Group items tagged

Two days after a disastrous initial public offering, shares in Facebook are collapsing. They’re down to $33, well below the IPO price of $38.

The larger picture is that a powerful company, one that is collecting more information about more people than any organization in history, one that has 900 million members, making it the third-largest country on earth, is in the control of a 28-year-old man who has a history of being, well, less than forthright. Will it ever occur to people that so many who rub up against Facebook later notice that their watch and wallet are missing?

The IPO disaster simply creates an incentive to pry even deeper into the lives of users, “the one thing people hate most,” Wadhwa says. Facebook can track people even when they’re not on the site, watching where they go and what they do. That information, sliced and analyzed the right way, could be of great value to advertisers.

Placing ads next to Google search results works well because people using Google are already searching for products. Advertising on Facebook is less effective because people go to the site to talk to their friends, not look for products.

nobody would be complaining if Facebook stock had gone up instead of down, a feat the company could have accomplished so easily, just by selling fewer shares at a lower price. But Facebook didn’t want to leave money on the table. Zuckerberg and his bankers let hubris, self-delusion, and ego get the better of them.

nearly half of the respondents now have less favorable opinion of Facebook than they used to simply because the IPO has been such a disappointment. Even thought the declining share price and frustrating technical troubles had zero affect on most Americans (or even the average investor) simply giving off the impression of a bumbling, unpopular company can change the customer's perception of it

Part of the reason the stock is struggling is because the public offering has exposed some of the cracks in the armor of Facebook's business model. Ads are awkward and under-performing and revenue is not growing at the rate it once was, particularly when matched against the site gigantic user base. (The site makes a little over a dollar per user, each quarter.) That makes consumers less interested in the site, which depresses the ad market even more, which drives down share prices, which turns off consumers... and so on. The stock opens on Tuesday at $26.90, still well below its IPO price of $38. 

Steve Pearlstein has a piece on bank compensation that points out something that I took on last year:  the absurdly high fees that investment banks charge to do deals. 

What we want to know is, why? Unless you know that, any project to put an end to these excess profits will stall out. 

There are standard answers that I find implausible, like "oligopoly".  Or rather, saying that they have a cosy anti-competitive club simply restates the question; it doesn't actually answer it.  Oligopolies aren't particularly stable--the Big Three persisted for so long arguably only because the UAW kept them from competing on labor costs. 

the billionaire businessman disappeared from the public limelight following brushes with Chinese regulators in recent weeks.

The 56-year-old former English teacher founded Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. from a small apartment in eastern China in 1999.

The startup grew from a fledgling internet business matching wholesale buyers and sellers into a fast-growing technology empire,

Y Combinator said companies have to “understand that the poor public market performance of tech companies significantly impacts VC investing.”

Slow your hiring! Cut back on marketing! Extend your runway!The venture capital missives are back, and they’re coming in hot.With tech stocks cratering through the first five months of 2022 and the Nasdaq on pace for its second-worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, start-up investors are telling their portfolio companies they won’t be spared in the fallout, and that conditions could be worsening.

It’s a stark contrast to 2021, when investors were rushing into pre-IPO companies at sky-high valuations, deal-making was happening at a frenzied pace and buzzy software start-ups were commanding multiples of 100 times revenue. That era reflected an extended bull market in tech, with the Nasdaq Composite notching gains in 11 of the past 13 years, and venture funding in the U.S. reaching $332.8 billion last year, up sevenfold from a decade earlier. according to the National Venture Capital Association.

America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency.

And this year that trend is up by at least 33%  from the previous high in 2011.

Since then, the tax and other consequences do not depend on why one leaves. Yet after Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his Facebook IPO riches, there was an angry backlash.

Softbank plans $18bn share sale of its mobile business

Japanese giant Softbank is planning to list its mobile phone business in Tokyo and overseas, according to the Nikkei newspaper. The listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and possibly in London aims to raise 2 trillion yen ($18bn; £13.1bn).Softbank confirmed in a statement that the share sale is an option but no decision has yet been made.

SoftBank would use the proceeds to invest in growth, such as buying into foreign information-technology companies, the Nikkei said.The Japanese telecommunications giant is one of the world's biggest technology companies and is run by its founder, Japanese entrepreneur Masayoshi Son.It has previously acquired Vodafone's Japanese operations and the US telecoms company Sprint.In 2016, Softbank bought UK technology firm ARM Holdings for $24bn ($32bn).

At a moment when animal-based agriculture is near the top of planet-killing culprits, ditching meat for substitutes, faux or otherwise, is the most effective thing an individual can do to fight climate change, according to a study in the journal Science.

More than 500 million years after life took hold on earth, humans are having such a drastic effect on it that we are now the dominant geologic force. This designation comes not from the usual concerned voices seeking recognition from distracted media and political elites, but from a key body within the international union of geological scientists. As these folks like to say: rocks don’t lie.

Industrial agriculture to produce meat is the coal-mining of food production. Producing a single beef burger takes about 660 gallons of water — equivalent to a full week of water use by the average household in the United States

We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker.

this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.

pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin.