They apparently have burned nearly $70B on this... imagine if they had invested that in AI back in 2021 instead...

Well, we can't blame them too much for not seeing that particular detail of the future. LLMs work better than most folks expected.

But we can blame them for really bad capital allocation. I'd say it was pretty obvious even back then that it was extremely poor capital allocation at the hands of a too-powerful and too-desperate boss in the face of weakening of the blue app. Renaming the company after something you don't do? Really? I had to look up the name of their VR app/world. User count has been on a down trend for years, still in low 6 digits.

I would say that when the boss is very poor at capital allocation, a dividend would have been an outstanding choice : )

$70 bn equates to a one-time payment of $32.11 per share. For a sense of scale, that's around 8.5% of the average share price in the last five years.

Jim