I wish FAANG paid government and defense industry salaries. Then our best and brightest might be engaged in something other than advertising and social engineering.

You don’t think the government and defense industry are engaging in social engineering?

I always assumed Google and Facebook are just privatized components of total information awareness program.

So to answer your question, Google makes making spookie systems cool and profitable. Without them, the spookie systems would need to be built and deployed by 3 letter 'alphabet' type agencies and your local area geek may not be able to handle that much cognitive dissonance.

Yes, but it's not 90%+ of their business.

What would an equity package for the US federal government look like?

Bonds?

If Mark Zuckerberg spent a lifetime writing COBOL to interface with a 1972 missile silo door control panel, we'd certainly be doing well.

Bonus points if his manager is someone like Boris Johnson.

The office parties would have been wild...

I mean they don't pay that bad unless its entry level. Senior & principle engineers can make over 150k and thats a pretty good salary everywhere besides San Francisco and most of them are in LCOL areas.