> The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Facebook produced nearly $70 billion in operating income for fi

> The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Facebook produced nearly $70 billion in operating income for fiscal years 2017-2019. They don't require their stock to be priced to a high multiple to buy competitors and they haven't been using that approach to competition since Instagram (2012) & WhatsApp (2014) - because they know they can't. They didn't require their stock to buy either Instagram or WhatsApp. Instagram only cost a billion dollars. As it turns out, using stock was a large mistake as it pertains to the owners of the company; the cash equivalent is ~1/10th as valuable as the shares used to buy Instagram turned out to be and Facebook will just keep piling up cash they can't spend. Facebook has been wildly profitable since fiscal 2009, when their profit margin hit 29%. They've had a giant pile of cash throughout much of their history, courtesy of considerable venture capital backing and reaching profitability 4-5 years after their founding. > And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end. That approach would work perfectly fine in fact, as it always does, were Facebook still allowed to buy a company like TikTok. They're not allowed to buy large competitors any longer due to government competition concerns. If they were, Pinterest would not be an independent entity at this point. They could acquire Pinterest and shut them down. Then buy Snapchat and shut them down. Then buy Twitter and shut them down. One after another, trivially. It would dramatically bolster their monopoly position. Regulators would never allow it and everyone - without exception - knows it.