Google surpasses $2T market cap

Google is doing what the street wants, which is a proxy for shareholders. The increase in ads revenue, the first ever dividends, and the layoffs. These are the tools that the leadership have, and mostly short-term. The long-term innovations haven’t really taken hold. So, this may be the flame burning the brightest before it goes out.

Just because of inflation you would expect more companies to exceed 1 and 2 trillion dollar market caps over time. Their existence is not a problem to be solved. Google search, maps, email, books, scholar etc. are wonderful services that have created immense value.

So many ads…<p>Edit: but it’s so apt. What that valuation is actually showing you is the value of sitting in between people looking for things and people looking to sell things to people looking for things, and turning that position into an ads engine increasingly at the expense of enabling people to find what they are looking for. The valuation goes up to the extent ads are prioritized over just getting out of the way and giving people what they are looking for.

I wonder what % is from ads that are straight garbage. AI generated celebrity voices, information on how to get the latest &quot;stimulus&quot; money, marketing schemes involving things like audiobooks or real estate, health scams...

Related:<p><i>Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40162354">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40162354</a>

What&#x27;s interesting to me are:<p>- market cap<p>- random layoffs<p>- overstaffing<p>- falling competence<p>A lot of frictions build in there. I&#x27;m curious how it will play out.<p>I tend to translate market cap for big companies into dollars per person. 8 billion people in the world, so Google expects $250 profit per human being in average to be accurately valued.<p>That feels high, but what do I know?

No company should exist at that size in a society that has a healthy distribution of power and fair competition. These businesses need to be split up ASAP. And if they aren’t, they should be heavily taxed and heavily regulated. If you’re that big and powerful, you are pretty immune to competition since you can eat losses, copy ideas from others, push your services unfairly, bundle things, etc. We need higher taxes and new anti trust laws that actually do something based on size or a lower threshold of market share, even if there’s no evidence of consumer harm. Getting bogged down in lawsuits around old toothless antitrust law is why nothing ever changes.<p>Also, at that size you’re basically like a government service. Companies like this should be held to standards as if they were publicly owned utilities, on topics like pricing or transparency or free speech or whatever.

I bet there will be short peaks in the next years. Basically, ads declining and we discover they are a kind of scam for most companies (we don&#x27;t know the real algorithm to handle the inventory) and&#x2F;or legal actions around the world (e.g. Europe).

&gt; its announcement of a first-ever cash dividend of 20 cents per share<p>Ok so there has never been a dividend payment so far, so all the money investors get out from Google is from new investors that get in?<p>Is that even allowed?

Our national debt is so much that we need to give half a Google to China each year

Layoffs are paying off, congratulations. I guess.<p>Trading the core of the business (or whatever is left of it - ie, &quot;do no evil&quot;) in exchange for short term gains.<p>Maybe we will see more &quot;Project Nimbus&quot; initiatives. Maybe a collaboration with North Korean, or Russian governments. Maybe this time they will sell out for $10B+ or more.

So a company can make more than Australia but not be a monopoly?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...</a>