I get what you're saying, but the reality is that it takes more than engineers to run a browser company. You'd have to find 100 engineers who can double as lawyers, designers, project managers, etc., and handle payroll, and HR, and after those 100 engineers end up doing the job of 300 other people, how much code are they writing? Your point about them appearing to waste money is taken, I'm just pointing out that it's not quite as bald-faced as that.

It doesn't take more than engineers to maintain an open-source browser, though. Why does it have to be a company at all? Remember Firefox? Firefox was literally just an act-of-love fork from some engineers from a dead acquisition by a dying dot-com era behemoth.

Put another way, does the Linux kernel or the Python language need to be run by a company, or will foundations does these jobs ok?

There are plenty of open source projects that are enormously successful without a single lawyer or project manager in sight.

Or you could literally outsource 90% of that and focus on what you actually should be, engineering and development of Firefox and other Mozilla products. These companies are bloated beyond belief and they have nothing to show for it, clearly it’s not working.

They got it over many years with ongoing expenses because they had a browser, so comparing it with 7B lump sum is silly.

With the same argument you could probably retire, after all you already earned (years you've been working) * (average salary).

>so comparing it with 7B lump sum is silly.

It's not that silly, because that's a huge amount of money. What do you think the gross expense of building software like this should be? Because this may be the end of the line.

How much has Google spent on Chrome.

Big numbers without context are not useful outside of taking advantage of people who don't think critically.

I don't know... do they even have 100 engineers? Or 20 and the rest is management and crypto and AI projects?

so if I've worked for 20 years from age 20 with a 100k average salary that's 2m

A 2m lump sump at 20 would allow me to live a lifestyle of a 20k/year life, not good enough.

Had I lived that over the last 20 years and saved the rest of the 100k in an 8% return fund then I'd have 4m today and could drawdown a 40k/year life at 1%.

Had I been given a lump sum of 100 times my desired salary though, or 10m, then sure, no need to work.

And depending on where you live, 40k might be barely scraping by now, and certainly not enough another 20 or 40 years down the road when you get to the point where you need daily care and medical services.

You may want to double check your math before you retire.

You are right, they got $400M+ a year.

I stand corrected, I would want to face the $400M+ per year existential wobble.