In perhaps the purest illustration of exactly how capitalism works, Facebook has become the latest company to hit a $1 trillion valuation. That’s according to Yahoo Finance, which lists the company’s market cap at $1,008 trillion.
This is the first time Facebook has crossed the fabled barrier, and you can expect it to make the trip back and forth a few times before it becomes large enough that only a catastrophe will drop its value any lower.
Facebook joins the big-time
The social network has joined several other tech companies, including Google’s Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, which have all crossed the valuation mark. It has managed to do this by cleverly making use of its users’ personal information, to sell advertising to… basically everyone… as well as develop products — most of which are designed to hoover up even more personal information, including voice and movement data.
Which, if we’re being wholly fair, is more or less what other tech companies are all doing. But Google, Facebook’s closest analogue, hasn’t visibly mistreated its users over the years and has been very prominent in creating actually functional products with their info. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has kinda bumbled into its position like an overweight child stuffing more and more cake that belongs to other people into its gaping maw while destroying everything in its path. Which, really, only illustrates just how valuable your personal information actually is (and why you shouldn’t just be giving it away).
On the back of the social network’s milestone valuation, it also seems that the FTC in the States has had its case against Facebook dismissed. The complaint hoped to split apart Instagram and WhatsApp from the main body. A judge found that the “…FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims —namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services.”