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From the comments: "He's just a guy who knows a bit of PHP and wanted to get rich, along with the creators of 1000 other social networking sites, and just got l

• stanleydrew 16y ago
  Agree, but using the word "genius" is still a bit extreme, which is what I think incited that reaction.
  • whereareyou 16y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg is a genius.
    • tjogin 16y ago
      Sure. But not because of his supposed larger-than-life PHP skillz.
    • Tichy 16y ago
      So genius is defined by success?
      • JanezStupar 16y ago
        Well - usually this is the case. You see - society indeed tends to call successful people geniuses. The others get to be called "autistic savants". /sarcasm Some say that Edison was not a genius, and that Ford was not a genius, etc... Myself - I'm chock full sick of "geniuses" who would of made it if they would of made it. Thus I'd be way more inclined to root for the Zuck than for the mass of people that claim that he fracked them over. Rooting for the underdog might be "noble". But lets face it - most of the underdogs don't deserve to win.
        • Tichy 16y ago
          We agree that genius !=> success, but I don't think success => genius holds, either. Not everybody who is successful is a genius. Unless we allow some inflation of the use of the word. Known genii (?) include Einstein, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Jimi Hendrix...
          • mikebike 16y ago
            What do you think P[genius|success]/P[genius] is? (i.e., how much more likely do you think it is that someone is a genius given that you know they are a success?)
          • JanezStupar 16y ago
            I didn't say that success is sufficient precondition to be perceived as genius. What I tried to imply was that success is necessary precondition to be pronounced as one (by society).
        • loewenskind 16y ago
          Great to know. If you have any good ideas let me know so I can steal them, give you what the idea makes in a month and you can root for me.
      • shahin 16y ago
        Well, not defined but I would say it is a pretty good indication.
        • Tichy 16y ago
          Or it is just random chance. Out of 1 million people trying different things, a few are bound to be successful. At least for stock trading that is assumed to be true.
      • qntm 16y ago
        Yes. The distance between madness and genius is measured in success. Okay, that's a quote from a Bond movie, but still.
        • Tichy 16y ago
          What is a mad genius, then?
    • slantyyz 16y ago
      Can someone vouch for this by showing us the results of Zuck's IQ test? Is he in Mensa? Otherwise I would just say that Zuckerberg is very smart and a shrewd businessperson.
  • cb33 16y ago
    As someone said on another story about Zuckerberg, if a person can go from $0 to having a net worth of over $6.9 billion then they are most definitely a genius.
    • lotusleaf1987 16y ago
      Wealth does not imply intelligence. Some people are at the right place at the right time. People who win the lottery aren't usually geniuses. I'm not saying intelligence didn't help Zuckerberg, I just disagree that wealth=intelligence. There are plenty of poor geniuses out there, like Grigori Perelman who solved the topological conundrum.
      • cb33 16y ago
        Comparing winning the lottery to creating a social phenomenon on the scale of Facebook is pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure why people are so against giving this guy his due credit, but I find it very discomforting as an aspiring entrepreneur. I can see how some people could not enjoy Zuckerberg's personality, but that should be separated from what he has created. "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
        • lotusleaf1987 16y ago
          All I am pointing out is that wealth does not equate intelligence. There are many many intelligent people who do not end up rich. I didn't say Zuck isn't intelligent, I just think that it's only one piece to the puzzle--timing being another crucial aspect, and yes luck in the sense that FB took off virally. I didn't bring up his personality at all so I don't know what you're responding to. Look at Tesla, he died poor, in debt, and not very well respected. Only now is Tesla regarded as the genius that he was. Neither, Einstein or Edison died wealthy.There are many more examples (Socrates, Oscar Wilde, John Milton) I can go on if needed. Not to mention all the unintelligent wealthy people: Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, etc.
        • loewenskind 16y ago
          Probably the reason people are against "giving this guy his due credit" is because he seems to have screwed over and betrayed several people to get what he wants. If you don't do that then you wont run into the "problems" [1] he's having. [1] I say "problems" because it's irrelevant. I'm sure he's crying his way to the bank because of all the hate he gets.
• seldo 16y ago
  I've seen a lot of coverage of Zuck as a "genius computer hacker", reinforced by the Hackers-style montage in the film which makes it look like what he did was really hard (oh no, he busted out emacs! He must be a genius!). Actually, Facebook's core functionality, at least at small scale, is trivial. It's a database of people, with CRUD on top. All the really hard technical problems Facebook has solved -- and there were many, don't get me wrong -- have to do with scaling that system, and those problems were solved long after Zuck was no longer hands-on with the code every day. That's not to say I don't think Zuck is really smart. What I think he's really smart at, though, is interface design and user experience. The film touches on this, noting that Facebook's exclusivity was key to its early popularity. However, the reason Facebook really trounced Friendster and MySpace was that it was a much, much better experience. Everything worked perfectly and each screen was carefully thought-out in terms of information density and placement. Of course, Sorkin's narrative for the film is that Zuck is an aspie geek who built a website because he doesn't understand people, so the counter-evidence -- that Facebook's design is clearly built by somebody who understands people very well indeed -- has to be downplayed.
  • cynicalkane 16y ago
    Managing a large, rapidly scaling web business such as Facebook is not exactly trivial, either.
    • kloncks 16y ago
      That's exactly the point seldo makes.
      • Dementati 16y ago
        Nah, seldo focuses more on user interface, and less on community management.
      • cynicalkane 16y ago
        What? Where does he discuss this? He's talking about designing a user experience as if there's no managerial aspect involved in that at all. I can find no reference to the difficulty of running a company that actually can deliver that solid Facebook user experience. Not that he doesn't think this is hard; it's that he doesn't mention it. It's not as though being the Harvard kid writing the first version of thefacebook.com is the same as running a large company; as if Zuckerberg can just hire people to do hard coding for him and that's the end of it. I thought I'd point out that building Facebook as a company is something that would have been, and is, hard. The inability to grow has killed promising web businesses. I don't understand why I'm being downvoted and you're being upvoted. Addendum: the downvotes continue. Someone explain what I'm missing, please.
• maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  represent years of hard work Facebook has only been around for 6 years. The first investment of a half million dollars was made 6 months after the site had launched. I'm not diminishing Zuckerberg's insight or hard work but anything that takes off that fast involves a lot of luck.
  • hardy263 16y ago
    Even though Facebook has only been around for 6 years, don't forget the years of him working on programming. If an engineer who has worked for several years on the field, but finally gets a big project that's completed in a year, you don't throw away his previous experience and say that he's just a lucky guy who landed a big job. It's the sum of all the work before that adds up to the current experience now.
    • ojbyrne 16y ago
      Only if you assume there are few others who haved worked for several years on the field. If that's not the case, then you have to attribute at least some of the success to luck.
  • anamax 16y ago
    > I'm not diminishing Zuckerberg's insight or hard work but anything that takes off that fast involves a lot of luck. "take off fast" does not require luck. Yes, being lucky can result in take off fast, but there are things that took off fast that didn't involve luck. (Unless you think that "right place, right time, right thing" is an instance of luck, that is, happenstance.)
• olalonde 16y ago
  You are right, he certainly is extremely talented and intelligent, but I would argue that the genius label is misused here. It seems that mainstream media's tendency nowadays is to label every highly successful business founder as a "genius". In my opinion, Einsteins and Mozarts are geniuses and are much less common than people who build successful businesses. That being said, I think there is absolutely no reason to dismiss what Zuckerberg did or claim that it was all luck. Just don't fall into sensationalism and call him a genius.
  • tdfx 16y ago
    I prefer to label successful businessmen as socially or emotionally intelligent. Building a business requires many things, but the type of "genius" that we got from great physicists and artists is certainly not analogous to bringing people together and making money. It's a different measure of intelligence, but one that I think is more able to be learned than a gift for the natural sciences.
  • maguay 16y ago
    At least genius is a better term to throw around loosely than ninja or rockstar IMO...
• prawn 16y ago
  A lot of the reactions to entrepreneurial success online remind me of the response to criticism of contemporary art: Contemporary Art = I could've done that + Yeah, but you didn't.
  • pyre 16y ago
    So, does that make Jackson Pollock a 'genius artist' or a 'genius entrepreneur'? ;-)
• FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
  Most things come down to luck, both bad a good. One developing a terminal disease and one winning the lottery are both an instance of chance (luck). To say that Zuckerberg got to where he is purely because of luck is as equally false as saying that luck has nothing to do with it. I think the real issue that people are arguing about is, colloquially, whether the success is "deserved". You have people who look at the circumstances and assert that "given the opportunity I could have done the same thing", to them - it is an instance of luck, and undeserved success. To others, they perhaps are recognizing that more went on beneath the surface that we know about - perhaps even though technically what went on is nothing special, there may be other factors in play that only a select few would be able to surmount. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but the digestion of the circumstances will vary from person to person. There exist many people who could have made "Facebook" and been equally successful; there exist MANY more people who would not have been able to. I think that the polarization of responses has a lot to do the framing in absolute terms. Whatever attributions that are ascribed to him, cannot be said to viewed with equal validity for all observers.