Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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50-50 chance of a newsletter next week. Might be too busy preparing for the Cleveland visit. Still waiting to hear whether Seattle’s Mayor and Washington’s Governor are joining us.
News
Cloud Computing: How Hard Can It Be?
So if the AI thing doesn’t work, Meta can always jump into the cloud business. They offer no explanation why customers would give Meta permission to play in this market.
I warn regularly about the risks of taking a dependency on Elon, but Zuck has a very specific history of developer platform rug pulls (Facebook Platform, Parse, et al). As someone wrote:
Or does Meta have to get into the cloud platform business? Its history as a platform provider is a succession of rug pulls, so a Meta cloud would be a battle against not only AWS, Azure and GCP, but also its own genetics.
And they’re not exactly brimming with enterprise DNA. Remember Workplace?
The rise of agents is pulling a much broader range of cloud services into the mix, so merely having a bunch of GPUs isn’t going to be sufficient.
Put the Hyperclouds on Speed Dial
This feels directionally right although the data is from Synergy Research, who 1.) previous indulged in “ridiculous” efforts to paint IBM as a hyperscaler and 2.) put the hyperscaler population at 21 companies (“if everyone is a hyperscaler, no one is a hyperscaler”).
If you’re a financial actor chasing the data center gold rush, this is another warning your potential customer set is relatively small.
Space Twitter: A Boon for Direct Indexing?
The Space Twitter IPO is a marvel of both financial engineering and expectations management. And it may wreck your index fund returns.
There is still time to look into direct indexing, which lets you personalize your index. Like if you wanted to omit a particular stock being jammed into the indexes at a really high valuation with a small float, without time for proper price discovery.
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Actions Have Consequences: Data Center Resistance Edition
I offer up Maine as the first place to do this!
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Good News for Nuclear Power, Bad News for Data Centers, Don’t Be Cleveland or Seattle? The Data Center Resistance, You Can’t Blame Data Centers in Seattle for Our Skyrocketing Electricity Prices, Release the (Electrical) Scapegoat!, The Pain in Maine Stems Mainly from the Insane, The Pain in New England Stems Mainly from the Insane, The Pain in Maine Compounds,
Inflation-Adjusted FTW
Dan Primack joins the inflation-adjusted unicorn movement. $1.43 billion is up from $1.35 billion when I did the math in January 2025.
When will progressives inflation-adjust their threshold for billionaire hatred? Can progressives do math?
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Quick(er) Hits
Antitrust Incoherence: Democrats are in thrall to the idea that corporate consolidation is America’s biggest, and maybe only, problem Jonathan Chait has a great look at the incoherence, failure, and broader political implications of hipster antitrust.
Europe Is Starting to Think Putin Will Expand the War Beyond Ukraine Putin has to make his next move while Trump is still in office, and is deadlocked in Ukraine.