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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

I think it will be interesting to see a company get so big that it fails because it can't hire anyone anymore. While, the "market can remain irrational", it certainly isn't impossible that eventually you consume a sufficient portion of the entire hirable population with your bad reputation, that finding the replacement talent for your company size incurs costs that are just too high. What is the model for getting out of this bind?

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> What is the model for getting out of this bind?

Continuing to acquire and/or drive out of business other players before that happens so that there aren't sufficient competitive opportunities to drive your costs up to unacceptable levels. (It helps if as well as approaching a labor monopsony you are also becoming a monopoly on the services sold from that labor so that you can use the monopoly rents to offset any labor cost increases you don't manage to forestall by destroying other opportunities.)

Splintering off the toxic division as a subsidiary.

For example, Google, the "be evil" toxic advertising-tracking company, is now a splintered subsidiary of Alphabet.

But Amazon and Facebook don't seem much interested in doing the subsidiary thing, at least not to Alphabet scale, so I'm not sure what they'll do instead.

Google is 90+% of Alphabet's earnings - that's not splintered any more than FB is a splinter of (cough) Meta.

Exactly so.

I believe this model could work, but amazon seems to be a fractal of toxicity. I've heard bad stories from developers, managers, and of course contract delivery drivers, packing and sorting people, etc. Just about everything except for the robots has complained. So you would have to rebrand each division, as something completely different, e.g. AWS => CloudWeb, Store => InternetShopping.com, etc.

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