It's almost like patents stifle corporate growth and doesn't lead to innovation.

Nvidia and Microsoft have lots of things that are just trade secrets instead. I guess Facebook's excuse is that it's a modern day railroad monopoly and it only has to continue to be big and vaguely usable to profit.

Obviously some mix of marketing and existing reliance by clients is the main value generator for them all (excepting maybe Nvidia) - the scale was chosen arbitrarily.