Not only this. The marketplace got way less efficient. These companies are so large that they rival small states, with very little actual competition and command economies internally.

When management decides to build the metaverse, it should be a career-ending and company-ending move. What did the shareholders say? Nothing, they know that there's no competition. The leadership stayed. $70B!

Huge swathes of tech (and the economy at large) are like this. The stock market plays a huge part -- there are very few active participants, and individual pockets are bigger than ever (think e.g. Softbank); capital flows to whoever is largest. Even VC's talk about "what's your moat" -- they don't want you to out innovate, that's actually difficult; why do that, when you can find a regulatory loophole, or market power, and exploit that instead.

When one earns better return on his dollar from monopolization and market power, it's a very very bad sign for the economy at large. And we very clearly have not yet learned this lesson, even when signs of it (China out innovating us in a rapidly growing number of industries; political instability; state capture, etc). We are already a couple decades into this habit and it will not end well for us. I think this is an issue with USA industrial strategy at large. We say over and over again, we need to do the hard stuff, we need to invest in energy, batteries, 'hard tech' etc. But what did we do? $1T to Sam Altman sitting on stage in the Steve Jobs outfit, doing the App Store for ChatGPT.

Individual SWEs are doing what individual people did in the Soviet Union. Join the party, read the party book, and get a cushy mid-level bureaucrat position. It beats working the factory, that's for sure!