he makes a good point but doesn't quite get to cosmic brain status: valuations are arbitrary and, at heart, political. Instagram is "worth" a billion dollars because Facebook decided it was, and we can only imagine that Facebook decided accordingly after running cost projections on how much more money it could get from advertisers in the long run. But that is an inherently subjective measure that takes into account how many years of revenue Facebook is looking at (i.e., how deep its coffers are right now); fantastical projections about Instagram's ability to attract and retain users in the future; and arbitrary decisions about how much to charge advertisers. Ultimately, Instagram is worth a billion dollars because enough people decided it was. Rather than accepting this valuation as God-given and trying to divide up this amount among Instagram's presumed contributors, we should question the idea of Instagram being worth anything at all.

Instead, his solution seems to be (and I think he clarifies it over the next few chapters) that we should pay all Instagram users who contribute anything to the service. Even if you could convince Facebook that it was worth doing this, I don't see how this will solve the winner-takes-all problem (you already see this with influencer marketing).