Facebook is an outlier monopoly, having successfully privatized a massive commons, so I'm not sure their ability to spend 40B a year proves much of anything. (If those figures are even the right lens.)
As a counterpoint, Wikipedia's operating costs are ~40M a year, 1000 times less, and I know which one I'd rather keep!
> having successfully privatized a massive commons
They created the commons.
It didn't exist before and several companies tried to do what they did. They all failed. MySpace had a huge head start. Didn't matter. Everyone shit on the Instagram acquisition for $1B when it was first reported and years afterwards (in fact Zuck made the decision without even consulting the board and right before a risky IPO where the public was sure to take it as a negative signal). He saw the value and invested in it. Today Instagram is a $100B entity that does more revenue than YouTube.
Credit where credit is due.
That’s not to say there aren’t issues. There obviously are and they’re well documented.
The Big Dig cost ~20B over the course of a decade. The Apollo Program clocks in at ~25B The Large Hadron Collider at a svelte 10B.
Software isn't cheap it's just that no one pays attention to the costs.