Put this in to perspective. Alphabet had $282 BILLION in revenue in 2022. I don't know exactly what they will pay in 2023, but in previous years it was somewher

Put this in to perspective. Alphabet had $282 BILLION in revenue in 2022. I don't know exactly what they will pay in 2023, but in previous years it was somewhere around $10 billion a year. Google incentivizes it's employees in a certain way. Those employees have a very high expectation of not only income but wealth. Management has demonstrated an ability to waste an enormous amount of that money (Alphabet/Google is certainly not alone in that regards.) Because they own a monopoly they can get away with it. Because the monopoly is in advertising they don't have to be that exceptional in terms of delivering new and improved products. Because of the stock ownership structure and because they've had tremendous revenue growth for so long they really haven't had to answer to their investors about their failure and waste. In some regards a lot of those investors are asleep and don't really understand what is going on. However, the managers need to crank the monetization dial to hit whatever incentives are set for them to become wealthy or grow whatever wealth they already have. This is a bag of tricks (the monetization dial) that has worked well for over a decade. When it runs out, Google's revenue growth will end and employees will no longer get to become wealthy by being employees. Maybe they will suddenly get a lot of capital discipline and experience a second wind like Microsoft appears to have. Maybe they will start looking more like Yahoo. To be determined.