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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.

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Just like the metaverse?

Anti-aging startups is 5D chess, the 4th dimension is the most fickle so it's very hard to make it to a 4D intercept when your ideas are stupid.

sometimes you lose

Like everything but acquisitions since the original product?

When your track record includes a lot of losses, the scale points more and more toward "clueless" and away from "4D chess".

Isn’t that already priced in? Shorts exist.

The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

That was my point, if someone thinks that Meta is overvalued, they can put their money where their mouth is. The fact that the share price hasn’t cratered is a kind of collective belief in the opposite.

Edgy prediction: Meta is irrelevant and on a path to even further irrelevancy, and, fingers crossed, a bankruptcy or at least Zuck being removed as the main man

Edgier prediction: Meta is too (big, but more importantly) relevant to (be allowed to) fail, because it can be co-opted by TLAs due to its apps being pre-loaded on mobile devices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44979751

There were a lot of things too big to fail

Lehman brothers, Enron.

When this bubble pops, its going to be absolute chaos maybe just like last time

It will be chaos for those working at Meta and those invested in them too much without an appropriate hedge. I doubt I will notice much, to be honest.

Even if Meta tanked, unless Messenger/Whatsapp stop working, it’s kind of beside the point how much their stock trades for. Everyone will just use whatever has or keeps the most public interest, whether that is Meta-owned or something else.

The worrying aspect is that for Meta to really tank in value, the shit has to have already hit the fan, and it probably would not be isolated to Meta.

My point in my prior comment was that Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo just by doing what they’re already doing. Cloudflare too, in a way.

> Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo

The problem is that their products are getting worse and worse. Signal is already taking a huge share from WhatsApp (ads and AI chat bots, really?) and Messenger.

TikTok absolutely obliterated Instagram. Facebook is sliding into irrelevancy, and most importantly, they have a lot of failed products like Oculus, Metaverse (wtf is it anyway), LLAMa, etc. Now they are sliding into even more irrelevance and burning money even faster trying to poach extremely expensive OpenAI folks. My conspiracy theory is that Facebook ads earning numbers are somehow a scam.

After so many bad decisions on their part, so much waste and bad execution that I can't see them surviving the next 5 years.

They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast, or they would have done if not for antitrust concerns under Biden. They can afford to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to rockstars for well over 5 years, and acquihire their way to acquiring the next big thing. I think they’re probably appropriately valued alongside other trillion dollar companies, but they will likely find that it’s less lonely at the top than anticipated.

Signal serves IC interests too by requiring phone numbers.

> They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast

No, what they could do in the past is not at all how they can operate today. They can't afford to pay the rockstars anymore, they went through multiple rounds of layoffs. They can't afford to drop the stock too low also. Basically they are in a corner, and I love it. Fingers crossed that within the next five years they shake up upper management and Zuck is out.

They’re laying off folks, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it due to payroll pressure. They’re a megacorp. They can’t go broke from payroll, they have accountants for that. The folks getting acquihired and poached aren’t at risk of being laid off as long as they’re producing value. If the value they bring at Meta is also not being provided elsewhere, so much the better for Meta. It hurts Meta’s competitors more than it hurts Meta, because Meta won’t miss the money. They don’t need high headcount, they need folks who are irreplaceable. It’s a different hiring process for different jobs.

I doubt Zuck is out anytime soon, unless folks stop using their products compared to alternatives. I think it’s possible, but I think the odds are at best even for him to go in 5 years. In 10 years, who can say? Facebook users are pretty locked in because there’s nothing else like it for the users that regularly use it. Facebook users who aren’t on alternatives aren’t just going to switch to Reddit or TikTok overnight. Why would they? I can’t follow your reasoning, but I understand not being a fan of Zuck or Meta, I guess, but I think their business seems pretty strong right now, though that is subject to change along with consumer whims.

I meant that if meta actually goes under, since they are clearly a decent part of S&P 500, it might create a spiraling effect similar to lehman brothers which can affect the world economy and thus you and me both.

They better get their shit sorted.

"The Zuck" can't be removed — he has more the 60% of the votes![0] The board stupidly voted to do so a few years ago.

[0]: He only has about 13% of the shares, but the dual allocation means that his class B shares are worth 10 votes. And he owns 99% of those shares. https://observer.com/2023/06/mark-zuckerberg-2023-shareholde...

I can't/won't short the stock because shorting usually is for 14 days etc. and I can't be certain in that timeframe about meta or any company

I mean, theoretically you could short a company for a really long time it seems like, I just searched, I always assumed it to usually be of 14 days but still.

Isn’t that the reason options even exist? You need to know you won’t starve and die if your harvest doesn’t come in. I’ll admit that I’m no expert on finance and innovations in financial instruments, but I think short selling has been around in some form or another for centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)

> The practice of short selling was likely invented in 1609 by Dutch businessman Isaac Le Maire, a sizeable shareholder of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch).

Especially when there are hours of public footage of the decision maker in question not sounding particular astute as a technical or strategic thinker.

How does zuck’s net win-loss track record look to you?

The lottery.

Doesn't sound like "sometimes" in most cases

And like VR?

And like...LLAMa?

Maybe also like adding ads in WhatsApp cause we gotta squeeze our users so we can spend on... AI gurus?

Meta has not had a win since they named themselves Meta. It's enjoyable to watch them flail around like clueless morons jumping on every fad and wasting their time and money.

It makes me feel better / more comfortable with myself seeing what meta does. Almost being childish.

Maybe this sounds selfish but its a little fun to me to see them lose. I just don't like meta and its privacy in sensitive ad network bullshit.

Like the fact that if someone clicked a photo and deleted it then show them beauty ads because they are insecure. I can't give 2 cents about the growth of such a black mirror -esque company

> I can't give 2 cents about the growth of such a black mirror -esque company

I would donate my two cents or even more to witness their downfall though. I left WhatsApp years ago, and haven't used any of their other services like fb or Instagram. I don't want to contribute to a company that actively helped a couple of genocides (Myanmar), help elect a dictator or two (Philippines) and spread racist propaganda and, most recently, allowing women to be called 'personal objects'.

Their tech is far from impressive, their products are far from impressive, the only impressive thing is that they are still in business.

I think the use of "4d chess" was your downfall.

I do however think that this is a business choice that at the very least was likely extensively discussed.

Zuck is fantastic at transferring wealth. Not so great at creating wealth.

Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.

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