I am not sure if that is called survival.

And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.

There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

Ambitious, hard working people like promotions, so they gravitate towards growing companies and not stale companies.

Ambitious maybe (though that's nearly the definition of ambitious). Hardworking, not necessarily. I know a cement guy that you have never in your life worked a harder day than who has never received a promotion nor even sought one.

Companies that aren't growing? I meet A LOT of companies (about ~50 or so a year) and I can tell you there is massive difference between the distressed ones and the ones who are growing. btw - even 2~5% growth is fine, it doesn't need to be 25% google scale growth...but flat or declining is bad.

So, what to bonus the CEO on? Stock price appreciation. Stock price valuation loves growth. So even though a flat business throwing off 10% profit is a very nice business to be in, the only way you can increase stock price is to grow margin, which is really hard and attracts competition. Ergo, CEO is going to try to grow the company to boost the stock price. That's one reason dubious mergers are pursued, as it at least will goose revenue and profit. Wise investors might use return on equity or capital as well, but the market in general biases towards the revenue and profit metrics. Stock goes up, CEO gets their bonus.

For a private company, slow or flat growth with a nice profit margin is great, and without having to favor growth at all costs for pesky stockholders and analysts, you can pick and choose when a good opportunity comes along, and grow a bit anyway.

Businesses are valued based on discounted cash flows (DCF). If you're profitable and not growing, your cash flows are very stable & easy to evaluate -- you get a low P/E or P/E/G ratio. But if you're growing quickly with sane unit economics, most of the DCF value is in future years... which then results in much higher multiples relative to today's revenues & earnings.

Not the company, unless selling stock to raise cash.

Not the employees, if paid in cash instead of funny money.

Nobody needs that.

It's cultural.

People see other people’s wealth growing quicker because their investments grew more, increasing demand for higher growth investments.

Population growth inherently leads to economic growth assuming a sufficiently stable society and access to resources.

All of these create an environment where people expect certain ROI and make plans according to those ROI.

This assertion presumes that it is impossible to propose any form of compensation that's enticing without involving stock. This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

Plus, your competitors are not sitting still. People will go work for the more exciting companies even if you pay them equal amounts anyway (to vary their type of work and grow their careers) rather than staying and watching the thing die and doing the same thing for 30 years.

Which one?

Netflix is also 20% of FAANG companies, so that's not as lonely as it sounds.

Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.

Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company.

Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests after 1 year.

Let's say I'm in the highest bracket, $523,601 or more in income. The tax rate for that bracket for 2021 is 37%.

After 1 year, the stock price goes up 100%.

In Scenario A, I have vested RSU's worth $20,000. If I sell $10,000 of that (the gains only), I pay short term capital gains equivalent to my tax bracket, or $3700. If I hold that stock for 1 year after vesting and the stock price stays exact same for the next year, I pay the long term rate of the highest bracket which is currently 20%, or $2,000.

In Scenario B, I get a bonus of $10,000 just the same, but there is no situation where I'm not stuck with paying $3,700 on that $10,000 gain. In Scenario A, I can save almost 50% of the tax bill by holding it for a year.

It can also be a cash flow problem if you have to cover quarterly estimated tax in between trading windows. My day job sells and withholds 22% of my vesting RSUs, because that’s the statutory rate for supplemental wages, but I always owe about 10% more.

With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man?

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...

Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or BeOS or something else on our PCs.

If you slice the market thin enough anything can be a monopoly. This particular distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me.

While this may be the case for capital-intensive businesses (oil, consumer goods, energy), this is usually not the case for intangible-asset businesses (media, tech). In the former, the assets will generate cashflow, whereas in the latter it's a people-centric model

What was the last time you chose yahoo over google or altavista over google?

Google was always greedy, but when it was small it was cool to be the disruptor. Now it's perceived as only greedy. This is typically the case for any successful company (from HP, IBM, to the new 'big tech').

Good (related) book recommendation btw: capitalism without capital

Everything a capitalist market teaches us is against this, if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't.

FAANGS companies aren't at fault for when they're winning a game which is rigged from the start.

And if they do fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built?

- The companies who take their place service the customers/clients they used to have

- The workforce either coast along or move to the (presumably growing) new big boys

- The investors should spot the decline and trade away

The only downside is the company - the brand - slowly dies off. For most of us that is fine; the only parties to all this who will actually lose out are the ultimate beneficiaries/owners, and I can live with that. And presumably they've extracted masses from the company by then anyway.

Its both cultural and economics, but the economics only affect the masters and not the minions (who find alternatives) and the cultural aspect is misguided - individual companies/brands are ephemeral and irrelevant so we the minions should not be invested in protecting them at the destructive (to society) costs of scale.

No such thing. In capitalism you are either growing or dying. Stagnation means others will grow around you, and relative to them you are shrinking in the same market. Thus, stagnating == dying.