If you've been around a while, worked in the big corp world, and studied stocks, then you've seen this more than once. Executives begin to gut the company. They'll make crazy acquisitions, that if you dig into them, you'll find they are acquiring companies owned or controlled by their golfing buddies or some other loose, non-documented connection, but ultimately it's tactic for extracting wealth out of the company. They'll outsource production and labor to their friends or other partners companies, and again, bleeding down the assets of their company very fast. They'll begin cutting their own staff to rapidly reduce expenses while pilfering out the wealth to other protected channels. Sometimes they'll open a revolving door to hire executives/friends at the top, and give them huge sign on bonuses and golden exit bonuses, and executives will begin to flow through very quickly with all sorts of excuses for why so and so stayed only a few months or a year. The assets of those companies get bled off insanely fast, and they blame it on market forces or other things. Some will even go through fancy debt restructuring, which often greatly enriches some fund manager buddy's company, but leaves their blind investors and retirees who have money in the fund, with a spread out loss, sometimes a severe loss, depending on how greedy they all are. If you've ever bothered to investigate deeply the corporate and investment world, if you've watched the individuals like a hawk for decades, you've seen all of this before and more. You know what it looks like, and when it begins, and if you're also a common shareholder, you get the fuck out and quick when they start. You know you only have a short amount of time before they've left a shell of a company in it's place, and the stock falls 10%, then 20%, then 30%, then 50%, and maybe they even declare bankruptcy to dodge any serious investigations. You've seen old, stable, extremely valuable companies turn their often old timer, retired common shareholders into broken bag holders. And no one really does much about this practice because it's all carefully executed, legal, and often the losses are spread wildly across either common shareholders or blind/ignorant old retirees.
Or, maybe you don't know what all of that looks like, and you think it doesn't happen, and some magical fairy or agency protects common shareholders.
Or, maybe you're part of those circles, and you really need to quickly discredit this.
Put all of that aside for a moment. Yes, I know it's gnawing at you. That was the point. But now I'm asking you to put it aside.
Meta has supposedly been spending billions, billions per month I think, on building out this new Metaverse thing. I don't care for Facebook or any of the other social media, privacy invading, data mining, wealth extraction companies out there. But, I do love technology and the potential good it can do, and I personally like the idea of a metaverse. Perhaps it's not the vision that many have, perhaps I have my own dreams of what it will become. Whatever. BUT, what interests me is that they've supposedly spent an incomprehensible amount of money on this endeavor, and every time we catch a glimpse of their progress, whether it is in their hardware or software or whatever, it's absolute shit. No one outside of Meta is going to argue this. We all see it, we all know it. It's a cartoonish nightmarish ridiculously pitiful rendition of what it could be…. and let's not forget… they've spent many, many billions on this. IF you're in the technology industry, then you also know without a doubt, not one single ounce of doubt, that their progress thus far is beyond pitiful. It's the equivalent of paying a car salesman the price of a top of the line, most expensive Ferrari, and he delivers a broke ass flat tire from the junk yard to you. It's even worse than that. It's utterly incomprehensibly insane.
So, two ideas come to mind:
- What they are showing to the public is a distraction, some sort of corporate strategy because they know that Apple and others are about to kick their ass, and they want to disarm them, maybe some silly idea that Apple will slow down. OR, they want to give the public a lowered expectation, and then blow our minds when they finally release v1. Maybe it's a deception strategy.
- Social media, privacy invasion, extracting information about society is coming to a grinding halt. We all know it, and they know it, and they don't have any viable solution in mind. So, they're folding. They are going to suck out all of the company's wealth as fast as they can, declaring it's all being spent on “the metaverse”, then they'll start laying off people to eliminate ALL expenses, yet continue claiming they're spending billions on the research and development, while sucking everything out. When they are done, there will be a shell of the old Facebook/Meta remaining, and the stock will plummet to zero. Some fund company will come in at the last moment and offer common shareholders a lifeline, to buy up what shares remain for a slight premium of the then collapsed price, and then take the company private.
TLDR; What do you think about the massive collapse for META so far, and the insane amount of money they've pumped into development that has thus far yielded complete bullshit?
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