Facebook is raking in so much filthy lucre, it can't spend it fast enough

Golden age of pyramid schemes.

The stock will bounce back, Zuck will remain a billionaire, his millionaires will remain millionaires, and not much will change in how they run things, until Zuck decides to change that.

Hi

Still never used it.

:wave:

Ireland office

Apparently has a lot of wasted time - lots of playing table tennis and other stuff. Anywhere that's funded by too much VC is going to struggle to not get like this, and FB goes further than most with all the PC stuff going on that's great for the recipients of that, but isn't exactly going to contribute to the bottom line. Hopefully they'll find a way to do both.

Facebook is to privacy like Ryanair is to comfort...

Facebook is to privacy like Ryanair is to passenger comfort.

Confused users and market.

Facebook users are not "the market", they are the product being sold by Facebook.

Growth

This is the problem with the way markets are currently set up. Handing back excess money to investors is not an activity that the markets reward.

If Facebook started paying a dividend there would very likely be worried articles about whether it was maturing as a stock and its price earnings ratio would get hammered as the people it gave money back to dived for the exits.

By splurging it on investments that will almost certainly deliver ever smaller growth for ever larger amounts of money Facebook maintains its position as a growth stock until the market at some point decides that it isn't and the markets start to demand that it behave accordingly. By that point it may have wasted $20bn+ of the profits from its monopoly position on inane projects that quietly get dumped a few years later.

The recent Microsoft article charting just how much money Steve Ballmer has wasted is an instructive case in point, and Google are a few years further down the line from Facebook in doing much the same thing.