[AQuantized]

Google and Facebook are making hundreds of thousands of (almost endirely advertising derived) dollars per employee. They have functional monopolies on search and social media advertising respectively, so every company in the world looking to use those advertising vectors is at their mercy. Maintaining that extremely lucrative position is worth paying an excess to achieve even small advantages in staying ahead of the curve.

[samstave]

Years ago, I heard that Google made $800,000 per employee, I wonder what its at now?

This is why Amazon is as big as it is, because the vast majority of their employees are warehouse and delivery workers at low wages - so the margins they make per employee are insanely higher than Goog...

[mrep]

From their latest earnings release [0], they had 61.880 billion dollars in revenue for the second quarter and 144,056 employees so a simple annualization of that quarter would put them at 1.718 million dollars in revenue per employee.

[0]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...

[sjg007]

Right but it's a dutch auction right? Highest bidder pays second highest price.

[nhooyr]

Isn't that a Vickrey auction?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction