It is a real loophole in the economy. If you're a trillion dollar company the market will insist you set such sums on fire just to be in the race for $current-hype. If they do it drives their market cap higher still and if they don't they risk being considered un-innovative and therefore doomed to irrelevancy and the market cap will spiral downwards.
Sort of reminds me of The Producers.
Funnily enough Arpanet and all that Xerox stuff were like <$50 million (inflation adjusted!) total. Some real forward thinkers were able to work the system by breaking off a tiny pittance of a much larger budget.
Where as I think this more appropriately can be considered the meta PR budget. They simply can't not spend it, would look bad for Wall Street. Have to keep up with the herd.
You don’t think earning increasing amounts of tens of billions of dollars in net income per year at some of the highest profit margins in the world at that size for 10+ years has anything to do with market cap?
