Okay, we we're gonna a look at the Facebook and Instagram owner meta meta platforms, giving a revenue forecast that was at the low end of endless estimates. Getting over now to David Kirkpatrick, who has found an editor in chief of Techonomy. David, thank you so much for joining. Is I think you make the valid point here that everything in the results which came out earlier were at or above expectations except for one key parameter. Profit That's
not not ideal, is it. Here's a company that really has gone through a historic transformation since it changed its name just a year ago. Uh. Not only were you know, revenues down for the second quarter in a row, but that wasn't expected, but profits were more than fifty below a year ago. And it's largely because this is a company that has shifted from a priority on its central business, which is social media for three point seven billion people
in the world. Just per say that to yourself a few times, to a a prospective business that doesn't exist and may not exist for many years around the metaverse that they're spending ten billion a year on plus Uh and it's just not working. Yeah. This letter of from Altimeter from Brad Gursner got a lot of play and Uh, basically I'm curious whether or not you agree with a lot of this. It's almost like, um, they need a ruth poor Ade or something there to help with the management.
That they should be more mindful of profit. They should be more mindful of expenses. Like you said the Reality Labs, the expenditure there more than ten billion a year and and Brad wrote in his letters should be more like five billion. Um, there's a lot of a lot of interesting points here. Do you do you? I mean, what would your prognostication be for for how Facebook could write
the ship? Well, don't forget for fourteen years until just a month or so ago, they had an ex Google senior leader, Cheryl Sandberg, who was in there helping, and she maybe voted with her feet by leaving. She doesn't seem to believe in what they're doing. What they need to really write the ship, unfortunately doesn't seem in prospect, which is governance and collective leadership of the type that
any company with an active board is familiar with. But this is a company where all power resides in one individual who has no obligation to listen to anybody, because he literally controls more than of the voting shares, and he is obsessed with this metaverse future and doesn't seem to care that much about the existing businesses, despite all kinds of reasons why any rational person at least on
the outside, believes he should do that. So that I don't think even a Rutport type person coming in would make any difference unless Mark Zuckerberg decided to listen to them. But he doesn't listen even to his board. That's it isn't it's it doesn't does it? This is coming now? If if it is an obsession, that probably the intriment of as you mentioned earlier, the cool business and the cool business perhaps could by this I suppose neglect lead to it being in trouble for all sorts of things
such as oversight. Well, I mean it's in trouble because when when the stock since this morning, the stock is down to almost and you know, it's down from its peak. This is one of the great growth stories of modern business that has suddenly turned into something completely different, and it's it's almost hard to contemplate what a turnaround this is for what was for a long time the most profitable company in capitalism on a per dollar of revenue basis.
So um, it's hard to understand why there isn't a sense of you know, ten ten bell alarm to to do things differently. But they just keep acting like, yes, this is the kind of what it was going to be like, and we're okay. So the work doesn't on the direction going forward. I mean, there's nothing wrong with pursuing the metaverse. I suppose perhaps it just needs to happen more slowly and so the expenses would be you know,
less of a drag. What else I mean, he's not reducing Yeah, he said that they should they should cut their investment in the metaverse at least by half. That also, they said that they should reduce their head count by about which sounds reasonable. They still have over more people than they had a year ago, so you know, they could lose a lot of people and still be a very robust, well governed company from an employee point of view,
a lot of people that are very capable. But again, it's weird because the sense of crisis doesn't really seem to be there. And you know, when you have somebody who has absolute power who doesn't seem to care what other people think. It's a very unusual situation in a company of this scale. At some point he'll hear what other investors are saying. We don't have time now, unfortunately, David, But uh, you know, I mean, it's only a matter
of time. I think many would say that messages like that one that we we talked about from Brad Gersoner and others, and you, uh, he'll he'll ultimately hear it, I suppose, is the argument. David Kirkpatrick, founder and editor in chief of Teconomy