He acts like an oracle for investing but anytime there’s economic turmoil, he’s like a fish out of water. He’ll shamelessly keep on making 1000% confident recommendations though.
I actually used to listen to him until he made disastrous call after disastrous call during the Great Recession. I watched him make similar mistakes when the pandemic started. Always way too optimistic and calling “the bottom” way too early.
He's pretty much like every other investor out there that tries to beat the market picking stocks. Spends the entirety of a bull run deluding himself that he knows what he is doing and then totally confused and confounded during a bear market.
In other words, everyone is a professional stock picker in a bull market.
He's a total clown and has been a pawn and shill for wall street.
You can watch this old video where he brags about he subverted SEC laws and regulations at a hedge fund and fomented stories in the media and told lies because it was a lucrative game:
Yes I’ve seen the memes but tons of people take him seriously. I’m sure many of the people who call into his show to ask for advice do. I personally know a handful of people who do as well.
This is what happens when shareholders have no say on how the company is run. Zuckerberg doesn't have to listen to Meta shareholders because their shares are non-voting. Zuck can't be fired.
Well, unlike some dubious investments (e.g. crypto companies), FB is backed by something: a reasonably successful advertising business and social network; and VR headsets, while unsuccessful to date, are an actual product that you can use for gaming, telepresence, etc..
> At least Facebook is a reasonably successful advertising business and social network, and VR headsets are an actual product that you can use for gaming, telepresence, etc..
They went whole-hog on the metaverse and their customers rejected it with a resounding "no". If they stop now they can probably make a full recovery. The fear is Zuckerberg is far too stupid to do that. In any other company the board would have terminated him several quarters ago. He is smart enough, however, that he allowed the board absolutely no power. So he is a Benevolent Dictator for Life and due to this it's entirely possible his own hubris will run Meta directly into the ground.
It felt like the VR push was meant to distract from the cracks in their existing business. You've got the regulatory risk factors (angry politicians who tease pulling Section 230 or more targeted regulations), the diminishing new-user growth combined with an increasing appearance of uncoolness and demographic aging, and a strategy which feels like they don't know how to revitalize their base product. Let's shed all that baggage by changing our names and moving into a different ecosystem!
On its face, VR seemed like a good distraction. The tech feels like it's within grasping distance, and it presented the chance for them to appear leading-edge and cool again. The problem is that they went in too fast, at huge expense, and have not been very good with messaging. Thje fact people are conflating whatever mess Horizon Worlds is with their entire VR vision is a crime of messaging as much as anything.
TBH, VR today is where home computers were in 1979. People are buying them, but as hobbyists and enthusiasts or novelty seekers. The market is not mature yet, most of what's available sucks for a wide variety of technical and learning-process reasons, and we're still waiting for the real killer app that makes previously uninterest consumers storm the Best Buy. Meta probably doesn't have it in their plans. Hell, Apple and Valve probably don't have it either. The industry needs to get to the VisiCalc moment, and I suspect the way to do that is to stick to cheap, rapidly iterating hardware, and focusing their efforts on dev support and maybe some infrastructural stuff, rather than trying to headline the software market and ending up being the butt of jokes about "legs coming soon".
That would leave a lot of cash in the coffers so that when they see things that look promising, they can just roll up dump trucks full of cash to developers. Let them be the R&D because they're not going to be beholden to whatever constraints your internal teams have.
How much money are they throwing into this? I doubt it is a huge investment that they can't recover from, more like Kinect or Hololens for MS. At worst, they'll stay at the top of the VR market.
Their "Reality Labs" (AR and VR) ran an operating loss of 3.7 billions this quarter. By comparison their total revenue for the same quarter was 27.7 billions.
Full recovery to what, stagnation? He is just taking the risk of trying to leap forward in addition to just waiting - FB currently is stagnant, unfashionable, lame, boomer network for old people and ads and it will be like that for a long long time.
I'm 100% sure it will be "fashionable" again but the question may be if it will be able to stay alive and able to adjust long enough.
I'm surprised they aren't trying to morph one of messaging apps into western "weechat"
Good for him. I respect and appreciate the ownership, much more than the 2 other guys on there who were just acting like they needed to keep JimCramer™ the brand at maximum market value.
In the long run ownership is far more valuable than being right or wrong on a specific call, because ownership is what improves your batting average.
He is trying to get in front of the lawsuits, this is not the first time for that shill, I remember more than 20 years ago he was on CNBC bad mouthing a company so the stock would tank, later you find out he had a huge short position. I feel bad for anyone that took his advice, but certainly don't feel bad for him, what a crook.
His timing was all wrong, just like the rest of the thundering herds of talking heads and communication majors who parrot press releases and investment gossip boards.
Their fundamentals haven't changed in 2 days. There's a lot of freedom of motion and power with $50 B in AI-GPU-enabled server gear by 2024.
This is a good point - FB has some smart people working there on actually valuable, tangible things (such as data centers and networks.) AI, AR and VR are largely bets on the future, but they could pay off eventually.
Whether they can turn any of this into a successful business (telepresence? gaming? education? healthcare?) that isn't Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp but has comparable scale remains to be seen, and that's probably why some investors aren't confident.
Meta is a 9 P/E company with an unparalleled technical founder CEO and legions of tech talent the likes of which invented React, React Native, PyTorch, RocksDB, and tons more. They’ll be more than fine here on out.
Almost the entire echelon of YC, VC, and other founders would agree.
A lot of people have huge blind spots by disdaining Zuck and Musk's competence. Zuck has secured >50% vote on a company that made $29 billion last year. He did this by repeatedly making contrarian moves and executing successfully. Creating Facebook, not selling to anyone when his entire executive team disagreed and quit, buying Instagram, buying WhatsApp. You have been repeatedly on the wrong side of history doubting Zuck's competence. Even if Zuck makes the metaverse work, people will still call it luck.
This is not out of blind adoration, but by understanding well enough that you need to accurately assess extremely powerful people who are trying to put the world under a different reality.
Buying competitors when they are eating your lunch hardly requires shrewd strategy. Those were not big brain decisions and not contrarian at all.
As for maintaining control, I would chalk that up more to the fact that for years he had a company growing hand over fist. He didn't really have to give up much or risk much to maintain control, so again, not really a contrarian move.
Where he does seem to differ from many founders is that he appears to not be encumbered by any moral or ethical qualms to speak of. So this robotic ruthlessness has allowed him to wield the power of facebook's data pipeline like a kudgel. Using it to know which competitors to buy or crush and literally selling said data to the highest bidder with very few limits. Be they foreign adversaries to the US or just outright corrupt organizations with malignant intent.
instagram did not eat fb lunch, it's a 13 people startup doing photo sharing in san francisco. He took a bet for 1 billion, for that. So yes, it's very contrarian, it was even ridiculed publicly, I know i did and damn I was wrong.
Also, you are saying that as if he's the one who is evil enough to sell data to the highest bidder while Apple is kneecapping the DTC market under the fake banner of "privacy" while they are setting up their own ads exchange (check the leaked emails) and google is doing the same thing, hell they are even the first ad exchange to introduce realtime bidding with google ads. The thing that FB is guilty of is how successful they are in monetizing.
Instagram was already valued at $500 million from a recent major funding round by the top VC firms in silicon valley. They were also one of the top apps in the app store and were leagues ahead of Facebook when it came to photos. So again, it was a good investment, but not contrarian by any means.
I honestly think META is undervalued now, should be around 20 IMO, whether you like it or not it is a mature company with stable revenue and profits.
I agree that the whole metaverse/VR thing is a big fiasco, though. But remember that META is FB + Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp, they're gonna do fine.
For the PE to be 20 the stock would have to more than double and that’s not going to happen in this environment
I don’t follow Meta closely so I’m trying to catch up.
Sounds like they’re cash rich so they can afford to burn some money on the VR project, which sounds like it’s a decade away.
They burned something like $65 billion in stock buybacks over the past couple of years. ouch!
Still, that PE shouldn’t be 9 unless revenue is expected to drop quite a lot. Anyway, I’d been interested in knowing who to follow on this stock.
Here’s some info I’ve come across:
“As for capital expenses, Altimeter makes a startling claim: excluding metaverse investments, Meta is still spending more on capex than Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Snap, and Uber combined, with much of the growth apparently coming in the past three years”
He acts like an oracle for investing but anytime there’s economic turmoil, he’s like a fish out of water. He’ll shamelessly keep on making 1000% confident recommendations though.
I actually used to listen to him until he made disastrous call after disastrous call during the Great Recession. I watched him make similar mistakes when the pandemic started. Always way too optimistic and calling “the bottom” way too early.