People have been asking me for more than a year now if we’re seeing another crazy dotcom bubble again, only this time with Web 2.0 companies. All I can say is, I thought Yahoo was nuts to offer one billion for Facebook last year. Then I started hearing the team of eighth-graders who are running the company now thought they were worth five billion and I thought, Okay, yes, we’re in a bubble. Now the Borg is offering to invest at a valuation of ten billion, and the nuts running Facebook think they’re worth fifteen billion. Where does it end? Gates keeps bidding, and no matter what he offers, they say they’re now worth more than that? No idea why Gates is doing this except maybe he’s figured out that Facebook is the only company with applications that are more useless and more annoying than Microsoft’s. You’ve got to hand it to Zuckerberg though. Kid has brass balls. And he’s figured out something very essential about the Valley, which is that, deep down, nobody really knows what anything is worth, and nobody really knows which ideas are any good, and everybody’s always driven primarily by fear. So what the money does is hover, waiting to pounce at the last minute and then, if something takes off, acting like they knew all along that this was the Big One.

You have to admit that they do look good together, right? Bill and Zuck, I mean. They should form a club for very expensive yet essentially irrelevant companies. I wish them well. I really do. Now I must get back to the terribly unsexy job of taking over the music, film, television and telecommunication industries. Peace out. (Photo by Acid Gurl.)