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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! We're going to turn our offices back into a college-campus-like playhouse of innovation! We're going to hire the best and brightest again and give them amazing things to work on rather than improving click-rates by 0.1%! We're going to do only moonshots! We're not going to maximize shareholder value!" The stock price would go to $0.01 but it would be a paradise for researchers and developers.

It would be such a breath of fresh air from all of the dollar-maximizer companies that we seem to be stuck with now.

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I don't think that works either.

You need a playhouse of innovation, but you also need a pipeline of taking that innovation and making lots of money/practical applications. And you need the interaction between people doing practical work and feeling limitations and the playhouse trying stuff out.

Bell Labs worked because AT&T had huge field operations, a huge automation problem (telephone switching and billing), and a huge manufacturing arm for telco equipment and customer equipment, and a reputation for solving problems related to communication. Small innovations easily contributed to the bottom line, and large innovations enabled massive expansion of communication. Also, there's a huge benefit from research being connected to scale --- Bell labs innovations were likely to be applied in AT&Ts businesses quickly which informs future innovation; if you're an unconnected playhouse of ideas, it's hard to know if your innovations can be applied.

For better or worse, things are less integrated now. Telcos still have large field operations, but they don't usually manufacture the equipment. Automation of telephone switching is so complete, I don't know if there are any operators anymore. Billing for usage is very limited.

You see some companies developing the processors in equipment they use and sell, which is more integrated than when it was all Intel/AMD/Qualcomm.

As much as I dislike Elon these days, this is basically how all his recent companies have been setup. Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and arguably even Boring are all moonshots, the latter 3 being so anti-shareholder that they aren't even publicly traded.

He might be anti shareholder but that does not mean he is pro worker. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...

Why would being anti-shareholder make someone pro-worker?

They're the two most common sinks for revenue.

There is nothing special about Elon choosing to do that, it isn’t some contrarian masterstroke.

Of Arianaspace, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance: only Rocketlab is publicly traded.

> Arianaspace

As in Ariane Space, wholly owned by Airbus SAS (ex EADS) and listed on Euronext Paris, FWB, CAC 40, DAX and Euro Stoxx 50?

The fact that shares exist doesn’t mean it’s a public company.

In the same vain, indices / trackers are not exchanges.

There seems to be some amnesia about the sort of company AT&T was. AT&T was first and foremost a profit maximizer. They were the poster child for abusive monopolies. Remember until the 1980s, literally no one owned a phone. All hardware that connected to a phone line was owned by ATT.

> I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now!

If this alternate timeline where giant companies are autonomous creatures were to be, why would there be shareholders?

why would they even be companies?

Not sure if true but i read a funny: bezos entire fortune could keep the pentagon afloat for 2 whole weeks.

Forbes is saying he's got $211 billion so more like 3 months if we're comparing to the whole dod budget

That's shares number of shares times current share price, not money. If he starts selling those shares they won't all sell at that price.

$6.1 trillion 2023 seems 500b per month?

> why would they even be companies?

Because that's what was asserted to be in this alternate timeline. An alternate-alternate timeline could have no companies, sure, but the discussion is centred around a specific alternate timeline.

Maybe the companies could be run by LLMs. They will still need shareholders because, well, as far as I know at least computers can’t own property yet.

An alternate-alternate timeline might have companies run by LLMs, but the alternate timeline under discussion states that the giant companies act on their own accord, with their own dollars – which, again, questions where the shareholders fit.

Google more or less did do this. Why do you think they created Alphabet? To house all of their experimental moonshot companies.

I thought it was for regulatory shielding

And then...the company goes bust? Why would anyone do this?

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