Meta is a 9 P/E company with an unparalleled technical founder CEO and legions of tech talent the likes of which invented React, React Native, PyTorch, RocksDB, and tons more. They’ll be more than fine here on out.
Almost the entire echelon of YC, VC, and other founders would agree.
A lot of people have huge blind spots by disdaining Zuck and Musk's competence. Zuck has secured >50% vote on a company that made $29 billion last year. He did this by repeatedly making contrarian moves and executing successfully. Creating Facebook, not selling to anyone when his entire executive team disagreed and quit, buying Instagram, buying WhatsApp. You have been repeatedly on the wrong side of history doubting Zuck's competence. Even if Zuck makes the metaverse work, people will still call it luck.
This is not out of blind adoration, but by understanding well enough that you need to accurately assess extremely powerful people who are trying to put the world under a different reality.
Buying competitors when they are eating your lunch hardly requires shrewd strategy. Those were not big brain decisions and not contrarian at all.
As for maintaining control, I would chalk that up more to the fact that for years he had a company growing hand over fist. He didn't really have to give up much or risk much to maintain control, so again, not really a contrarian move.
Where he does seem to differ from many founders is that he appears to not be encumbered by any moral or ethical qualms to speak of. So this robotic ruthlessness has allowed him to wield the power of facebook's data pipeline like a kudgel. Using it to know which competitors to buy or crush and literally selling said data to the highest bidder with very few limits. Be they foreign adversaries to the US or just outright corrupt organizations with malignant intent.
instagram did not eat fb lunch, it's a 13 people startup doing photo sharing in san francisco. He took a bet for 1 billion, for that. So yes, it's very contrarian, it was even ridiculed publicly, I know i did and damn I was wrong.
Also, you are saying that as if he's the one who is evil enough to sell data to the highest bidder while Apple is kneecapping the DTC market under the fake banner of "privacy" while they are setting up their own ads exchange (check the leaked emails) and google is doing the same thing, hell they are even the first ad exchange to introduce realtime bidding with google ads. The thing that FB is guilty of is how successful they are in monetizing.
Instagram was already valued at $500 million from a recent major funding round by the top VC firms in silicon valley. They were also one of the top apps in the app store and were leagues ahead of Facebook when it came to photos. So again, it was a good investment, but not contrarian by any means.
I honestly think META is undervalued now, should be around 20 IMO, whether you like it or not it is a mature company with stable revenue and profits.
I agree that the whole metaverse/VR thing is a big fiasco, though. But remember that META is FB + Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp, they're gonna do fine.
For the PE to be 20 the stock would have to more than double and that’s not going to happen in this environment
I don’t follow Meta closely so I’m trying to catch up.
Sounds like they’re cash rich so they can afford to burn some money on the VR project, which sounds like it’s a decade away.
They burned something like $65 billion in stock buybacks over the past couple of years. ouch!
Still, that PE shouldn’t be 9 unless revenue is expected to drop quite a lot. Anyway, I’d been interested in knowing who to follow on this stock.
Here’s some info I’ve come across:
“As for capital expenses, Altimeter makes a startling claim: excluding metaverse investments, Meta is still spending more on capex than Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Snap, and Uber combined, with much of the growth apparently coming in the past three years”
