It's very hard to square the activity in the real economy vs the valuations in the stock market. As a stark example, look at the revenues of AAPL for 2019 vs 2024, then compare the market caps for EOY 2019 vs 2024. It's astounding. What's causing this? ZIRP, which is now gone, but lower rates ahead it seems, and the trillions in money printing. Little of the helicopter money ended up in consumers hands as evidenced by AAPL's revenue growth. Almost all of it ended up in the hands of the investor class.
Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#32We're going to look back at these insane buys in a few decades as unreasonable, because they simply are. You can have an entire county for $24B.
Try to cash out that pile of stocks and instantly the bubble pops. The values are virtual
AFAIK since incomes are stagnant, tax revenue is very dependent on capital gains. Governments and central banks can't afford to let the stock and real estate bubbles pop.
Governments need taxes to a) keep the circus going and b) paying interests on the growing debt (a good chunk of it is held by the central bank).
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which country? (Not necessarily doubting you, just curious.)
25B is the market cap of Ericsson, which is probably responsible for something like 5% of Sweden's GDP. 25B might not be a whole country, but it's definitely a whole country's phone network and internet infrastructure.
There are lots of countries smaller and/or poorer than Sweden.
There are a number of very small countries with GDPs in the hundreds of millions of USD range. If you could buy a country for say 10× GDP you are looking at the low billions in GDP which is Bhutan or Zanzibar sized economies.
The problem is that countries are not often openly up for sale. You need military or political backing to actually get one. So you cannot literally buy a country.
On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#34[flagged]
Thank you for the heads up, I just uninstalled that app. I had it from 1 or 2 years ago and havent used it since. I feel like I'm being proven right that when selecting software, it should be open source and hosted on-site. Even if this causes problems, the alternative seems riskier.
To that point is there an open source PIM you'd recommend?
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the heads up, I just uninstalled that app. I had it from 1 or 2 years ago and havent used it since. I feel like I'm being proven right that when selecting software, it should be open source and hosted on-site. Even if this causes problems, the alternative seems riskier.
What are you talking about? CyberArk is enterprise privileged access management. It’s not an app you install and forget about for 1-2 years. It’s certainly not something you just uninstall because you found out very basic information about the vendor on HN, because you almost assuredly run it because auditors require you to, and uninstalling it without a like replacement would be an extremely bad idea.
Do you doubt that he never ever installed the thing? But it makes him feel important or something so let it be.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#36In 2024 Cyberark had $1 billion in revenue. Can anyone comment on how this $25B number makes sense for Palo Alto?
I like this article about the acquisition (disclosure, I know the author).
https://strategyofsecurity.com/p/the-case-for-and-against-pa...
From the article:
> If Palo Alto Networks was going to do identity, they had to do it big.
> Commercially, there was no way they were going to build a successful identity business if they had just picked up a bunch of small companies and tried to put them together. They needed to bootstrap their entry into the market, so a scaled acquisition made sense.
> The identity market is at a completely different level of maturity compared to the situation when Palo Alto Networks built its cloud security business by stitching together smaller companies. That approach worked because the cloud security market was still forming. There essentially was no market leader to acquire.
> Identity has been through multiple generations of market leaders (Sun, IBM, CA, Oracle, and others. The market has already gone through multiple phases of disruption and M&A. For the most part, we've seen it all.
> Currently, we've landed with a handful of specialist identity players — some public, some owned by private equity firms. You know them: CyberArk, Okta, SailPoint, and Ping Identity. And then there's Microsoft. We'll get to that.
> Palo Alto Networks had zero chance of competing with those four companies (plus Microsoft and the other incumbents who still hold material market share) by building, buying, and partnering their way to a coherent identity offering.
> If there was one market where a massive deal had to be done, identity had to be it.
My read of that is basically they are buying a fast growing, big player in workforce identity that they can integrate in with their next generation security platform.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#37We're going to look back at these insane buys in a few decades as unreasonable, because they simply are. You can have an entire county for $24B.
No, we won't. As long as productivity continues to increase, so will market caps.
Some countries are just left behind.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#38In 2024 Cyberark had $1 billion in revenue. Can anyone comment on how this $25B number makes sense for Palo Alto?
Sure, they know they can 2x to 5x the revenue of Cyberark with integration to their clients/offerings, maybe more. And build a stronger moat at the same time.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
25B is the market cap of Ericsson, which is probably responsible for something like 5% of Sweden's GDP. 25B might not be a whole country, but it's definitely a whole country's phone network and internet infrastructure.
There are lots of countries smaller and/or poorer than Sweden. There are a number of very small countries with GDPs in the hundreds of millions of USD range. If you could buy a country for say 10× GDP you are looking at the low billions in GDP which is Bhutan or Zanzibar sized economies. The problem is that countries are not often openly up for sale. You need military or political backing to actually get one. So you…
>On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to say that this amount of money is the value of an entire small economy, or of the entire stock market of a somewhat bigger one.
Yes. I think it's plausible to believe that it's a ridiculous valuation. That whatever the company has can be replicated for less money.
That's probably true for many companies, but seeing as Palo Alto Networks probably has some kind of software arm, it seems reasonable to expect that they'd actually have the capacity to get what they want for less.
Re: Palo Alto Networks agrees to buy CyberArk for $25B
#40Both are legacy dinosaurs, it makes sense they start eating each other.
Palo Alto is a legacy dinosaur? Pretty sure they are the current market leader in both firewalls and SOAR.
There are market leaders in everything from DSL modems to tape drives. Most companies in 2025 don't own hardware firewalls. You're proving his point.