this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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The stocks had to be bought back first, then basically they could be turned in to the DTCC and the company gets delisted. That's how Twitter did it.
The other way is to naked short so much you've got enough shares to control the board and tank the company from inside then you don't have to do a buyback because there's no company. This will be reddit's future if they even get to ipo at this point.
The more realistic death is a buyout, merger and dismantling. That's how the vast majority of publicly traded companies die. Bought my a larger organisation looking for a deal on your IP, userbase or reputation who then sells off all physical assets, offshores all talent and outsources all capabilities. They retain the brand equity which then gets rinsed through a range of products that are smaller and smaller before quietly being shelved. See GEs dismantling of RCA, the death of GE itself, and every company EA has ever bought.
No, not really. The metric is growth only for those who aren't profitable. They use growth as a promise of future profits.
Meta/Facebook is turning in a huge profit each ear. Nobody cares about the user count that much anymore unless it sharply falls.
Twitter is different. Twitter didn't really make a profit yet. They aren't profitable.
Meta is pumping ungodly amounts of money into a moon shot (VR) because it is in stagnation phase and their market is saturated - so they do care about growth quite a bit.
We were talking about growing the userbase. Growth of the business is something different. Of course any company is interested in growth. However, I don't think usercount growth is the metric Facebook is looking at currently.
Look at Amazon. The cloud division is now more profitable than the Amazon website. Facebook is looking to use those large profits to branch out in different directions. Some like the metaverse won't work. Just like Amazon's echo didn't become profitable. But others eventually will.
If your business relies on the size of your userbase than those things are quite related. Again, not a coincidence that while facebook is stagnating meta is desperately trying to force vr.
It's doing double digit billions in profit every year. Both Facebook and Meta. They're actually doing quite all right even with the VR fiasco.
And even iftheir only possible growth vector was user count(which it isn't), they have close to 3 billion active users monthly with over 2 billion people using Facebook daily. It is impossible to grow. There are no more people.
Musk crumpled the cashflow pretty quickly in weeks, but he also has a lot of wealth, he had to chip in billions of his own dollars to save the company from his mistakes.