Whenever I see DOGE I think of Venice.
I’d like to see Elon in a canal, face down.
But the Doges of Venice were authoritarian oligarchs, and Musk is… Oh, wait…
When I first read that, I thought it was going to be a palindrome.
Behold, the fruits of Facebook burning $100 billion on “the metaverse”; a dead VR game with PS2 graphics, populated by AIs and small children shouting the N-word.
A while back I heard that Mark Zuckerberg had spent something like $20 billion on the metaverse. That was bad enough. But $100 billion?
If most of that $100 billion was spent on salaries, then I’m perfectly fine with it. Better programmers have all that money than Zuckerberg and his cronies.
If Zuckerberg hired a thousand world-class metaverse engineers five years ago and paid them a million bucks each for salary and benefits, that would only account for five billion in spend. I’m trying to imagine how he spent $100 billion, though part is surely for the data centers, servers and Nvidia hardware.
Maybe some of that $100 billion got lost in crypto fraud.
Star Citizen space ships!
I’m pretty sure that there are free standalone phone apps nowadays that can make better videos than that.
I am more than a bit amazed at this level of spend because I worked for a very small company in the 1990s that was trying, with little funding, to get somewhere in the virtual reality craze of the time. I think the entire industry at the time wasn’t spending more than $50 million.
Data centers and servers need to be installed, hardware needs to be assembled. I have no doubt that most of that money went to other rich people, but surely some of it went to people who earned it.
Besides, it’s always a good thing when a fool is separated from his money.
It’s only partially his money. It’s also that of his shareholders.
And I should have sympathy for them, why?
That’s just what he wants them to think.
Well anyone investing in one of the index funds probably has some money in Meta stock.
I know - and that includes me, too. But it’s worth it.
To billionaires, investing in controlling the narrative is worth the loss in revenue. See Elon’s purchase of Twitter. See Jared Kushner buying The New York Observer so they wouldn’t say so many negative things about his real estate ventures.
Apropos of nothing, the daily shitstorms have got this sort of punchline stuck in my head. “Then he raised his tear-stained faced from his hands and said, ‘the worst part of all of this is, the goat wasn’t even very good.’”