every investor who gave them their money did so knowing that they could never fire him and were happy as a clam with it right up until the last year when he started pouring hundred dollar bills into the woodchipper by the dump truck load, pound sand
— ??GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE?? (@golikehellmachi) October 26, 2022
… that the self-styled ‘Emperor of Mars’ mostly distracted media people from his own latest flailings this past week. Or, if he’s too blinkered to realize the luck of the timing, his underlings certainly must be!
Patrick Redford, at Defector — “Meta Will Continue Burning Billions Of Dollars Until Something Happens”:
What could you do with $22 billion? You could buy each of the 10 most expensive islands for sale on privateislandsonline.com, 40 times each. You could buy almost 220 tons of the world’s most expensive caviar. If you wanted to invest that $22 billion in tech businesses, you could spend your money making like eight of the greatest and most expensive video games and still have 12/13ths of your money left over. You could buy Defector Media. My point is, it should be prohibitively difficult to blow such a ridiculous sum of money, even if you were trying to do so in some sort of Brewster’s Billions scenario. You can’t store that much caviar, or buy an island more than once. We should hail Facebook/Meta, then, for their world-historic achievement in the field of self-immolation, as the company’s pivot to the metaverse continues to cost them astronomical amounts of money and has sent their fortunes into the toilet…
The narrative pushed by Zuckerberg during this week’s earnings call is the same it was in Q2: immediate trends are worrisome only if you choose to focus on them at the expense of the transformative work we’re doing in developing the metaverse. The problem is, every single number presented by the Meta people about their present and future was successively more gruesome: a four percent dip in revenue from Q3 2021, net income down 52 percent over the same period, a period in which costs rose by 19 percent, to $22.1 billion. The virtual reality arm of the company alone lost $9.4 billion this year, and company honchos said they expect that “figure will grow significantly” in the coming years. Meta’s stock price dipped 22 percent after the call, hovered south of $100 for the first time since Jan. 2016, and brought Jim Cramer to literal tears.
Again, this is not discordant with what Zuckerberg has said about the short-term pain necessary to build a video game for fewer than 200,000 people, though that doesn’t make it good or true. There is little evidence, whatever the metaverse turns out to be—A workplace? A virtual space to upload your consciousness after your body decays? A place to fuck?—that its development is being driven by anything other than a sense of belief by some of the most powerful interests in the world that they can create what comes next simply by deciding what they want to come next. But the Oculus Rift S is not the lathe of heaven, and if you burn an increasing number of billions of dollars every year to try and make it so, eventually you will run out of billions of dollars. That is currently what is happening…
the first avengers movie cost $220M. imagine what you could’ve done if you had $15B to spend and asked marvel to make you a movie filmed and edited exclusively for VR headsets.
— 🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 (@golikehellmachi) October 28, 2022
you wouldn’t even have to update the hardware. keep the price point, keep the old specs and jam your warehouses full two months before the premiere.
and, like, look, i am a shitposter with no experience in film or entertainment. there are certainly better ideas than mine. what meta have done instead is spend $15B trying to convince people to hang out at work in ways they don’t want on hardware most don’t have.
the thing about filming the next titanic or ET or whatever in VR for these purposes probably *would* get you a big spike in adoption, which could lead to more interest in something like the metaverse *eventually*. but they didn’t want to wait.
you could take a huge loss on it and easily make it up in headset sales. hell, you could practically give away the older model of the headset, make the movie free, and *still* lose significantly less than they have spent.
these are all ideas that absolutely have to have come across his desk and he has rejected, which is not something that an actual visionary or experienced leader would have done.
zuckerberg is someone who thinks people in star trek use the holodeck to file their taxes and clean their house
Zuckerberg lacks the basic empathy and core competency to lead a $300bn company, and he can't be fired. He's the perfect startup bro, disconnected from humanity through an abundance of resources and power, a man who wants for nothing yet wants everything.https://t.co/Ywam9ecU7Y pic.twitter.com/hAJaDX63aY
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) October 26, 2022
Honestly curious to know what WoW's budget was when it was first getting started, considering that it's a better, more fun version of Meta. https://t.co/jCmLa5iJ4K
— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) October 27, 2022
if mark zuckerberg were a normal CEO with normal business experience, i would think that the cost of the metaverse was a cover-up for corporate fraud on a scale the world has never seen. https://t.co/IBFFbxNoy6
— ??GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE?? (@golikehellmachi) October 27, 2022
you can’t spend your way out of creating viable use cases and zuckerberg is doing future business majors a service by proving it
— ??GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE?? (@golikehellmachi) October 27, 2022
I can sum it up in four:
They didn’t hire furries.
— Accidental E9 (@Accidental_E9) October 27, 2022
The furries want to be in a perfect multidimensional online universe!
Furries are fucking decades ahead of Mark Zuckerberg. https://t.co/qlDsuOzFy1
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) October 21, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 247: The Anti-Ukrainian Agitprop Connection To the Attempted Assassination of Speaker Pelosi
Splitting Image
I stand by my prediction that Elon Musk is more likely to go broke than Zuckerberg.
The Metaverse seems to be working its way towards becoming the biggest firing offense in the history of C-suites, and the shareholders will eventually oust Zuck the Schmuck over it, but he’ll be left with a few hundred millions if not billions, and I can totally imagine him shrugging and spending the rest of his life playing Civilization, where the little people at least do what they’re told.
Musk won’t do that. After Twitter collapses and Tesla shareholders oust him for driving the shares of that company into the dirt, he’ll come back with another cockamamie scheme to become everybody’s favourite boss again, and then another one. You’re just going to have to learn appreciate his genius dammit. I wouldn’t be shocked if he spends his last few millions buying what’s left of Meta, just to prove that the only reason Zuck couldn’t get the Metaverse done is because he didn’t have Musk’s genius.
The moral is that it pays to have a hobby, even if it is playing too much Civ.
lowtechcyclist
And this is the ground-level justification for a 90%+ tax bracket: there comes a point when a person or corporation has literally more money than they can do anything with. Not anything useful, and not anything fun either. It’s just more money than is possible for one entity to spend.
So after a certain level that money needs to be taxed so that it almost entirely goes into the hands of the government, which actually can use that sort of money. It can ‘save’ Social Security, it can arm Ukraine, but at least a government’s operating on a scale where that money becomes useful and productive.
So we need to tax the hell out of that money. 95% tax on income over $1B, and take away all the clever tricks that the billionaires are using to keep a great deal of their money from being taxed at all. And Liz Warren’s wealth tax, of course.
lowtechcyclist
The other reason for confiscatory taxation is that political power tends to follow financial power. If you’ve got billions, you can find indirect ways to influence political outcomes in your favor, even if the Supreme Court hadn’t gutted campaign finance reform. But in a world where they have in fact done so, all those billions in the hands of a handful of super-rich people puts an enormous thumb on the scales in favor of their interests.
“Money talks” has always been true, but it’s been nearly a century since so few have had so disproportionately much of it. The best way to limit how loudly their money can shout is to tax it away from them.
eclare
I still have no idea what the Metaverse is, and I have absolutely no desire to learn.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist: The wealth tax is key. I bet a lot of people who are rich on paper are pretty cash/income poor, as I suspect TFG is.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
I agree with both your comments.
The bottom person on the Forbes 400 list is worth $2.7B. Musk is supposedly worth $251B. That’s $100B over the next on the list. This is insane that one person can have that much and have millions of us with squat. Those on the list are worth $4 trillion. Something is fucking wrong with this picture.
Ruckus
@eclare:
I suspect that SFB is a very bad financial planner. He is supposed to be worth $3.2B. I wonder how much he actually owes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
ROFL
There is a fan theory that the insanity inducting Imperial prison in the new Star Wars streaming series Andor is inspired by Zuckerberg’s management style at Meta.
And; 15 Billion for a god damn computer game/virtual world? Todd Howard weeps.
Frankensteinbeck
The Metaverse sucks so bad because everyone but the executives at Meta and other companies dumping billions into it know that it can’t happen. It is indeed a grift of historic proportions, but it’s not the people at the top doing the scamming. Mostly consultants, I suspect. The programmers are phoning it in because what Zuckerberg really wants isn’t possible. You can’t link up a VR simulator to every grocery store in a chain to show exactly what is on the shelves at that moment so people can shop. So they program just enough to keep their idiot boss pleased and bank their paychecks and laugh at him behind his back.
You know what’s up with the furry jokes? SL, VRChat, they make a profit because they provide nothing but a basic engine. Players design everything. Every landscape, every item used to build those landscapes, all the clothing, the avatars, the animations, all of it. Players have the motivation, and furries have the most motivation. There are people whose whole money source is making those resources for other players.
And that’s the last damn thing Zuck wants, a world in the players’ rather than companies’ hands. He already can’t keep up with content moderation.
Ironically, that system is the concept behind NFTs working, where players resell their content.
As for Musk, it may be in a previous thread, but last I heard he fired the board members who offended him… then announced he’s doing absolutely nothing. He’s making a committee to talk about what should be allowed, and no moderation rules or account reinstatements until that’s decided.
Why? Because every advertiser has said they’re pulling their money if he does the shit he said he’d do. Will he ever follow through? Who the fuck knows? It’s Musk, a man child with a record of delivering on promises as bad as Trump’s. But he has had his face shoved in the truth that if he does, Twitter sinks and he truly does lose all that money.
@eclare:
That’s Musk. He had to scramble desperately for financing because his gigantic, insane wealth is all stock he can’t sell in wildly overvalued companies. He’s a fantastic hype man and charlatan, and stock price inflation is his entire secret.
Boussinesque
I’ve always held that there’s literally no labor any one person could do that is worth that much money. “Oh, they’re making important decisions”, “Oh, their connections are what enabled this to happen”. Bullshit. Schmoozing and telling other people what to do shouldn’t be regarded as that much more valuable than actually doing a thing, and any amount of income above a certain level is really just indicative that you aren’t paying the other people in your company what their labor is actually worth.
HumboldtBlue
Nick Castellanos of all people with a diving defensive play!
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Despite the best efforts of the media to talk down the economy, the week recorded a healthy growth in GDP, the stock market rose, so did disposable income, while inflation fell, gas prices fell, interest rates fell and jobless claims remained historically low.
I don’t know if we can take much more of this “economic anxiety”.
eclare
@Frankensteinbeck: A good friend of mine worked for a very well known consulting firm. He was told to always tell clients the project was 80% done. He laughed all the way to the bank.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
His real problem, OK one of his real problems was that the entire world has seen that even though he’s listed as being worth $251B he couldn’t scrape up $44B for twitter. That should be pocket change for someone of his valuation. OTOH it also shows that a lot of these people are wealthy on paper and live a lifestyle that says they are worth a lot but the reality is far different. There is paper in their name but real money? Not so much.
eclare
@Boussinesque: About the indispensable CEO myth, I’ve always maintained that any company that doesn’t have procedures in place that let the average workers there function without a CEO is poorly run.
mrmoshpotato
Well, this wasn’t worth my time.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: It was a great catch. And good night.
Frankensteinbeck
@eclare:
And the executive class eat it up, like they did NFTs, like they did synergy, like they have chased every dumbass buzzword their buddies think is cool. Revealing every time we’re not in a meritocracy, we’re in a system where the wealthy are shielded from their mistakes.
SpaceUnit
Social media blows goats. I have no interest in TweetyBook or InstsaFace or ClickityKlak or Elon Fucking Zuckburger. Makes me tired just thinking about it. If I want waste my time and kill off brain cells I’ll do it with a bottle of Johnny Walker and a stack of Coltrane CD’s, just as God intended. And if I have something stupid to say I’ll dump it here on Ballon Juice where it belongs.
Fuck it, going to bed.
eclare
@SpaceUnit: Really too bad that comment is too long for a rotating tag!
Baud
@eclare:
General Barnicke : Are you telling me that you men finished your training on your own?
John Winger : DAT’S DAH FACT, JACK!
Soldiers : THAT’S THE FACT, JACK!
Baud
@eclare:
Take the first and each of the last two sentences and make three rotating tags.
eclare
@Baud: That works!
OzarkHillbilly
@eclare: Yep,
If I want waste my time and kill off brain cells I’ll do it with a bottle of Johnny Walker and a stack of Coltrane CD’s, just as God intended.
is about 19 words too many for a rotating tag. I still might put it up on my frig tho.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: AAAAAARRRRRMY training, Sir!
Breaks my heart that Bill Murray is, according to a lot of people, a huge asshole
Mimi
I have no idea what’s going on because I refuse to read shut when the writer of said shut can’t be bothered with basic capitalization. I hope that’s what kills off the Zuckerberg empire.
Geo Wilcox
@Ruckus: You are not rich until you can hold all your wealth in your hand. Period. All the stocks, bonds, etc. are AIR money. They are nothing until they are cashed out.
Keith P.
@eclare: I only kind of know what the Metaverse is, and I own a Quest 2….that I play a LOT! It *seems* like a virtual world that you hang out in, but with a headset, it’s kind of tedious – the Quest 2 movie experience is amazine (particulary 3D movies), but it’s kind of tough on the neck to watch an entire film. I’d be more into something that integrates with the actual games, since that’s the hook into the VR – maybe have a game model where each game has an actualVR lobby. Golf+’s Top Golf mode is perfect for that, as is Walkabout Mini-Golf’s updated lobby, with putting green and driving challenges. Basically, make me explore beyond the game but not in a completely separate app.
lowtechcyclist
Is this blog not a social medium? It’s definitely social!
cintibud
@Geo Wilcox: Your not rich until you can jump into a swimming pool of cash like Scrooge McDuck!
Princess
@eclare: It looks like we’re never going to have to learn, and for that I am glad.
NotMax
Said it years ago and shall say it again. And again.
Social media is neither.
Betty
@HumboldtBlue: The second time in the post-season that he came through. Surprised but grateful.
catclub
Another last thing Zuck wants is for Apple to successfully monetize THEIR ecosystem away from FB. One analysis gives that as the reason for Meta and VR emphasis,
catclub
@lowtechcyclist: needs goatse link.
Frankensteinbeck
Wow, there’s a lot of people in this post talking about how they don’t want to be in this post.
catclub
@NotMax:
Social medium is neither rare nor welldone.
Matt McIrvin
Musk’s about my age, Zuckerberg’s quite a bit younger, but they’re both geekish guys who grew up on science fiction and futurist images from the 70s-80s-90s. This idea of the entire Internet turning into an immersive cyberspace where you do everything was one of the central images of cyberpunk science fiction. (The term “Metaverse” is literally from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)
But it was for narrative reasons. A story about people typing and looking at screens isn’t as interesting as one where people go through a magic portal to a fantasy world where they have dangerous adventures, and cyberpunk virtual reality was that with a science-fiction gloss on it that made it seem like just realizable technology.
But just because something works as the setup for a story, it doesn’t mean people will actually want it in reality. These science-fiction cyberspaces seemed kind of silly even at the time. Often they had story contrivances intended to put the characters in mortal danger, which, as with the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation, immediately raises the question of why anyone other than a real obsessive would risk this. But even without that, they often seemed more awkward than a relatively prosaic user interface for any purpose other than games, entertainment, and a few training applications, which in real life are the only things people ever use virtual reality for.
catclub
@Geo Wilcox:
No, if your banker will loan you real cash based on your ownership of stocks and bonds, they are real enough. You can live off the ownership.
Burnspbesq
Another problem facing Elon is that his lawyers aren’t any better than Trump’s. DOJ is going to dunk on him in ways that will make Zion Williamson jealous.
Matt McIrvin
…as for Musk, he didn’t go for the cyberpunk imagery but clearly swallowed all of the 1970s-80s futurist speculation about space colonization, automated personal transit and vacuum trains. I remember them well.
Ken
@Ruckus: In the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the crypto world, fraudsters commonly create some new coin or NFT, then establish an artificial “value” for it by selling a few of them in a circle – A sells to B for $10000, who sells it to C, who sells it back to A. This brings in the victims.
It’s possible that some stocks traded in the traditional market are in the same boat, though at least for them there’s an actual company and products underneath. With certain notable exceptions such as Theranos. And it’s thus possible that some multi-billionaires on paper could never turn even a tiny fraction of that into cash, since selling their shares risks a collapse in investor confidence.
PaulB
It’s a truism in the tech world that 80% of the project will be completed in 20% of the allotted time. It’s the remaining 20% that will kill you. My own experience has been that the truism is actually true, more often than not.
One of the biggest fears that a development team has is the product demonstration at the 20% mark. Because the project looks so good, senior management is often convinced that they’re on the verge of release and that the project is way ahead of schedule. I worked at a couple of the biggest companies in our industry, and I saw this phenomenon over and over again, to my intense frustration.
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve been using the term ‘cargo cult science fiction’. Both of these dumbasses think they can make sci-fi reality by saying so. They build something that superficially resembles a science fiction wonder, but since they can’t produce why people wanted the wonder, it fails. Google’s household robot can’t do chores or have a conversation. The cybertruck can’t fly. Metaverse can’t produce the levels of variety and sensory input that would make anyone even consider using it as a major part of their life. Metaverse is a particularly dumb idea that people would be unlikely to use for what he wants even if it were real, but he’s still just putting up a cardboard cutout and chanting “The Future! The Future!”
Sex. I’m being serious-ish. You can’t boink Cleopatra if you can’t touch her. Full holodeck immersion, the ability to live whatever your fantasy is, absolutely requires touch, which means a physical object that can hurt you. The wind on your face, the pressure of water, the softness of a cushion, riding a horse – and, people being people, sex, they need touch. People put up with danger if something goes wildly wrong for a lot less.
For other virtual realities that are purely in the mind, well, the same ‘people drive a car to go to a movie and that can kill you’ applies.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: Charles Stross’ Halting State is one of my favorites along those lines. It starts with a robbery in an online virtual world, where some orcs bust into a magical vault and steal the items players have deposited there.
The FBI-equivalent isn’t interested in the in-game theft until the programmers explain that they use the same protocols as the banking industry. It’s just that their data is visualized as ancient caverns filled with treasure chests, not account numbers with attached balances. So anyone who can break into their vaults and steal a magic sword…
catclub
The difference is that the SEC enforces laws against stock manipulation in stocks. There are no laws or regulations against price manipulation in crypto world.
PaulB
One very revealing mark of a good or bad a manager is what happens when the manager leaves the team/organization/company. If the manager was good, everything continues to operate smoothly. If the manager wasn’t, everything falls apart, primarily because the manager made themselves integral to everything, forcing everything to run through them.
On a small scale, both types of managers can seem to be successful, at least for a while, but the manager who empowers those in his or her organization will always win in the long term.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Halting State did it right because it was written late enough that Stross could build on real-world experience of things like World of Warcraft.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think the buzzword version is haptic interface.
different-church-lady
You could house every homeless person in the country, get them some mental care, and still have plenty left over for ice cream.
different-church-lady
@Frankensteinbeck:
Doofus, this anti-social media.
Ken
@catclub: Hmm, yes. I should have noted that in the crypto case, sometimes the marks manage to keep the price at the initial fake “value” or higher, because they’re continuing to buy and sell with other people that also believe it has that value.
I don’t think that would draw SEC scrutiny, would it? In the real markets, there are stocks where analysts will say the price is much higher than its fundamentals justify, but keeps trading at that price because people are not really the rational actors that economists posit.
different-church-lady
@SpaceUnit:
I’m almost certain Coltrane grows brain cells.
NotMax
@catclub
Asp and ye shall receive.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
Or just use, “Fuck it, I’m going to bed.”
Ken
Emphasis on buzz.
Anyone know if there’s a horror movie that uses that? Not the “players enter a VR world where the demons are real”, I’m pretty sure that’s been done. More “players are electrocuted and torn apart when hackers take control of the haptics”.
Starfish
@lowtechcyclist: Government can create a social safety net so that the only start-up bros are not billionaire start up bros.
Starfish
@Frankensteinbeck:
You could come close to this, but the hurdles have to do with relationships and trust, and I don’t think that Zuckerberg is good at those things.
Walmart may know what is on their shelves at any moment. Are they going to share that with you, an outside entity? No. They are not going to share that because that is business proprietary data that could get in the hands of their competitors. All these grocery stores and box stores are running tighter data security than you would expect because none of them want to be that company that had millions of customer IDs or credit cards stolen at Christmas.
Starfish
@SpaceUnit: So what do you want the young whippersnappers to do once they get off your lawn?
BruceFromOhio
Utter, barking madness. Who thinks of such things?
Another Scott
@Ken:
Wouldn’t rules and laws covering wash trading cover A sells to B who sells to C who is actually A situations?
Phemex.com:
Of course, there are the usual issues of having to prove “intent” rather than simply having to demonstrate that someone profited from the scheme. The “intent” aspects of white collar crime laws have been stretched well beyond the breaking point. Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
SFBayAreaGal
Ray Bradbury wrote about VR in 1951. A short story called “The Veldt” originally called “The World the Children Made”.
BruceJ
@eclare: They don’t need to be cash/income rich. Paper wealth is sufficient for an endless lifeline of loans with your stock holdings as collateral.
The interest is tax-deductable, loans do not count as income and so all the money you need to actually live your life (even as hugely extravagant as Musk’s lifestyle must be, it’s sofa change in comparizon to his paper wealth.)
The multibillionaires version of living paycheck to paycheck. So long as you’re not the last bank to have loaned them money, you’re golden.