저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
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결론: 메타(META)의 리얼리티랩스 과잉투자가 회사를 위협할 수 있으며, 상위 라인(above the line) 전략 변화가 필요하다는 진단. 메타 리얼리티랩스 투자 문제: 최근 2년간 약 250억 달러 투자, 2023년 대폭 확대 예정. 분기 약 40억 달러 지출이 연 160억→250억 달러로 늘고 이 수준이 지속되면 약 12~13년간 누적 2,500억 달러 규모. 애플 첫 아이폰 36억 달러, 맨해튼 프로젝트 230억 달러, 테슬라 누적 250억 달러, 보잉 320억 달러, 구글 기타사업 400억 달러와 비교하면 아폴로 프로그램(약 2,500억 달러)에 필적하는 수준. 주가 비교: 애플은 2016년 이후 자사주 매입 3,960억 달러로 주가 상승, 메타는 약 1,000억 달러 매입했으나 2021년 9월 이후 하락. 원인은 자사주 매입에도 직원 보상 주식 발행으로 희석되고, 과도한 인력 채용과 리얼리티랩스 지출이 드러난 것. 경영 제언: 브래드 게르스트너 등의 제안처럼 인력 감축·팀 축소·자본배분 변경 등 상위 전략 변화 필요. 다만 경영진이 이를 받아들일지는 의문. 장기 주주 확보를 위해 투자 근거를 명확히 설명해야 함. 트위터(X) 관련: 실명 인증 사용자와 익명 사용자의 노출을 분리하는 방안 제안. 실명 계정 노출 확대, 익명·가짜 계정은 유료로만 증폭 가능하게 하자는 주장. 플랫폼 정책: 정신건강 위기 사용자의 일시 정지 후 복귀 절차 필요성 언급. 과도한 혐오 표현은 플랫폼 사용을 어렵게 만든다고 지적. 테슬라 관련: 테슬라는 자본 효율적으로 자동차 및 에너지 산업을 재편했다는 평가 언급. 투자 방향 예측: 메타에 대한 단기~중기 방향성 명확한 예측은 없음. 리스크 강조.
다듬은 글
problem is really in this reality Labs the amount of investment that they're making is so outsized and so abnormal and doesn't compare to anything anybody's ever seen I think everything else in the business seems to be actually quite functional so the problem is that this above the line thing though has become so big it could sink the business in his most recent podcast chamoth polyhepedia discussed the big Tech starts making cuts and what this means for the broader economy and startups chamoth share his thoughts about global debt numbers fed incompetency and more the The Meta problem is it's it's a deep and a very dangerous situation that they've put themselves in which is why their male values are this low but you know if you had done this analysis a few years ago the trade was looking at meta's male values being so high where you would have said why isn't Twitter doing more I think the most powerful change that Twitter could make today is there are two classes of users people who are verified real world identity yeah and people who want to stay Anonymous correct there is a hundred percent distribution fire hose for people who are real and there is a fire hose for fake people or fake names that you need to pay to amplify just that one simple change will cut through all the nonsense because if you want to see where the money is being spent you will be able to see very quickly because otherwise they'll be virtually no distribution for anonymous fake people and it'll Force those people if they really want to be heard that and that there's something valuable to say to spend against it no offense to all the people out there although I don't really care but no offense but you cannot use Twitter as a coping mechanism okay like I get that life is hard or that you know life hasn't lived out to your expectations or you know there's envy and whatever of other people but to go out there and spew hate doesn't solve anything are you talking about brigad Dunes well there's also just a lot of people that are just in general they're just they're just mean and I'll give you a perfect example there's a woman that I saw on Tick Tock and she's like uh you know been married for 13 years mother of two kids and she was she had a thing that went viral where she was talking about who's in charge her or her husband and it was a very funny little thing and so I've I followed a couple of her videos just to see what else she had posted and one of the videos was how she has some complicated health issues which she was very public about PCOS and how it causes you know issues in losing weight and she posted a pre and post picture of her which takes a lot of courage and she was like Brigadoon and it's like what is wrong with these broken people yeah that have to give this woman a hard time and it just it so to me these social media channels are not coping mechanisms they were never meant to be and so you know if they have to go to 4chan or a Chan or Reddit or whatever better to sort of create these honey pots of hatred than to have it spew everywhere because it makes for the rest of us these platforms to be unusable nobody is banned forever okay I think that it when somebody is banned temporarily they can be banned for any reason that violates a term of service that's well understood and uniformly enforced got it and I think that's the right of a private company but there has to be a way to get back on in the case of both of these folks there should be a way to basically you know have because of the the step uh the the quantity of their reach some sort of almost like tribunal or you know mediator that can understand what's going on because if somebody's going through a manic episode it's absolutely right to turn that off I mean these guys should have turned him off much much sooner because when you're in the middle of a Mania and I said this last week like you know like for example like this this relative of mine when they're in a manic episode it's 60 70 80 emails a day and text messages a hundred texts that I get and they're honestly they're vile they go through paranoia they go through Mania they go through these periods where they think they're completely right they go through these periods where they look completely sane and normal so yeah so it's a tough the most important thing when you have a family member and Mental Health crisis is to get the phone away from them that is a weapon that only continues the loop and to re-regulate this person and then there should be a way to prove that you're back in a re-regulated state to get these tools back but I think that that needs to we just need to acknowledge like there's just a lot of people with mental health issues there's a lot of social media there's a lot of damage that can be done it's not to forgive these people but it's to explain that in moments you've got to shut these channels down and then give them a way to come back when they've re-regulated you look at Apple versus meta there's this really interesting thing that comes up which is in 2016 you know and we've said this before you could not give Apple stock away they were generating a ton of cash it was sitting on the balance sheet in many ways Facebook was doing the same thing and there was this famous dinner I don't know if it was a dinner that ever happened but that's how the the lore is told between Tim Cook Carl Icahn and I think Luca maestri the CFO and in it what Carl icon said is listen I have a below the line suggestion for apple and what does that mean if you look at a p l you have your revenues that's above the line you have costs that's also above the line and then you have your profits and then it's what you do with the profits so what he was suggesting is below the line after the fact he had no suggestions for how the business should be run he just said give us back the money and we will reward you the stock price will go up and what's interesting to note here is the black line is the performance of Apple stock as as they've given back and they've used a ton of their own balance sheet cash to buy back the stock okay so they've spent 396 billion dollars since 2016 to buy back stock in the same time Facebook has spent almost 100 billion now here is here's where you start to see the Divergence so you would have said well shouldn't Facebook's stock have reacted in the same way and for a very long time it actually looked like it was right until about September 21 and then obviously this thing fell off a cliff and the reason why it started to fall off a cliff was somebody started to notice that hold on a second even though you're buying back all these shares the bottom of the funnel right you're leaking all of these shares to all of these new employees why are you hiring so many people and this is when people started to uncover what was happening above the line at Facebook and is what caused this massive dispersion so Nick if you go to the first chart so what has actually been going on above the line here's what's going on if you look at the light purple bar Facebook in the last two years have spent 25 billion dollars on reality dabs and they said that they're going to spend you know meaningfully more in 2023 and then sustain that investment for a while so if you do a little bit of math if they spent you know they spend around 4 billion a quarter right now so 16 billion a year that'll go to 25 billion in 2023 and then they'll sustain that what that means is that over this you know 12 or 13 year life of reality Labs as we've seen it these guys will have spent a quarter of a trillion dollars and what I did here was I just wanted to understand hilarious I wanted to understand a quarter of a trillion dollars in the context of other major leaps in humanity so at the left is what Apple spent in its entirety by the way these are all inflation-adjusted dollars for today Apple spent 3.6 billion dollars to create the first iPhone and what they did was they said every subsequent version of the iPhone would only be funded from the cash flow and profits of the generation before it right so they used consumer demand as their guiding principle so it was a very incremental approach iPhone 1 iPhone 2 and now we're on iPhone you know 14 or whatever 13 but the point is it took 3.6 billion to get that Juggernaut off the ground um the Manhattan Project will cost 23 billion in today's dollars to create the atomic bomb Tesla in its entire life spent 25 billion to get free cash flow profitability and they took this incremental approach as well will create the you know the the coupe uh the Roadster then the model S then the model X they iterated their way they used customer demand and all of that Revenue to fund future growth the cumes spend on Tesla was 25 billion Boeing spent 32 Google and other bets has spent 40.
the only thing that I could find in history that is comparable to what meta has basically said they're going to spend is the entire Apollo program which cost in today's dollars a quarter of a trillion as well so the problem is that below the line meta was doing the right things above the line they've created I think an enormous set of pressures for themselves which is you know if you think about the Apollo program this was 13 years of building Rockets getting to low earth orbit then getting to be able to you know orbit the earth then eventually building an entire infrastructure and capability to land on the moon and get back so there was a lot of incremental progress there I think what people don't understand is where is this quarter of a trillion dollars going and is it going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program because it now is becoming the single largest Capital allocation program in capitalism history nothing comes close so I think that that is a really interesting maybe jumping off point to talk about what's going on inside of this business it's I think they're doing all the right things below the line but there's this one major big red flag above the line that has to be probably better explained by them if they want to have long-term shareholders and basically what happened was when people heard this they said this is a dumpster fire we're out here and they basically said look we're gonna slow head count growth some teams will shrink I think the problem is really in this reality Labs the amount of investment that they're making is so outsized and so abnormal and doesn't compare to anything anybody's ever seen I think everything else in the business seems to be actually quite functional so the problem is that this above the line thing though has become so big it could sink the business you know it's very very hard to see an investment case for a quarter of a trillion dollars of money in the door before you really start to see something magical now they may have something super magical that nobody knows about that they're going to unveil and say ha See told you and maybe there should be a set of outcomes where we plan for that but the reality is it's you know 25 billion dollars a year for the next umpteen years and it's it's and I think it's 10 billion where did the 25 billion come from no this number it's 4 billion a quarter right now so 16 billion a year and they said that they're going to significantly increase it to 2023 so I just assumed it was a 50 increase maybe significant means a hundred but 16 goes to 25 and they said they're gonna keep going at that pace and so if you run that out till 2030 that's how you get to 250 billion dollars you know if you compare what Brad asked Facebook to do on Monday versus what icon asked Apple to do in 2016 you know icon basically said just make this below the line change and everybody will be happy it's a Do no harm solution none of us are getting in the way we're not telling you how to run the business the thing that I think that you know what Facebook had to react to was Brad's suggestions were fundamentally above the line it's like you know firing 20 of the people or 30 or changing the capital allocation would require some changes to strategy and I think this is a a good moment to recognize it as as much clarity as Brad's letter had and as much sense as it probably makes to Outsiders looking in the minute you have to tell companies how to change above the line it's just a good reminder to me that no it's not going to happen because these folks will not want to make those changes because the problem is when you get compared to the Tesla program look Tesla is Reinventing an entire category trillions of dollars of energy generation and transportation but they did it on in one year of meta reality lab spend Apple reinvented an entire compute platform on one quarter of meta's reality lab spent that's not a judgment that's just a numerical observation so if you want to get people on your side you just have to be able to double click into that in an elegant articulate way and say here are all of these things that justify 25 billion dollars a year
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