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.
Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees.
The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
I imagine the licensing revenues are a literal rounding error, but it's hugely profitable if we include things like Play services. The latest numbers I could find accounted for $48B in revenue in 2021, compared to $256B for all of alphabet. It's pretty substantial.
Alphabet made $31B in revenue last quarter. [1] CydeWeys already addressed their costs, but $100M over 10 years doesn't exactly sound like something they get out of bed for, especially considering they're already out $25M and they really will have expenses to cover for this.
Well, no. Distributed among all Alphabet shareholders it is, from the most recent numbers I've seen, about $85 million each from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and smaller amounts from everyone else.
Wait, they spent extra $30 billions in a quarter for research, development and marketing?
"Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit, which missed Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said."
Which is included in Alphabet's $4.9 billion profit Q2 FY2016.
Sure, they might have made an extra 0.6 billion that quarter, but it's not exactly a hidden bet. Further, these are R&D losses, so it's hard to say what the long term impact is, but it's unlikely to be exactly -2.5 billion / year.
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