True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.

Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept

LGR - Afterlife - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0

Afterlife (video game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)

> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes

The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.

If you sort by number of employees you get companies where those employees aren't in R&D divisions.

Their comment reads to me as if businesses hire employees (regardless of the work they do, since we are discussing employees that don't do anything) because investors consider employees as R&D (even useless ones).

Either way, there is no data I have seen to suggest market cap correlates with number of employees. The strongest correlation I see is to net income (aka profit), and after that would be growing revenues and/or market share.

Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market leaders

Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole metaverse investment. And all the products that Google has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like Stadia...

We really oughta work on setting up systems that don’t waste time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would be worth the effort.