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by ghomrassen 2612 days ago
Heard about this a couple days ago, crazy stuff. For those who don't know, bilibili is a massive video hosting platform in China aimed toward the younger generation.

So the question is who leaked it and why? Just a disgruntled employee or the effect of 996?

5 comments

Elaborating a bit more on the size of bilibili: it has around 100m monthly users and trades as NASDAQ:BILI with a market cap of ~$5.7B.

This is not some small-time shop, as far as social media companies go bilibili is one of the more established companies out there.

I'll never understand what market cap has to do with company size. Stock prices are basically an arbitrary value mostly determined by how much people buying stock think the stock is worth, are they not?

Correct me if I'm wrong but theoretically an overhyped two man operation running at a financial loss could generate the same market cap as a much larger company with massive profits? As I understand it, the only somewhat tangible factor is the actual money in the company which again can be bloated by overeager investors.

I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious about the rationale.

Market capitalization = share price * number of shares

As a first approximation, this is how much money it would cost to buy all the shares. You’d pay $SHARE_PRICE for each share and then own the entire company. Therefore the concept is a decent measure for what the market has decided the company as a whole is worth.

A company with 10x the market cap of a competitor is considered 10x bigger, because it would take about 10x as many dollars to acquire.

I say “first approximation” because if you actually tried to buy all the shares on the open market, then increased demand would drive the price up, and not everyone would want to sell right away. In an acquisition, the acquirer offers a deal where all shareholders get, say, 1.25x the current share price, but only if all shareholders sell all their stock. And the board of directors of the company being acquired can compel all shareholders to do so, if that’s in the best interest of the shareholders.

I understand how valuations work but I guess where I'm confused is that people on HN seem to conflate market value with size or even revenue.

After some googling it seems that my intuition about the relevance of stock prices is mostly right:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/krantz/2012/10...

> If the stock price falls, these investors lose money, not the company.

The stock price is entirely speculative and detached from the company's actual performance. At best it's informed by a perception of the company's performance and an expectation of how the stock price might change in the future in reaction to the company's future performance.

While shares will be worthless if the company goes bankrupt, the company won't be directly affected if the stock market plummets -- except in situations where (additional) stock can be used as a currency in lieu of actual cash, like buying out competitors.

So to answer my own question: market cap (but mostly share price really) is only a measure of company size in so far as it indicates how much money the company could generate by selling additional shares. It doesn't provide any indication of how well the company is doing financially, how many employees it has, how much market share it serves or any other measure of size BUT generally people are willing to pay more for shares of companies that are likely to grow or at least outperform their competitors in the short term.

EDIT: In other words, yes, an overhyped two man operation running at a financial loss could end up with a massive market cap but in practice it's unlikely to happen because hype rarely works that well.

"Enterprise Value" is one of the legitimate measures of company size, and is defined as market capitalization + net debt.

You can think of this as equivalent to the size of the company because it would be the amount of money you'd need (roughly speaking) to buy the entire company outright.

Don't forget to subtract cash in the EV formula. Otherwise you could take out a gigantic loan and magically get bigger, when really all you've done is shuffle some money from debt into cash.
Well if your company only has one product with all the secrets leaked on github, it matters whether the company was worth 10 Million or 6 Billion before bad things happen.
Among other things, market cap gives an indication of the future value investors place in the company. Your 2-man shop would unlikely have a similar market cap unless they can demonstrate some blindingly simple strategy to take over the world. Your big corp already has access to a large userbase (100m users in Bilibili's case if the previous poster is to be believed). That makes future growth and profits much more likely.
Bilibili was also criticised by the Chinese government last week for the 'quality' of some hosted content (read: pornography, satire). The next day its foothold in younger generations was praised by the same relevant organs (read: being told to focus or educational and 'moral' content).
Probably a little of each. The repository "title" of swituo/openbilibili-go-common, when pushed through google translate, says:

"I don't know if these are embarrassing... The troubles of morality are going out and turning right to pay attention to 996.icu"

"我不清楚这些是啥… 道德心泛滥的麻烦出门右转关注996.icu!" means "I don't know what these are... I hope those with an overflowingly moral heart won't be too bothered to go out and turn right to star 996.icu"

The original repo was taken down, so I don't think you can attribute that message to the leaker.

Should be translated to: "I have no idea what are these (or what is this) ... If you have too many moralities to spend, go spend them on 996icu!"
What is 996?
The practice of requiring employees to work from 9 to 9 6 days a week.
I first heard of it last week from this article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47934513

hubot (a Github bot) automatically publishes DMCA takedown requests into the repo [1] in question.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/

I suspect the commenter you’re responding to means ~”who leaked the source code referenced in the DMCA, and why”. The DMCA takedown request refers to a repo that it claims contains internal information and data from the claiming company.
According to this repo Symantec just filed a DMCA notice to Android source code about a week ago:

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/04/2019-04-0...

Crazy.

Why crazy? They do list every .. folder (and call them 'repositories'), which is probably stupid. But

https://github.com/shil99/android_test/tree/master/external/...

literally has their name in the path/package name, so it isn't crazy (unless you know more?) to believe that this was stolen/reverse engineered Symantec code, no? At LEAST it's a very confusing and misleading directory tree for a random repository?

Files below src/ should be sources, not a 3rd party Symantec lib or whatever, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt here.

What android source code? It's a repos called android_test of some user.

This seems to have been the main factor - com/symantec/mobilesecurity - in the code.