[fardo]

I think it's three things:

1. The hangover in tech caused by post-Covid overhiring and layoffs, as well as negative sentiment surrounding inflation over the last year feels like it's ending or at least calming down - somewhere between lower staffing spend internally and a rosier feeling economy, people feel a higher valuation makes sense.

2. Meta's riding and part of leading a general tide that's lifting all tech boats due to hype in the AI space surrounding recent LLM developments. Meta successfully releasing frontier models in the space shows they're capable of being a crucial player in the space and still have the talent internally to compete with other big players if they so choose, although thus far they've felt content with releasing free models as a broad-side attack on their competitors' moats. The market additionally wants to cost in the non-trivial possibility that these technologies will either receive massive uptake across other industries, or the possibility the tech's power and intelligence will massively improve in the next few years, potentially even to the level of something approximating or beating an average intellectual human at knowledge work, which would make all these tech companies making this technology very, very rich.

3. Focus in the company appears to be shifting back towards their core competencies of social media technologies, taking ground from Tiktok with new offshoots such as shorts with Reels, and as described above, their AI projects, which all feels like a return to form after their mostly ill-fated VR and metaverse projects, which are now being de-emphasized. This is felt as boding well for the company's future growth prospects, as those projects felt like dead-ends.