[plutonicks]

While true it is harder for companies to manipulate those 2 measures.

E.g. could Facebook run with 20 staff? Would Facebook and its shareholders be satisfied with 20m in annual revenue.

This scenario requires trade offs. My opinion is that monopoly, political and market dominance is a sub-optimal outcome

[quietbritishjim]

It could certainly run with 20 staff – it would just spend a lot of money on license fees to a separate Facebook Services Inc that provides software and server administration services. This is similar to how companies avoid tax e.g. IKEA and Starbucks.

It could similarly avoid large profits but avoiding large revenues works be trickier. But I'm not an expert in these things, so maybe it's possible if you really know what you're doing.

[fastball]

Then you just base it off of the number of employees overall in the parent company, not the number of employees in the subsidiary.

[quietbritishjim]

The problem is, there's no legal distinction between a company that own shares but is "really" part of the same company, vs a completely separately company owning shares e.g. a pension fund.

[pyrale]

Base it off user count too, problem solved.