Meta
Personally, I&#x27;m less bullish on FB&#x2F;Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB&#x27;s culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years.<p>Consider this, and call me out if I&#x27;m wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB&#x2F;YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it&#x27;s kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it&#x27;s by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet.<p>I don&#x27;t know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta&#x27;s problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven&#x27;t been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I&#x27;m not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of &quot;Ready Player One&quot; fanboys.<p>That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.