Hacker News Reader

Comment by d12bb | Hacker News Reader

Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…

View on HN

> Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it.

If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement

Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more evidence then just a gut feeling.

Not to mention supporting data for announcements like these tend to come up in discovery requests for lawsuits so I highly doubt they'd make such a definitive statement w/o the points to back it up.

Wilson Sonsini (the consiglieri to the Valley CEOs) has entered the chat..

True, but if the internal attitude of Facebook is to be as pessimistic as possible about the IDFA changes and make them the scapegoat for all problems (which they've advertised via their public stance on the issue), that would show up in the projections even if nobody is "lying".

What would be his motive for saying revenue would be $10B less than previous trends would predict? They posted record revenue again in 2021, so it doesn't look like he's trying to cast a scapegoat for stagnant revenue.

with my tinfoil hat on -- planned stock buybacks?

According to what I read (not first hand, of course), he said that 10bn because of Apple's decision. That's a different thing than just saying 10bn, and to pressure Apple to let loose on privacy seems motivation enough to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com