The Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) “scandal” is officially in the rear view mirror, at least according to Wall Street. Facebook stock, which fell 20% in March when the company came under political attack for its role in the 2016 elections, is back to pre-crisis levels, opening for trade May 23 at about $184 per share.

All it took was a single earnings report. The company said it earned almost $5 billion, $1.69 per share, during the three months ending in March, on revenue of $11.8 billion.  That’s 63% more profit on 50% more revenue than a year earlier, with over 41 cents of every dollar reaching the net income line.

The results reaffirmed Facebook’s status as a “Cloud Czar,” one of the five huge companies that now dominate computing and society, because they can afford to keep building so-called “hyperscale” data centers and fill them with traffic.

Is Facebook Stock Bulletproof?

With 2.2 billion people accessing the service at least once a month, and 1.45 billion doing it daily, with 91% of revenue coming from mobile devices, Facebook has become an inescapable fact of global life.

Facebook’s financial success makes $2.81 billion in capital spending during a single quarter easy to afford. The company has no debt and nearly $44 billion in cash and marketable securities. Operating cash flow was $7.86 billion during the quarter, up from $5 billion a year before.

These are the kinds of numbers Wall Street has never seen before. Facebook gets its content free from users and controls the servers and networks on which it is processed. It is both the talent and the viewer, and its ad network monetizes its traffic like nothing this side of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL).

Thus, money not only makes the world go around, but makes problems go away. Who cares that there are people organizing Facebook groups, for free, with massive conflicts of interest? Who cares about the critics?  The whole scandal looks like nothing more than a bump in the road. 

Facebook Stock Is Monolithic

TV analyst Jim Cramer laughed at that on May 22. How would you even do that?

Well, I suggested in a tweet, you could force Facebook to divest its data centers so it would have to rent capacity like Snap Inc. (NASDAQ:SNAP) and other smaller rivals. Oh, yeah, he replied, are you going to do that with Amazon.Com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)? How could you even do that?

The power and scope of Facebook is like nothing the world has ever seen. Which is amazing because 25 years ago I was working for a very similar company.

It was called CompuServe, it was owned by H&R Block Inc. (NYSE:HRB), and the difference was that, in those pre-Internet days, you paid an hourly fee for access and they paid me for my content. Oh, and it was all-text.

Now founder and CEO Zuckerberg is the world’s fifth richest man, worth nearly $74 billion, and sails through critical hearings with the air of a distracted robot awaiting instructions.

The Bottom Line on Facebook Stock

With a market cap of $532 billion, Facebook stock is trading at about 13 times its expected 2018 revenues, but at a price to earnings ratio of just 30.4, which is half that of rival Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and even lower than that of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Even if people suddenly abandoned both Facebook and Instagram, Facebook also has the financial firepower to bring in replacement services for cash, and the infrastructure to host them inexpensively and fully monetize them through its global ad network.

It’s good to be the king.

Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the historical mystery romance The Reluctant Detective Travels in Time, available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in AMZN and MSFT.