It is a real loophole in the economy. If you're a trillion dollar company the market will insist you set such sums on fire just to be in the race for $current-hype. If they do it drives their market cap higher still and if they don't they risk being considered un-innovative and therefore doomed to irrelevancy and the market cap will spiral downwards.
The thing is, this could be considered basic research, right? Basic research IS setting money on fire until (and if) that basic research turns into TCP/IP, Ethernet and the Internet.
Funnily enough Arpanet and all that Xerox stuff were like <$50 million (inflation adjusted!) total. Some real forward thinkers were able to work the system by breaking off a tiny pittance of a much larger budget.
Where as I think this more appropriately can be considered the meta PR budget. They simply can't not spend it, would look bad for Wall Street. Have to keep up with the herd.
Funny you pick a company that has very little to answer to the markets, out of all the large tech companies, META is the rare one that does not need to answer because Zuckerberg controls the company.
> Funnily enough Arpanet and all that Xerox stuff were like <$50 million (inflation adjusted!) total.
That doesn't say much. The industry was in utter infancy. How much do you think it cost to move Ethernet from 100Mbit/sec to 1GBbit/sec to 10GB to 100GB to 400GB to 800GB? At least one or two orders of magnitude.
How about the cost to build a fab for the Intel 8088 versus a fab that produces 5nm chips running @ 5GHz. Again, at least one or two orders of magnitude.
This suffers from hindsight bias, at the time it was impossible to know if Arpanet or flying cars was the path forward. A better comparison would be the total sum of investment : payoff ratio, and is not something we can see from where we are now. Only in the future does it make sense to evaluate the success of something. Unfortunately, comparison between eras is difficult to do fairly because conditions are so different between now and Xerox.
> If you're a trillion dollar company the market will insist you set such sums on fire just to be in the race for $current-hype. If they do it drives their market cap higher still and if they don't they risk being considered un-innovative and therefore doomed to irrelevancy and the market cap will spiral downwards.
You don’t think earning increasing amounts of tens of billions of dollars in net income per year at some of the highest profit margins in the world at that size for 10+ years has anything to do with market cap?
$1T Market Cap lets it be known it will invest $10B a year into $current-hype that will change everything. P/E loosens speculatively on sudden new unbounded potential, Market Cap $1.1T. Hype funded. PR as innovator cemented.
It is a real loophole in the economy. If you're a trillion dollar company the market will insist you set such sums on fire just to be in the race for $current-hype. If they do it drives their market cap higher still and if they don't they risk being considered un-innovative and therefore doomed to irrelevancy and the market cap will spiral downwards.
Sort of reminds me of The Producers.