That said, Facebook is, for better or worse, the biggest thing this industry has seen in a while. So that fact these rumours are being discussed in earnest, rather than "Facebook is still on such an insane revenue growth path that anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot" is substantial.

The fact that these rumors are being discussed... is substantial.

The statement is self-refuting.

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