I wish people would stop using twitter for article/blog sized content.

Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I find retweets of threads extremely an extremely unreliable way to find my way back to the actual thread.

This particular link works, but it's still very a very annoying form to read it.

That said: Shorting these companies, that OP admits have huge R&D budgets, is a bet that they won't invent something new. Or that they will be taken over by something that does.

With a 10 digit R&D budget you can afford to be second mover.

In the last 20 years, has GOOG invented? Wow, yes. Question is do you think the past 2 years (or whatever) is a better predictor of next 5 years than the last 20 years was?

I dunno. And saying you do (especially when shorting) is saying you know better than the market, which is not always wrong, but it does have some arrogance in it.