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

(www.ft.com)
113 points 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 3 comments | 02 Nov 25 05:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.521s | source
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LarsDu88 ◴[02 Nov 25 07:08 UTC] No.45788405[source]▶
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.

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ares623 ◴[02 Nov 25 07:09 UTC] No.45788413[source]▶
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"
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xnx ◴[02 Nov 25 14:53 UTC] No.45790748[source]▶
Facebook Libra, Metaverse, etc.

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

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1. bdangubic ◴[02 Nov 25 14:55 UTC] No.45790762[source]▶
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 … :)
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2. LarsDu88 ◴[03 Nov 25 16:20 UTC] No.45800732[source]▶
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.

3. nitwit005 ◴[03 Nov 25 23:26 UTC] No.45805728[source]▶
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.