the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate, or make their search any better because they no longer play by the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system.
Linking the slide deck that caused Google to start encrypting the traffic between their own data centers running on their own fiber is perhaps not the most compelling argument that Google is a state asset.
What does this mean? Like, I work there and I’d be pretty annoyed if they stopped turning a profit as a collapse of the stock price would affect my compensation.
It’s interesting to hear this take because I’m used to hearing the opposite: that Google is too focused on increasing short-term profit at the expense of product quality.
And technically Musk was not the wealthiest man in the world when he bought Twitter, because he didn't had that much cash laying around in his bank accounts. And yet, when wanted, or more precisely put in corner to do so, he did shit 50 billions and bought it.
OpenAI is Microsoft, technical details don't matter here, only money.
Before FAANG the acronym was MAFANG, but due to too much closeness to a slang word, the political correct crowd change it to FAANG. Also, just as a side note, Microsoft is a trillion worth more than the "G" in FAANG.
The FAANG acronym was actually about growth rather than size, and their stock was performing like a tech stock for a while. But yes, they don't belong because they're actually a media "manufacturing" business, although a successful one.
[0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...