> the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be
Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.
Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.
I put Facebook in the same category as Google. They have all of these flashy projects, but at the end of the day they never get beyond serving advertisements. It's their core competency and always will be.
- Amazon made AWS
- Microsoft went from Operating Systems to a cloud company
- Even Google has Waymo, which might develop into a large company by itself
- Apple was founded in 1976. They really weren't the powerhouse that they are until the iPhone came out.
- Netflix went from mailing DVDs to streaming
Of course most pivots don't work and there's selection bias here. BUT, it's not unheard of for business models to change. And it certainly helps that Zuck is the original founder and has controlling shares.
Most companies are like that. Look at their core competency and how much room that market has to grow. It's definitely the exception for company to go into a completely different vertical and excel there.
Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.
Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.