“There are four types of people in the world. There are entrepreneurs – who are the guys who get out of bed in the morning and say ‘How can I make money by making things better for people ?’ There are contra-preneurs – who are all the governments and bureaucrats and regulators who try to stop that happening, make it difficult or ban it. There are the con-trepreneurs.. who pretend to be doing the first thing but are just lining their own pockets, usually with government subsidies, with the help of the second group. And there are the non-trepreneurs – which is all the rest of us, who must be pretty bloody thankful every time we jump out of bed that the first lot keep doing it.”
- Sean Corrigan of Cantillon Consulting, interviewed on the latest State of the Markets podcast.
As Mike Tyson never quite said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the Facebook. Just when it seemed that Elon Musk’s notorious Q1 Tesla conference call couldn’t be surpassed for CEO-inspired trainwreckery, or that Netflix’s Q2 earnings miss and its associated 14% share price fall might be setting some new kind of financial market low standard for 2018, along comes Facebook’s Q2 conference call, which managed to knock $156.6 billion off the company’s market valuation in after-hours trading. As the FT’s John Authers pointed out,
That is, deliciously, very slightly bigger than the current $155.6bn market cap of Facebook's fellow FAANG Netflix.
As JK Galbraith remarked in The Great Crash of 1929,
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.
