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> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes

The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings.

Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.

Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market leaders

Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole metaverse investment. And all the products that Google has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like Stadia...

If you sort by number of employees you get companies where those employees aren't in R&D divisions.

Their comment reads to me as if businesses hire employees (regardless of the work they do, since we are discussing employees that don't do anything) because investors consider employees as R&D (even useless ones).

Either way, there is no data I have seen to suggest market cap correlates with number of employees. The strongest correlation I see is to net income (aka profit), and after that would be growing revenues and/or market share.

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