next big thing. So it's a whole bunch of people who are working on stuff that's not the core business because they can make an argument for it and because the budget allowed it.

So here's my parallel to that. My first Dilbert experience, kind of when I left the bank and went to the phone company, local phone company. It wasn't long after the divestiture from when all the phone companies were owned by AT&T. So once the individual phone companies were created, they got some allocation of capital from what had been the master entity that was very profitable. So it turns out that the company I worked for had big piles of money coming in just because of the divestiture and had nothing to do with their business. There was just vast piles of capital that we had to employ.

How many of the things that we spent that money on were necessary, do you think? Because we realized early on that whatever we established as our budget for the group I was working in, it probably would be sort of the good starting point. So after that capital started trickling out because it wouldn't last forever, we'd have a large budget and then we'd be able to say, hey, we better keep having this large budget. You might have to cut some other things, but look at all these things we're doing. So people were fighting to spend the most budget because that was in their best interest. I'm not making that up. We had conversations about how to overspend and move some expenses into the current year to make sure that our expenses were as high as possible. That was a real thing that happened. Real thing.

Now, do you think that a bank like Silicon Valley Bank, which at one point looked pretty profitable, do you think that all the things they were doing were right on target to their basic? No, they were doing lots of social things and donating money to politics and all that stuff. Facebook, I assume it's the same thing. If you got rid of 25 percent of the workforce, no problem.

How about Twitter? What percentage of Twitter did Elon Musk fire? I don't know the numbers. Like half or something. Does anybody have that percentage? I'm not sure I've seen it exactly. A little technical problem here. Oh no, technical problem on Locals. Looks like Locals is down. I'm gonna reboot Locals, see if that works. Well, we should be one click and back in business. Back in business. Sorry about the technical problem there.

All right, so he says 50 percent. 50 at Twitter. And has anybody noticed that Twitter is worse now? There have been a few technological problems, but I think there always were. Oh, is it 75? Did he get rid of 75 percent? My personal subjective experience is that Twitter is better. I feel it's better. It's got a little more features. I don't know. To me it looks better. And that is not unusual from the Dilbert perspective.

But I think they're hiding the bigger story here. Here's the bigger story on Facebook. Do you know anybody under the age of 18 who uses Facebook? I don't. No, nobody. Now they do use subsets of the corporation. They use Instagram for sure, and they might be using WhatsApp. But actual Facebook, I think the real story here is that Facebook has no potential for the future unless they become an entirely different company, which, to Zuckerberg's credit, is exactly what he's trying to do. He is a good manager, I gotta say. You know, say what you will about him for any political stuff or any other problems you have, but he has proven to be a durable and reliable leader who has a good vision of the future. So I think he can own that. I appreciate him for that. And he stayed out of trouble too. Have you noticed how much trouble Zuckerberg stays out of? He's really, really good at staying out of trouble. You know, you don't notice it because you don't notice the trouble he didn't cause, but he's just really good at not causing any controversies.

However, I think the problem is that if he doesn't make Meta work, Facebook has no future. When all the tech comp