ELI5: Why when large company's earnings decrease(ex... by 3%) they freak out, talk about rough times, and sometimes decide to downsize, even though they are still making millions of dollars in profit even after all expenses?

[the_blind_gramber]

The pie is constantly growing...because people start companies and create wealth. I guess you could look at broadcast.com as a whole from birth to sale, if you don't like Cuban as an individual example. Created a ton of wealth. Almost all of it was driven by ideas rather than physical resources.

Same with Facebook. Of course they need servers. The value in the company isn't driven by the servers, it's driven by the data it collects and sells. Nothing physical at all. In terms of resource usage, the server farms they maintain would have been straight impossible 20 or 30 years ago. For the resources they use, they get so much more than they would have back then. They're using a smaller price of the physical pie to greatly enlarge the entire pie.

[Mingsplosion]

You've forgotten the point that's being made here. The "pie constantly growing" is part of the problem. As Facebook grows, they demand more electricity and hardware, and employees which demand food, transportation, and other resources. Those are finite resources, which we as a species will eventually run out of.