Funny you pick a company that has very little to answer to the markets, out of all the large tech companies, META is the rare one that does not need to answer because Zuckerberg controls the company.

    > Funnily enough Arpanet and all that Xerox stuff were like <$50 million (inflation adjusted!) total.

That doesn't say much. The industry was in utter infancy. How much do you think it cost to move Ethernet from 100Mbit/sec to 1GBbit/sec to 10GB to 100GB to 400GB to 800GB? At least one or two orders of magnitude.

How about the cost to build a fab for the Intel 8088 versus a fab that produces 5nm chips running @ 5GHz. Again, at least one or two orders of magnitude.

This suffers from hindsight bias, at the time it was impossible to know if Arpanet or flying cars was the path forward. A better comparison would be the total sum of investment : payoff ratio, and is not something we can see from where we are now. Only in the future does it make sense to evaluate the success of something. Unfortunately, comparison between eras is difficult to do fairly because conditions are so different between now and Xerox.