Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
Funny how you use the term “banana republic” to mean “corruption that wasn’t in the US” when the situation that coined the term was created by American imperialism in the first place.
Edit: not disagreeing with you btw, just found that specific use of words ironic, given the background.
No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.