The really large explosions in size seem to come from internal politics to me. Where leaders of individual internal groups start to have their own goals and agendas separate from the company goals...and start empire building.

In a sufficiently large corporation - it’s impossible to distinguish what empires are nascent independent and massive corporations from non-sense.

You’d think that teams closer to the companies core would be more competent and higher value… but often you find groups of thirty pushing inconsequential metrics. Alternately, you’ll find small groups on the fringe that appear to be doing nothing, but occasionally spit out the next huge product.

For these reasons, investors have historically penalized large conglomerates for inefficiency. The growth of big tech through the ‘10s may have been due in part to negative interest rates which valued discounted future free cash flow at approximately infinite dollars.

In a high interest rate environment, one would expect cash flow to be redirected to investors who will then invest the money. If big tech executive pay drops, then there is limited reason for tech executives not to move into startups.

And dealing with customers (and prospective customers) in much beyond an automated and low-touch way increases headcount.

Enterprise sales, personalized support, marketing programs, etc. Oh, and you probably have a legal team now. And you need to enable those sales reps and manage them. Oh, there's HR now too. And a docs team becomes more important...

Yes, but well, those things won't bring you from 50 to 10k people.

That kind of transformation only comes from scope or the things the GP pointed.