True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole metaverse investment. And all the products that Google has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like Stadia...
Their comment reads to me as if businesses hire employees (regardless of the work they do, since we are discussing employees that don't do anything) because investors consider employees as R&D (even useless ones).
Either way, there is no data I have seen to suggest market cap correlates with number of employees. The strongest correlation I see is to net income (aka profit), and after that would be growing revenues and/or market share.
