> While it may seem impossible to drive a $500 billion company into the ground, I firmly believe he’s the man for the job
It may be a controversial take, but, like... if he does that's fine. It's his prerogative and risk to take.
He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.
At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?
> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?
At the point where the machine that is built starts having very real external effects.
Facebook has been used for artificially amplifying some incredibly extremist social movements.
It is a reasonable expectation to put some limits on that in the same way that we would want to put some limits on say… a family owned pharma company that actively encouraged doctors to prescribe addictive drugs.
Even Youtube premium, where I'm supposed to be the customer, I feel like advertisers and content creators are treated better than me, and I'm not being served (youtube shorts, and lots of clickbait that I can't turn off are pushed on me...all it would take is a simple clickbait sentiment analyzer).
The rate at which is gives teenagers depression is enough of a reason, imo. There's broad consensus this stuff is detrimental to young people's mental health. Facebook claiming otherwise is akin the Philip Moris company testifying in congress that it's actually completely normal for a baby to be born with a small head.
> ...akin [to] the Philip Moris company testifying...
Indeed. If only there were some analogy to a massively profitable industry, woven into the social fabric of the country, that was then found to be harmful.
Why, you'd expect that said industry would fight tooth and nail against regulation, perhaps stringing things out for decades...
For those who weren't there, two things were simultaneously true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s: (1) we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt cigarettes gave people cancer & (2) we still had smoking sections right next to non-smoking ones, throughout businesses of all sorts.
All because it was too hard to change, and there were too many addicts to make a change.
... before ultimately yielding to the weight of scientific evidence against it. But not before killing people who didn't have to die if they'd heeded warnings earlier and pivoted.
Or, you know, this could be a completely different scenario, and Meta could be acting out of altruism with its users best interests at heart.
You make an interesting point. I initially do think there is a scale where someone should not be allowed to just destroy something just because it's theirs. In the same way the US government has eminent domain to stop someone from hoarding land that serves the greater good, I think there needs to be a similar process for a corporation that is has more influence than many countries. I don't think Facebook is necessarily there or doing something bad enough to warrant anything like that, but I do think that threshold exists where the people can say "thanks for this incredibly valuable thing, but your right to destroy it is significantly less important the benefit we receive from it so we'll take it from here." For example, what if Google just said "we're tired. We're deleting all your emails and documents and websites and domains and we're closing down tomorrow." Shouldn't someone be able to step in and say that you don't get to destroy so much value for absolutely no reason?
> In the same way the US government has eminent domain to stop someone from hoarding land that serves the greater good
Governments use eminent domain when they want to do something with your land, it's not been used to take it just because someone has a lot of it - and I think that might go against all the case law, but IANAL.
But all that said, I don't think the government should be in the business of picking winners and losers - no one can tell if a gambit is a good idea or a bad one until it pays off or fails spectacularly.
The alternative here is nationalization, and I don't think the government should be in the business of nationalizing the tech industry either.
Let's be clear - while Zuck has the majority voting rights(does he?), he isn't the majority owner.
But even if he was, his decisions would impact the minority owners... and we have had cases, where devaluing minority shareholder value has been deemed illegal.
Imagine that you're in a co-op building and the majority vote owner decides to demolish the building...
> He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.
If we transpose this to the medieval period, you could say the same thing about many kings who built their kingdoms by invading their neighbours. The problem, as others have pointed out, is that the number of stakeholders is huge. Some people make their living on Meta's platform so his decisions can have far-reaching consequences.
I would argue that Meta should never have been allowed to get this big in the first place. Allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions was a mistake.
Creating a popular website by ignoring IP rules and cultural and social norms, and misrepresenting what you do and how it works may not be a "violent act of force," per se, but it's absolutely something that can be criticized and punished.
I mean, I don’t know where you’d draw the hard line in terms of user count, but it’s definitely somewhere before half of the human race.
Once that many people use your products I would argue there is a moral imperative to do right by those people. Yes, at that scale, people other than the original builder/owner do have the right to make demands.
If the human race finally ever takes such an outward interest in software, there's plenty of open source and decentralized ways they can use to link up.
Facebook is only a public utility as long as we allow it to be.
There's onus on them because of that — but also on us.
That's why things like www.touchbase.id exist - to make it easier to find the online presence of someone that THEY want to share - so you're not stuck defaulting to the big platforms, or ignorant to the other places they're using.
> Facebook is only a public utility as long as we allow it to be.
Facebook won't take opposition lying down. Consider their free internet offerings in some countries. How is open source going to compete with that? And what service will you use to organize a movement large enough to upend Facebook? Twitter? Mastodon?
>> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?
This is a pretty weird take. Do you apply the same logic to citizens of a country? I mean, they're just one vote, what right do they have to make demands of a country they only joined 20/30/50/70 years ago? Meta isn't some plucky little privately held startup. Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity combined own more than Zuckerberg, and those funds are primarily the savings of individuals and pension plans, so I think people do have legitimate grounds to make demands. He's maintained control without ownership, and I think this makes him extra worthy of criticism. He's highly leveraged and gambling with far more than his own outcome.
Not quite, although he controls the majority of votes due to the controversial dual class shares. Owning shares in Meta/Facebook is really owning shares in Zuckerberg Inc. He has total control, your share ownership means nothing. Investing in Meta is nothing other than an investment in him and his management.
This is a relatively unusual situation (although Google was similar) and I believe the SEC don't like these structures and they don't really happen anymore.
Most other company's don't have these absurd structures and so an investor has a right to an opinion. So while I agree with the parent in relation to Meta, it is not a normal situation, and it not "right".
> Facebook has Class A shares and Class B shares. Investors hold Class A shares, but Mark Zuckerberg holds Class B shares, which have 10 votes each. His shares represent roughly 14% of Facebook's economic ownership but control nearly 60% of the voting rights.
OP’s point still stands. If people invested in him to the tune of $500b, then they gave him enough rope to hang everyone with. They knew the rules when they decided to play the game.
A lot of retail investors will be unlikely to understand the nuance of the situation with Meta/Facebook. I don't blame them for investing and finding themselves with no voice. Institutional investors should know better than accept these ownership structures.
It’s a public company. Yes, I know he still owns the majority of it so it’s not like he’s violating the law by grinding it into the ground but still. It’s woven into the fabric of modern life for better or worse (worse) and I think it’s fair to write an article saying “This man is doing a bad job running it”.
I was about to respond that there is no way the class B stock could be passed down to an heir with 10x voting rights attached, but after reading the documentation it does. So his family could run it into the ground at their leisure! Though Mark would have the ability to convert it from class B to class A when passing the stock down if he wanted.
When someone else owns a majority of voting shares of the company they get to make demands of how it's run.
Unfortunately for regular investors in Facebook, their shares are each worth 1/10th of the votes of Zuckerberg's special Class B shares, and if they wanted to have a say in anything they probably should've invested in a company where the CEO/founder doesn't hold a huge pile of special voting shares.
He built it alone? Just him? Why does he need so many tens of thousands of employees then? Just because I initiate something doesn't mean I fully own it.
Zuck has the singular moral obligation to pile drive Meta deep into the earth.
Spectacularly.
To such a degree as to trigger a permanent social media winter. Dragging the parade of freemium, attention economy, dopamine hacking, panopticon, and manufactured outrage biz models down too.
Dorsey cowardly delegated that task to Musk. Which is probably for the best; like with all his manias, Musk will go above and beyond anything Dorsey could imagine, much less managed.
Any nominations for antihero(s) to warp TikTok into the sun?
It's not controversial. It's just factually wrong.
Public company has different rules than private company. He now has fiduciary duty to other owners. It's true that he has locked in majority of votes, but that's only because Meta has dual class structure.
It's unfortunate that it's possible to build this kind of monstrosities with dual class stocks.
unless they were doing so through an index fund like a significant majority of public capital
> understanding the structure
I would bet against every Facebook shareholder understanding at the time of investment; I would bet against even a majority thinking through the long-term ramifications
I understand your point — it’s a free market, nobody MAKES you buy stock — but I still don’t think it’s a reason to totally write off all the implications of a dual-class share structure for one of the biggest companies in the world.
He did have a bit of help along the way. Even if their contributions were smaller, it's sick to pretend they're zero.
> He still owns the majority of it.
AIUI he owns the majority of the voting rights but not of the total shares. He still has a duty to act in the interests of the shareholders as a group, and can be sued if he does not. Beyond the merely legal to the moral, he has duties to other stakeholders as well, and to society.
> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?
"Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose." Others contributed. Others are affected. Those facts give them some right, however small, to make such demands. The only situation in which someone has sole right to make every possible decision is an utter vacuum. Does he or the company operate in a vacuum?
At the extreme, the demise of Microsoft would trigger an immediate and prolonged crisis response to everyone whose IT systems depend on it (i.e. essentially everyone, either directly or indirectly), both on-prem and for cloud services. At some point it is less about who owns the tree, and more about how much of the forest it will take down with it if the owner shows up and chops it down.
Facebook is not exactly at Microsoft scale on this, but it would still require an enormous about of human effort to reconstitute all the organizations, event planning infrastructure, relationships etc. that people currently manage via IG and Facebook.
"At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?"
Well, presumably the point when they no longer own it and turn it into a public company with shareholders that are going to go down with the $500b ship.
A quick google says that Mark owns 13.4%, not a majority of the company.
So he has a pretty large voice and might be the largest single shareholder but it's no longer his -- it's not his prerogative or risk to take, if the board decides it's not. And there's a good argument that the board should replace him.
> So he has a pretty large voice and might be the largest single shareholder but it's no longer his -- it's not his prerogative or risk to take, if the board decides it's not. And there's a good argument that the board should replace him.
Zuckerberg has over 50% of the voting rights, which means he controls the board of directors.
>At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?
Zuck still has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders, who expect a return on their investment. Running Meta into the ground because of his own hubris is not acceptable behavior from the CEO of a publicly traded company.
He didn't build that company, him and thousands of talented professionals built that company to where it is now. I'm not saying his contributions weren't a major part of that, but lets not act like he alone made this happen and this company is his alone to destroy, including all those jobs.
And beyond prerogative, it's pretty clear at worst he's wandering his way down. "Driving down" would look more like what is going on at the other blue social media company.
That's not how a public company is supposed to work. Once Mark sold a single share of the company to someone else, he is obligated to make the business successful.
Fiduciary duty is not an obligation to make the business successful; it is an obligation to do what you think is in the best interests of shareholders.
In other words, to TRY to make it successful, but failure still exists in this world.
> Facebook’s 2020 Gaming App that they said would rival Twitch? Dead. Hobbi, their app for “documenting personal projects?” Dead in less than 6 months. Campus, Facebook’s college-student-focused app? Dead in two years. Live-streamed shopping events? Facebook’s live-shopping feature? Dead[...]
A thing that I genuinely don't understand about these mega-companies (Google being another example) trying to expand into new fields is how weirdly uncommitted they are. Stadia is another example.
It feels like a lot of these side-services get closed down because they haven't reached some minimum level of revenue (I've heard the phrase "move the needle" in relation to google)...but so many of them are in new areas. I suspect Stadia was the most popular and profitable game-streaming-service ever - but it just didn't live up to Google's needs I guess?
It's to the point that my sense is that being acquired by Google or Facebook seems like a very bad sign for the long-term health of a service. Does anyone understand the internal logic behind this pattern of investing & abandoning with such reliability?
I think it's a unique artifact of the way that software work is done.
Software is, at its core, an intellectual exercise. When you start up a new multi-billion dollar thing, there's very little physical manifestation. There isn't a sprawling factory, a company town, a bustling assembly line...
There's just a piece of software. Building it takes a lot of effort, but not like effort effort the way you have to move the ground and get machines in to build a factory.
So even though walking away from a massive software project means, in dollars, the same as abandoning a giant factory, it isn't legible in the same psychological way. If you're Intel, and your new process node isn't working the way you expected, do you board up the factory? No, of course not! It's a gigantic thing that you can look at and say "wow, we spent a billion dollars on this." But if you're Facebook, come monday morning, you can just tell all of your ICs -- "hey, you guys aren't working on this any more."
This is kind of related to how quickly money flows into software. Money come money go. Software come, software go. Not so in the physical world.
That's my theory.
That also means -- if you treat your software projects like a big factory, you can actually distinguish yourself. Like many on HN, I am very hesitant to sign up for a new google service, even if it's really really cool and I would pay for it! Because there is no factory, there is no machines, there's just information, information that can stop being improved tomorrow.
That is an interesting point. Also those being put at the helm to run many such in-house or acquired projects probably don't have enough skin in the game or passion. Their metrics are always towards near-term progress; not tied to revenue, viability or even traction for that product line. And like you said, no big consequences other than switching to write code in another repo.
That said, it is not easy being Zuck. How do you steer a huge complex company like Facebook? He has had 3 mega mega hits (Fb, WA and Insta) and the company has produced tons of other useful tech and trained professionals.
I agree the lack of commitment is weird. Microsoft stuck to Bing for a long time before it now having a shot of becoming something relevant to MS’ bottom line (i.e. > 1% of MS revenue)
With Bing it feels like those large tech companies want to keep money-losing projects to keep their competition "in-check". Bing vs Google, Chromebook vs Windows, Google Shopping vs Amazon, etc.
There may be various reasons for that, I heard different opinions. It seems that it's just a part of the "chess" game between those companies.
Bing has generally made money for Microsoft. Search is just so valuable -- look at Google and how it built a whole conglomerate of loss leaders around it.
Did the same for Xbox as well: that was lossmaking for years, if I remember correctly. And yet now, and for a long time, they've had a very successful business. One thing I'll say for Microsoft: they really know how to commit. Doesn't always work of course (Windows Mobile, for example), but a lot of their more successful bets have been very long plays.
It feels like some projects are considered strategically important (Waymo comes to mind) while others are kind of allowed to sink or swim. It also seems like these companies acquire a lot of businesses that realistically will never hit the desired metrics in the limited time period they are given?
My understanding (as someone who worked at Meta and sold a startup to a large corporation) is that, in this particular case, money-printing giants are cursed by their own blessing.
The thing that prints them money limits them in terms of what margins and growth rates are acceptable. As a public company, your metrics are all bundled for simplicity into EBITDA, profit margins, etc. Investors buying your stock and your existing investors care a lot about these numbers.
So when your new product has a lower margin or a lower growth rate, this affects your whole company's metrics. This is why they try to isolate such projects into "labs" and the like, and this is why it's challenging to move from this "lab" into the main company portfolio. Your metrics need to be as high as your main product line - this one-in-a-million exceptional thing that made you huge. Which is pretty impossible.
Basically, the bar is very high, and not killing it and maturing it instead has very negative externalities in most cases. And so, it goes to the history dump.
Very unfortunate, and as a startup founder, I'd think twice about who to sell to. Also, as a startup founder, I know that often there's not much choice.
I've heard a lot about how mis-aligned the internal incentives are at Google along these lines, but there is usually also some kind of plan on the business side. If what is happening is really that these projects are killed because all the engineers quit...that seems like a big problem!
Seemingly they are more committed to tight financial KPIs, which will never allow them the flexibility to successfully traverse the moat of their own bad PR in certain product niches.
I agree with a lot of this, but the fact that the author can lead into the article by repeatedly block-quoting from their own prior articles about how awful Mark is kind of suggests to me that maybe they have already written enough on this topic and can move on to fresh material?
My thoughts exactly while reading this. In addition to his hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate, Zuck also lives in this guy’s head rent free.
Yes, agreed. Further, this has always been the case, and it's been discussed since the Facebook IPO.
The rules of the game are clear. Someone who doesn't like this game is free to walk away and do something else (most public companies don't have a CEO with majority voting power). Complaining without acknowledging the rules seems like misdirected energy.
He elects a majority of the board members through his shares. In fact, the board can indeed fire him even if he (as a member of the board) votes against the rest of the board. I wouldn't characterize the current board as being Mark loyalists https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/?section=b....
Even as a controlling shareholder, the ex-CEO could take months to go through the process of nominating new board members and holding a shareholder election according to the corporate bylaws before his new hand-picked board members could hire him back.
This. Owning ~20% of normal stocks and ~60% of voting stocks shouldn't be allowed for public company. At some point company becomes just CEO's toy to do things they want, in this case "metaverse".
Why not? Nobody put a gun to anybody's head and made them invest in META.
Arguably there's forced investment by index fund holders but now the SP500 eschews companies with that structure, so even index investors can avoid this sort of thing.
I'd argue that no single person should have that much power and wealth in this country. Why is it okay that Zuckerberg has absolute power over one of the most influential companies in the world? How does that benefit society as a whole?
> Why is it okay that Zuckerberg has absolute power over one of the most influential companies in the world?
Because that's the company he founded and owns. It wasn't one of the most influential companies in the world upon being founded, it became so with Zuck at the helm.
> How does that benefit society as a whole?
How does this have anything to do with anything? And how do you propose we measure it?
The author should do some reading on Facebook's share ownership structure and come back to tell their readers on who owns the majority of the voting power and then just delete this entire article; since honestly, I stopped reading when I read the title.
Good luck on "Fire Mark Zuckerberg" without his 'say so', unless he does it himself.
>This is not a plucky startup founder or a journeyman finding his feet, but a guy who has the majority of voting power in a publicly-traded trillion-dollar enterprise who is giving a “forgot to prepare for this meeting” style speech.
At risk of sounding hyped-up, I’d say that generative A.I. could be a major factor for the success of “the metaverse” in that it would make it easier for brands and users to create interesting 3-d objects and environments. I’d also look at progress in things like neural radiance fields that could make it possible to take a moderate number of pictures of a place and create a VR model you can visit.
I'd second the idea that this was not the major thing holding back adoption of the metaverse.
Frankly, even if they announced a program to give free Oculus headsets to anyone who wanted one, I still wouldn't want to start using the metaverse. Judging by the other comments on this post, I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way.
Megacorps can (thankfully) barely swim in new waters. These guys didn’t even start out in a completely new field.
The hubris when they think they can just create a new entire platform which people have no experience with, no mistakes to learn from etc. Especially so when the ones taking the wheel are anxious upper-mid PMs which are used to AB-test a color changed button for engagement improvements. It may sound harsh, but I can assure you that many, many of these decision makers haven’t even played Minecraft/Roblox etc and have no idea what would be compelling to “real” people. That’s why you get a remote office in the metaverse, because that’s at least one thing they live and breathe.
In my view, novel areas need grassroots “see what sticks” type of innovation, often by tiny teams/passion oriented nerds. I think the gaming world, with all its faults, understand this MUCH better than the FAANGS, because they simply have to.
As a counter-example, I’d point to Apple developing the smartphone market, although many big corps tries and failed before Apple.
I think Facebook though has a special cluelessness/arrogance which might be more widely shared by the ‘new monopolists’ of two-sided markets who inevitably mistake their luck of the draw (having the two sided marker) for their own merit and skill. Thus that kind of company can be world-leading and senescent at the same time.
Yeah thanks for filling in the gap, this is indeed very true. It’s also known as the Steve Jobs complex, and is a common yet medically serious self-delusion plaguing many of our poor tech billionaires today.
I think that whole journey is gravely misrepresented and narrativized. Much because Jobs died on such a high note. And also because people like the blackberry -> iPhone story more than they like the iPod -> iPhone story.
Also, Zuckerberg is desperately craving an ecosystem because he wants a land to rule, not because he’s a nit picky design fascist like Jobs. I think the App Store as a business success was much more a lucky side effect than people post-rationalize.
I think hardware is the biggest barrier to Zuckerberg's view of the metaverse. It's not good enough yet.
A close second is that the users and the interesting content are largely in other non-VR metaverses (like Roblox, Fortnite). Making it easy to make content probably benefits those just as much.
Starting to work on the experiences in 2d-screen-land while working on the VR hardware in parallel looks like the move that Facebook missed.
I think of Decentralland, which, lame as it is, is possible to experience just fine with a web browser.
Overall though i think it is software/content that is the real problem. Horizon Worlds isn’t any more interesting or fun than Decentralland. As much as Zuckerberg claims to be inspired by Ready Player One it’s hard to believe he saw the book or watched the movie (or played and video games) as he certainly didn’t understand what makes a compelling experience.
> However, I don’t remember the last time someone showed me a great Facebook or Instagram post, or something they enjoyed seeing like you’d see something good from TikTok, or a funny tweet.
Really? Twitter and TikTok have quality content but IG has nothing? Even though creators basically post everything to TikTok and IG these days?
The big questions that the article failed to answer:
1) Which specific people would do the job better than Zuckerberg? Just anyone?
2) What exactly would they do differently?
3) What results would they deliver to shareholders above what Meta has achieved so far?
A lot of the issues with Meta are issues it would still have under a conventional Fortune 500 CEO. Before you talk about firing Mark, find a superior replacement first.
The task ahead is to find something new that brings in a billion or so in profit per quarter, with headspace to several billions. And it needs to be a kind of winner-takes-all success that cannot be replicated easily.
Does the author have any idea how fucking hard this is? It's pretty much a once in a decade event: search, social networking, smartphones, AI. And most of these are ad-driven. So where do you go when you reach peak-ad?
The idea that because a company has lots of money and engineers it should be easy to launch one product success after the other at this scale, is insane. It should be thought of as near impossible.
Right.. I mean in my book only a disgruntled investor would be pissed about something like Facebook burning down. And investors have a moral responsibility, so..
Yes, no. Regardless of how many shares he owns, the CEO can be fired by the board of directors.
If that CEO happens to be a controlling shareholder who wants his job back, he would have to nominate a new slate of board members and schedule a shareholder vote according to the corporate bylaws (that are in turn regulated by the state of incorporation), which is a process that could take months to finish.
Presumably the new directors that the ex-CEO elects would hire him back, though it is worth noting that the directors have a duty to represent the best interests of all shareholders, not just those who voted them in. So if the CEO was fired for legitimate reasons and the directors act according to their duties, the ex-CEO should not be hired back.
One thing I always wondered was why Facebook never started their own cloud services offering like Amazon did with AWS? They have the scale, expertise, and infrastructure to do it yet never have.
While a lot of large companies constantly churn through new product ideas to see what sticks, Amazon hit a home run early on with AWS, and Facebook could have easily started their own many years ago when it was clear how the market was developing for cloud.
> One thing I always wondered was why Facebook never started their own cloud services offering like Amazon did with AWS?
I think the article addressed that:
>I’ll get right to it: Mark Zuckerberg is an ineffective, incompetent, and directionless executive, one bereft of complete or concrete ideas. He has entirely failed to innovate since the very beginning of Facebook — a product that he never envisioned as a business — and nearly 20 years later, he appears completely and utterly out of ideas.
If, like me, you stopped reading at the "you are a fool if you think otherwise" quip in the first paragraph, for a more grown-up take I recommend Stratechery.
Too much emotion in a writing piece belies enough bias that it becomes uninteresting.
Of course Facebook is pivoting into AI, the entire universe is going that way, and any big company not embracing it will soon be doing even bigger layoffs than those that are.
> And let’s be honest, nobody really likes any of their apps. Instagram and Facebook have billions of users, meaning that you sort of have to use them at some point.
That's a strange take. I've managed to be on the web since the mid-90s and have yet to use Facebook or Instagram. I still managed to get married, stay in contact with my extended family, get an excellent job as a developer, have a large fried group, etc. It is completely possible to have a good life without any of these.
Mark or no-mark, the question is really about ownership structures.
Facebook/Meta and Google have ownership structures that give them wide latitude to sacrifice present earnings for the future. But aside from showing that it's possible to advertise to everyone all the time, they don't seem to have done much with that freedom. Ironically, investors are still happy enough with returns, but they weren't due to new products.
Musk showed electronic payments were possible, private space, and electric cars; tunnels and twitter are less successful. His problem is really that people will sign up for anything he says.
Apple has somehow managed to build 2-3 markets in the same time frame, with Google, Samsung, Microsoft (and the chinese) gamely copying along, based mainly on hard integration engineering and clear product focus.
Similarly, Amazon has taken one idea and simply out-executed everyone else. And they had the guts to open AWS, which spawned entire ecosystems.
I would say what distinguishes them is not leadership directly but their leadership building a culture of both ambition and honesty in their middle managers. As far as I can tell, they do this because they believe more in the company than in themselves - i.e., what they can do if they work together.
So my reaction is: enough with blaming leaders for specific products bets. Hold them to account for building cultures - the horrors of Uber/Twitter or the joys of Apple - particularly if they've been at it for a generation.
For that, middle managers need to stage some interventions. It doesn't matter if Zuck owns all the stock, if people refuse to go along with his hair-brained ideas on soul-sucking marches. Stop treating stock as the measure of power, and use consent instead.
> He has entirely failed to innovate since the very beginning of Facebook — a product that he never envisioned as a business — and nearly 20 years later, he appears completely and utterly out of ideas.
The same could be said about Jack Dorsey, but I'd wager most people would take him back in a heartbeat. Let's wait for the competitor's headsets to launch before we start demanding that heads roll.
Facebook makes a lot of money. Twitter doesn't. Jack Dorsey seems just as bad, maybe worse, his politicking and backstabbing had surely hurt Twitter a lot more than his management ever bore fruit?
You mean a CEO hated for having no good ideas, allowing the company to rest on its laurels, missing major industry transformations, and leading from behind?
That's pretty much the shareholder sentiment for every FAANG company today. Even Tim Cook's legacy is boiling down to a watch, some healthwashing/greenwashing initiatives and services with ads. Google and Microsoft are now more known for their cloud services. Facebook wants to about-face into VR. It's a boring world out there, the enthusiasts and analysts don't do it justice.
I don't like any of these companies, but I do award bonus points for novelty. The Quest lineup is undeniably novel.
I am no expert on Jack Dorsey, but have been continually impressed by his ability to answer sensible relevant questions, without actually saying anything. And without giving away anything to hang follow up questions on.
He has mastered the passive equivalent of repeating "Nothing to see here", in ASMR voice, over and over.
He might be right but this guy seems unhinged. Couldn't get past the feeling that I was reading the thoughts of someone who is unstable.
There are better and more articulate ways to make this argument. You don't need to hyperlink to another article at every phrase to build a sound, fact-checked and consistent idea.
The lesson here is that if the founder retains majority control of the voting stock, you should apply a big discount to any options or RSUs in a comp package, because he can run the company into the ground on a whim without any checks.
Soft agree. Mark’s job seems to be done. He did amazing at it 2005-2018ish, but there’s probably someone else who could do a better job today. Google and Microsoft have had enormous growth under hired CEOs in the last decade.
Mark Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired. It's like saying "Fire the Sun." Not going to happen. If you don't like it, shouldn't have bought the stock -- this has been well-known since the S-1.
Mark Zuckerberg works for the Board and Share price
That’s it
That’s the only thing he can do, he has no other options. There’s no world where he can focus on making anything other than more money forever and he has convinced the board that there is infinite money in the future.
Mark controlled nearly 60% of the votes for meta when ur IPOd. He’s be a fool to let go of that level of control, and if that is still true the board works for him. Not the other way around.
Zuckerberg singlehandedly owns the majority of the voting power, he can focus on whatever he feels like. The board and the share price are just along for the ride, getting sued notwithstanding.
It may be a controversial take, but, like... if he does that's fine. It's his prerogative and risk to take.
He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.
At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?