(Getting back on the blog wagon)
Inspired by the news today: Facebook’s SMS app has reached 200MM users per day and the company is wondering how to generate a revenue stream from it — Facebook’s share price shot up on the news.
I think we are missing an opportunity to award a Nobel Prize for Capitalism — for the greatest value invested by Capital Markets for the social good of mankind.
We live in a truly remarkable era where Capital Markets generate wealth from products that generate little or no income. If I had to take a stab at understanding why there are more and more billionaires each year, I would put this as the reason:
- Investors are putting more and more value on less. The macro-economic driver of this is technology, through which more can be achieved at lower cost, multiplying the market opportunity.
Charities raise funds to help fight poverty, Capital Markets raise funds to help make social media affordable to even low-income households. It is harder to feed the world than to deploy communications infrastructure globally. Revenues can stay flat, profit margins per unit can drop but critical mass grows exponentially, generating hyper-wealth through the consolidation of billions of customers into digital media channels – based on market valuation, not profitability.
So I think we should be awarding a Nobel Prize for Capitalism for the funders of the innovations that are fabricating societal change based on market valuation. Now if we could just get them to do the same for affordable housing, water purification and nutrition, we would be in paradise.