Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off

I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.

Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.

Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).

Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.

Or, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"

So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.

Facebook Libra, Metaverse, etc.

Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.

Bezos is also having a hard time admitting amazon was just luck and gates is having a hard time admitting windows was just luck and … :)

Your idea of what would "make the user experience better" can be very different from what actually makes the experience more profitable to Meta.

As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.

The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.

It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.

Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft were a product of very good timing, but I think we should not undersell how high the barrier to entry for Amazon and Microsoft were in the 90s and 70s specifically.

Amazon basically started at the dawn of the internet, and I actually remember using it in 1997 as a fifth grader. It was incredibly well developed for that very early time period compared to just about everything else.

Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter written on a PDP mini-computer in assembly, and was written so quickly, Paul Allen wrote an entire emulator in assembly for the actual chip they were trying to run their software on. The bootloader for the tape loaded program had to be entered in binary onto the machine they were trying to run the software on. There were about a dozen people in position to create this sort of software in the world at the time and only two who could do it in a 6 week timeframe.

Bill Gates and a lot of these other billionaires are in totally different leagues when it comes to origin story.

You see a lot of people start a successful business, and then fail at their next venture. That doesn't mean they're incompetent. Everyone swings and misses sometimes.

But, if there is eventually a patten of failure, either luck was a factor, or perhaps the person themselves has changed.