Key insights
- The author draws a parallel between the long-term performance of Altria (tobacco) and the potential of Alphabet and Meta, suggesting that even if these tech giants face challenges, their long-term prospects might be better than perceived due to their 'addictive' nature and potential for innovation. This is a mildly bullish sentiment for the mentioned tech stocks.
I'm being a little flip, but I was just looking at the charts for Altria out of curiosity... And the company is up at least 5x-8x since the tobacco settlements in 1998, depending on how you slice it.
Granted, the markets have outperformed that, so maybe it's a laggard. But it's also literally kind of a dying business*, whereas the upside for the hyperscalers (notably Alphabet, given Cloud, Waymo, and other Other Bets) seems to have some real runway.
So given the Google exec who said something to the effect that Search was the best business since cigarettes... Even if they made the products less addictive, maybe even arguably more useful and satisfying to use, could these be good for them in the long-term? Or at least not devastating? Just curious what people think, if you compared them to the fates of other addictive products, like cigarette companies and maybe to a lesser extent drinking, which are culturally losing favor. Heck, that's a term you could increasingly apply to Big Tech.
(*IDK, given the next generation's preference for Tik Tok and who knows that comes next, maybe IG and FB are slowly dying out, too?)