I've no say in the manner in which they ran/run their business but judging a mega-corporation on lemonade-stand level accounting is a fool's errand.
So 50x Pets.com or 2x Enron.
> judging a mega-corporation on lemonade-stand level accounting is a fool's errand.
Disagree. Unit economics matter and can help you cut through a lot of hype and nonsense. "Where's the money coming from?" is always a good question to ask. Sure, sometimes a megacorp loses money on each transaction and makes it up on float or whatever, but that's at least worth knowing if that's what's going on.
Im morally against Meta but it’s the world’s greatest money printing machine ever conceived. To say they or Uber don’t make money would be too virtue-tainted.
Im trying to say it doesn’t matter what we plebs think about these massive entities. Maybe it should but if we’re talking creating (economic) value, they clearly are.
This reminds me of this bit on a podcast where a tidbit of learned information so blatantly contradicts basic logic.
There's always an explanation, in this case, the tidbit was that "dull knives are more dangerous", because you apply more force when cutting vegetables and can end up hurting yourself, but it's laughably wrong when applied to weapons.
In the case of the tidbit of "uber actually loses money" that might have been relevant in the first years, there's this phenomenon where companies operate at a loss for some time (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_dumping) in order to accumulate market share (i.e a monopoly) and then they increase prices in order to recoup their investment and make profits.
So you read somewhere that "uber actually loses money" and this was from presumably a trusted source, but you failed to account the date of the knowledge, when Uber was somewhat smaller and their margins were smaller, and you read it assuming it applies to the present, so you somehow thought that one of the biggest tech companies in the world, that charges around 30% per trip, and has almost no marginal costs, would operate at a loss.
So I don't want to be offensive, but it's so wrong that it has a comedic quality.