There are no sacred cows in Las Vegas. That’s the source of the city's immense prosperity. The past and present are relentlessly pushed aside to make room for the future.
In July of last year, the recently passed Elaine Wynn attended the closing ceremonies of the Mirage Hotel. While the Mirage was at the top of the Vegas casino/hotel pyramid as recently as the 1990s, by the 2020s it was a monument to the past. A Hard Rock casino would replace it. As Wynn described the change, “This is what we do in Las Vegas. We reinvest, we refresh.”
Stasis in Las Vegas is the same as failure. Precisely because success in Vegas can be so lucrative, there’s relentless competition meant to improve on the best and brightest to knock them from their perches. Without rapid, market-anticipating change, what’s great today is frequently rendered much less than great very rapidly.
To survive, casinos must routinely evolve. Except that the evolution is challenging, which means casinos and the jobs in them are regularly shut down, leveled or both so that they can be replaced.
To read Wynn’s obituaries is to wish the antitrust ankle biters at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would read them too. As readers already know, the FTC is presently suing Meta for it having allegedly achieved social media “monopoly” status with its 2012 and 2014 purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp. As for the DOJ, it’s in the process of suing Google with an eye on “breaking its grip on search.”
The easy response to the FTC is to point to what Facebook initially paid for Instagram and WhatsApp to quickly reveal the absurdity of the Commission’s case. As the acquisition prices for both indicate, no one, including the then owners of Instagram and WhatApp along with their investors (this included some of the most savvy VCs in the world) had a faint clue about what each would become. Neither did Facebook’s competitors.
As for the DOJ, the easy response to its expressed fears of Google as the noun, verb and adjective of search is to point out how much Google searches have changed in recent years, and in response to the proliferation of competition in an information space that Google invented. What choice does Google have? Precisely because it created such a lucrative market, Google must routinely compete to remain relevant in that market.
Bringing it back to Las Vegas, it exists as a useful metaphor for the baseless nature of the DOJ and FTC’s cases against Google and Meta. Even if it were true that Google’s Chrome web browser and Meta’s social media sites like Instagram and WhatsApp had monopoly qualities, it wouldn’t mean anything. As we see routinely in Vegas, today is a lousy predictor of tomorrow.
That is so because tomorrow when it comes to anticipating customer needs is another century. Las Vegas reveals this truth rather visually, and through constant change on the Strip that is occasionally preceded by literal explosions involving dynamite.
Technology is defined by explosions of the digital variety. Those explosions are explained by the valuations of the FTC’s and DOJ’s targets. Everyone wants to replace them, and intrepid investment meant to replace them is abundant.
Which means the FTC and DOJ can and should call off their lawsuits. If Meta and Google operate with even a hint of monopoly pretense, they soon enough won’t be. See Wynn’s obituaries to understand precisely why.
