Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.

That’s a great point as well. People blame investors but at FAANGs the workforce itself are investors and very important ones since they’ll bail if the stock stops going up.

When I was working for Google, only a minority of my income came from RSUs.

You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.

> Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse'

I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

That's plausible, and perhaps what Mr Zuckerberg had in mind?

But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.

(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)

I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.