The GEnx which powers the 787 is a 20 year-old engine design. There are thousands of jets flying around with 40+ year-old engine designs, especially in operations like charter and cargo where the aircraft spends more time on the ground than in the air. At the right price a 20 year-old design would be quite viable. Which indicates China is much more than a decade behind.
Terminating a PSTN call requires a lot of control plane infrastructure beyond just raw bandwidth. Especially mobile where you need to keep track of devices physically in motion. Could a system to support 4 billion simultaneous calls be built, sure. But current PSTN systems are nowhere near sized for it.
Almost all consumer services have a built-in level of breakage that make them profitable. Mobile providers certainly wouldn't be able to offer unlimited calling if everyone was actually on the phone 24x7.
They have a large and rapidly growing enterprise sales organization. If you want to sell to enterprises you need account executives, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, etc.
The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.
This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.
Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.
NPM (the company) was about to go under in 2020. They raised VC but never found a sustainable business model. GitHub acquired them to keep the ecosystem alive. The acquisition hasn't really benefitted GitHub much at all.
Voting control doesn't change management's fiduciary duty to all shareholders. The founders retaining voting control has worked out fine for Alphabet shareholders.
SpaceX and Tesla used aggressive vertical integration, manufacturing simplification, and reuse to radically lower the cost of building rockets and EVs. It's not unreasonable to speculate they might be able to do the same for hyperscale compute.
Who knows, it could have gone up more. Sandisk just did 40x in a year as a public company. That's the point of an index, buy everything so you don't miss out on the outliers that provide most of the return.
Imagine Anthropic had gone public a year ago when it had a $61.5 billion valuation. Index fund investors would be up in arms demanding this change after missing out on the 15x run to $965 billion.
On one hand, every VC who passed on Cloudflare missed out on what is now an $88 billion company. On the other, if they didn't invest because they didn't like the underlying economics, they were actually correct. 17 years after founding, Cloudflare still has never turned a profit.