• alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    [Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.

    Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.

      Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.

      That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.

      Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.