> It is remarkable how big these companies have gotten over the past few years. Walmart hasn't gotten much bigger in the past few years. They've lost position

> It is remarkable how big these companies have gotten over the past few years. Walmart hasn't gotten much bigger in the past few years. They've lost position in terms of scale & power versus other large companies and Amazon has been taking a lot of retail market share. Walmart has also lost a big chunk of their profitability, their business has become less profitable (a business that was already operating on tiny margins). They've only been growing their sales a few percent per year the past five years. Their operating income is below where it was four years ago. On an inflation adjusted basis, Walmart is lucky if they've been standing still the past decade. Their peak was circa ~2000-2010. It's unlikely they'll ever exceed the position of dominance they held at that time. I'm not sure how Walmart - a $524 billion sales global juggernaut - eating a comparatively tiny social media company, reminds of the AOL Time Warner merger? The AOL merger was a merger of near-peers in terms of valuation, AOL at the time was booming and massively profitable. TikTok isn't profitable, and they're barely a rounding error compared to Walmart in sales. AOL was somewhat in the publishing & media platform business, they were both in the ad business, and both AOL and Time Warner were in the connectivity business. Walmart's business has nothing in common with TikTok, there's no sound synergy at all (even theoretical). About the only distant reach, would be the idea of trying to appeal to younger consumers, to use (abuse) TikTok for that purpose. It would of course end disastrously for WMT shareholders, Walmart would take a giant write-down eventually. There's nothing new about it of course. GM bought Hughes and EDS for example. Giant companies do this type of thing historically.