It's one thing to speculate on taking over a company through unconventional means, but gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now.
Doesn't help that online ads have a certain arcane quality about them. It's crazy that you can make money from a blog just by creating an AdSense account.
"We use our AdSense revenue on a secret network of sites, 80% of which goes to buy stock in Google, the other 20% goes towards buy Gcp cloud compute that runs a network of bots that are browsing and clicking our ads this generating higher and higher ad revenues to reinvest"
Now if you could make that work, Google really would eat itself.
Most tech companies have pretty good defences against that sort of thing. High gross margins mean when your involvement increases sales on their platform, their P&L figures look a lot better. High P/E ratios mean every time their P&L figures look unexpectedly better, the value of all the stock you haven't bought jumps by a lot more.
Then again if you yourself are a fashionable web company, maybe it's different, especially if you buy more shares in the platform company you're dependent on by selling off your own stock. Wonder how much of Facebook Zynga could have bought when it was supplying 19% of Facebook's revenue....