Meta’s mega plunge great and ominous news

Mark Zuckerberg is chief executive of Meta Platforms.

Good. And fantastic – and also a great, informative and ominous, pointer to what lies ahead.

The good refers to billionaire Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s two-pronged assault on the Meta/Facebook of one of the planet’s great boy-poseurs Mark Zuckerberg – who’s a sort of Bill Gates Version 2.0, but without Gates’s ‘sparkling’ personality.

Forrest has ‘launched’ a downunder criminal prosecution – he gets it going, the Crown actually does the prosecuting - over Facebook channelling users into crypto scams off the back of his name and that of other celebrities.

That’s in Australia; the second prong is a conventional civil action in California alleging Facebook of knowingly aiding and abetting fraud.

It’s great to see somebody, and even more a ‘somebody’ with deep pockets, moving to hold one of the big tech neo-fascist totalitarian companies to account – when pusillanimous politicians and incompetent regulators won’t do it.

Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms.

I’d upgrade my characterisation of Forrest’s actions from ‘good’ to ‘fantastic’ if he persisted all the way through to a successful and even more an effective conclusion.

But I’m cautious as it would be all-too easy for Facebook to settle – especially in California - in a way that left the power of its essentially juvenile totalitarianism intact.

So for the moment I’ll reserve the ‘fantastic’ for the other good news – the 20 per cent plunge in the share price of Meta (the new, all-too Zuckerberg, pompous and fatuous at the same time, name for the listed parent entity) when it missed December quarter profit expectations.

Anything that takes money out of the pockets of Zuckerberg – and indeed each and all of the other tech billionaires, and indeed of their shareholders generally – is to be applauded.

As of Wednesday night Big Apple time, Zuckerberg was 20 per cent less rich. Fantastic.

Of course it might be a short-lived pleasure, the share price might well bounce back; but I live in hope of the Great Reckoning still a-coming.

The corrosive and entirely negative power of big tech – Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google at its epicentre – is twofold.

One is the power of the eyeballs they hold in mindless imprisonment, the other is the financial and market power they wield through their company’s trillion and multi-trillion dollar valuations.

Meta Platforms is the owner of social media site Facebook.

Both of these are realities that regulators have shown themselves completely incapable of even grasping, far less dealing with, aside from some pitiful ‘wins’ at the very margins.

The best thing that could happen for mankind, non-gender specific of course, would be the global valuation of big tech being slashed by at least 75 per cent and preferably more like 90 per cent.

A Microsoft, an Apple, a Google, valued at, say, around $US100bn each might actually be good corporate citizens, adding to (global) community well-being, as against subtracting from it, continuously, 24/7 and big-time and getting worse.

Well, that’s pretty much a pipe-dream, but the 20 per cent Meta slashing could be an encouraging pointer to what could like ahead for the sector.

Big Tech is at the very extreme over-bloated end of the global sharemarket bubble that’s been the consequence of the major central banks’ money-printing and zero interest rates.

If, and it remains a very, very big if, despite the supposed more ‘hawkish’ Fed, rates are now headed up – and they need to go high enough to ‘work’- share prices around the world must fall and the shares prices of the big tech companies must fall further that the general level.

Facebook gave us a great pointer to that. In the what used-to-be rational scheme of things, its ‘miss’ wasn’t that big – a $US10.3bn profit against $US10.9bn expected.

But it and its peers are not just ‘priced for (debased) perfection’, but for super-perfection plus. Imagine if profits, and growth of Big Tech actually went negative.

The mouth waters.