Founders with personal wealth and companies with massive cash-cow businesses, like Google's search ads, can afford to pursue high-risk, long-term projects like Waymo. This financial security allows them to endure long periods of unprofitability in pursuit of breakthrough innovations.
Incentive plans like Elon Musk's, requiring 10x stock growth for a payout, are culturally and practically impossible in mature industries. A CEO at a company like Target would never accept such a high-risk structure, highlighting the vastly different growth expectations between tech and traditional businesses.
Meta's Reels platform has achieved a staggering $50 billion run rate, placing it remarkably close to the entire U.S. television advertising market's projected $60 billion for 2024. This demonstrates the massive scale shift from traditional to social media advertising.
Google's mission to 'organize the world's information' creates a natural, logical pathway to diverse products like Maps and Waymo. In contrast, Meta's mission to 'bring people together' makes its leaps into less-connected fields like VR or generative AI feel more forced and less authentic.