How do you lose $15 Billion in a day?

Jul 27, 2018

There was a time when everyone was doing it – the hula hoop that is.

Back in 1958 there was even a hoola hoop song on the Ed Sullivan Show. Good ol’ Wham-O toys made a whole lot of money selling plastic tubing molded into a circle. For a while it was a fad everybody knew about, had seen, or done.

Sort of like Facebook.

It was all pretty amazing for a while. From a college dorm room to a multi-billionaire all by the age of thirty. Everyone wanted the Zuckerberg story to be an American success story. There was just one problem. It was not honest. What started as a “free platform” turned into a “community”. Then it became an addiction. They it became apparent that all the sincerity was lost in the simple motive to sell data for profit. Then the politicians came knocking and Facebook was all too happy to take their money too.

When it all hit the fan, the richest 30+ year old in American history stonewalled the Congress and told them he would fix everything by using artificial intelligence.

Then he lost $15 Billion dollars in a day as his stock began to crash. And a whole lot of other Facebook investors lost a lot of money as well.

There is a lot we can learn from the Facebook story. Of course “the company” is convinced they will recover and carry their “digital community” well into the future. I wonder if Wham-O toys felt the same way about the hula-hoop?