Facebook’s Market Cap Is Now Under the $600 Billion Threshold for U.S. Antitrust Bills ⇥ cnbc.com

Lauren Feiner, CNBC:

The company, recently renamed Meta, closed with a market cap below $600 billion on Tuesday for the first time since May 2020. The stock fell 2.1%, bringing it to a market cap of $599.32 billion.

The $600 billion market cap figure also happens to be the number House legislators picked as the threshold for a “covered platform” under a package of competition bills designed specifically to target Big Tech. If Meta were to remain below that threshold, it could avoid the additional hurdles the bills would install for how it can conduct its business and make deals, while its larger peers like Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and even Microsoft become subject to the rules.

Feiner acknowledges that both the House and Senate antitrust bills would require Facebook to maintain its sub-$600 billion market cap for months around the time of both bills’ hypothetical passage for it to be exempt. Nevertheless, it re-surfaces questions for me about whether public valuation is a fair way to measure a degree of antitrust concern — especially a fixed value.