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Fire Mark Zuckerberg

142 points by mandevil 4y ago

squokko 4y ago
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.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I bought the stock in the $30's, so I'm not complaining. It's had a good run over the past 10 years, so might sell soon.
smoldesu 4y ago
> 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.
- slac 4y ago
  But will the competitors allow for third party worlds connecting to their headset... This will be a walled garden.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
    What concerns me about society is that anyone would want to be in these gardens, walled or not.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      Yeah, what kinda NERD would spend time "socializing" on a computer?
    - dustymcp 4y ago
      some people have given up on reality maybe mark is one of them?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Sounds kinda anticompetitive to me. Guess we'll see who wants to play ball, though!
- jemmyw 4y ago
  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?
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  > The same could be said about Jack Dorsey The same should be said of Dorsey. And Musk. And also Pichai, while we're at it. What's your point?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Good leadership is relative, anything that isn't Ballmer is counted as a blessing by shareholders.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      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 totally doesn't sound familiar...
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        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.
- Nevermark 4y ago
  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.
PaulHoule 4y ago
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.
- version_five 4y ago
  I agree those things are easier (or more accessible) now, but I don't think that was the major thing holding back people from using the metaverse.
  - FourHand451 4y ago
    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.
    - blowski 4y ago
      I was given a free Oculus headset in late 2021. The novelty wore off after a couple of weeks, and I've barely used it since.
- majormajor 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
quasarsunnix 4y ago
Doesn't Mark have over 50% of the votes? The only way he can be fired is if he votes himself out right?
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Yes, the only person who can fire Mark is Mark.
- 1lint 4y ago
  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.
bravoetch 4y ago
Keep Zuck. I want to see fb crash and burn.
- kodt 4y ago
  Right? This article makes a good argument for why he should stay on if anything.
seydor 4y ago
So that they can save Worldwide Gossip and Surveillance Central Inc? Please let it burn crash and evaporate.
- klabb3 4y ago
  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..
holler 4y ago
Brutal. 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. Edit: Found previous thread about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22667025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22667025
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > 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.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
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. Is he making the board happy?
- akhosravian 4y ago
  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. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-supervoting-stock-resistance-2022-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s... At best the only leverage on him from the market is in reducing the stocks price, but it is not obvious to me how much that actually matters to him.
- Etheryte 4y ago
  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.
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
It seems a lot of people posting here don't realize that Mark Zuckerberg owns a majority of the voting power of FB's board through his shares. Nobody can fire him unless he votes with them to do it.
- protastus 4y ago
  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.
  - makestuff 4y ago
    Yeah snap has a similar voting structure. A quick search says that the cofounders have 96% of the voting power.
- rvz 4y ago
  Exactly. 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.
  - praisewhitey 4y ago
    Fourth sentence of the article: >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.
- userforcomment 4y ago
  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".
abeppu 4y ago
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?
- jaygreco 4y ago
  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.
  - smrtinsert 4y ago
    > rent free Not surprised to see this so often negatively correlated with quality comments
- rideontime 4y ago
  He's just showing off how many of his predictions have come true.
davnicwil 4y ago
> 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?
- afavour 4y ago
  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”.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    He owns about 14% of it. He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir. But most of the company is owned by someone else.
    - peter422 4y ago
      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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dspillett 4y ago
      > most of the company is owned by someone else. Absolutely correct, but… > He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir. Which is what counts, in terms of being able to push through his ideas of where/how the company should (try to) move.
johnea 4y ago
People actually care wtf the zucker does? More navel gazing by the lost generations...
reso 4y ago
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.
sgt 4y ago
P/E ratio as of April 2023 (TTM): 24.7
aeturnum 4y ago
> 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?
- soneca 4y ago
  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)
  - kozikow 4y ago
    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.
    - ReaLNero 4y ago
      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.
  - aeturnum 4y ago
laweijfmvo 4y ago
> 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?
fdsvalkj 4y ago
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. https://stratechery.com/company/meta/ https://stratechery.com/company/meta/
deleted 4y ago
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LegNeato 4y ago
This person is in PR and has never built anything of value. Ignore the SEO.
seunosewa 4y ago
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.
- dahwolf 4y ago
  Exactly. 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.
whoisjuan 4y ago
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.
ekanes 4y ago
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.
dahwolf 4y ago
Would be quite bad for this author if Zuckerberg got fired, obsessively hating on him seems to be his identity. Too much narrative and axe-grinding.
deleted 4y ago
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irrational 4y ago
> 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.
speak_plainly 4y ago
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DueDilligence 4y ago
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w10-1 4y ago
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.
stephencanon 4y ago
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.
sledgehammers 3y ago
That man belongs to jail given all the damage he's done to the global society.

142 points by mandevil 4y ago

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.

icedchai 4y ago
I bought the stock in the $30's, so I'm not complaining. It's had a good run over the past 10 years, so might sell soon.

smoldesu 4y ago

> 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.

slac 4y ago
But will the competitors allow for third party worlds connecting to their headset... This will be a walled garden.
- hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
  What concerns me about society is that anyone would want to be in these gardens, walled or not.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Yeah, what kinda NERD would spend time "socializing" on a computer?
  - dustymcp 4y ago
    some people have given up on reality maybe mark is one of them?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Sounds kinda anticompetitive to me. Guess we'll see who wants to play ball, though!
jemmyw 4y ago
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?
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> The same could be said about Jack Dorsey The same should be said of Dorsey. And Musk. And also Pichai, while we're at it. What's your point?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Good leadership is relative, anything that isn't Ballmer is counted as a blessing by shareholders.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    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 totally doesn't sound familiar...
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      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.
Nevermark 4y ago
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.

PaulHoule 4y ago

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.

version_five 4y ago
I agree those things are easier (or more accessible) now, but I don't think that was the major thing holding back people from using the metaverse.
- FourHand451 4y ago
  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.
  - blowski 4y ago
    I was given a free Oculus headset in late 2021. The novelty wore off after a couple of weeks, and I've barely used it since.
majormajor 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

quasarsunnix 4y ago

Doesn't Mark have over 50% of the votes? The only way he can be fired is if he votes himself out right?

HDThoreaun 4y ago
Yes, the only person who can fire Mark is Mark.
1lint 4y ago
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.

bravoetch 4y ago

Keep Zuck. I want to see fb crash and burn.

kodt 4y ago
Right? This article makes a good argument for why he should stay on if anything.

seydor 4y ago

So that they can save Worldwide Gossip and Surveillance Central Inc? Please let it burn crash and evaporate.

klabb3 4y ago
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..

holler 4y ago

Brutal. 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. Edit: Found previous thread about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22667025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22667025

JustSomeNobody 4y ago
> 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.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

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. Is he making the board happy?

akhosravian 4y ago
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. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-supervoting-stock-resistance-2022-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s... At best the only leverage on him from the market is in reducing the stocks price, but it is not obvious to me how much that actually matters to him.
Etheryte 4y ago
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.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

It seems a lot of people posting here don't realize that Mark Zuckerberg owns a majority of the voting power of FB's board through his shares. Nobody can fire him unless he votes with them to do it.

protastus 4y ago
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.
- makestuff 4y ago
  Yeah snap has a similar voting structure. A quick search says that the cofounders have 96% of the voting power.
rvz 4y ago
Exactly. 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.
- praisewhitey 4y ago
  Fourth sentence of the article: >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.
userforcomment 4y ago
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".

abeppu 4y ago

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?

jaygreco 4y ago
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.
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  > rent free Not surprised to see this so often negatively correlated with quality comments
rideontime 4y ago
He's just showing off how many of his predictions have come true.

davnicwil 4y ago

> 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?

afavour 4y ago
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”.
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  He owns about 14% of it. He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir. But most of the company is owned by someone else.
  - peter422 4y ago
    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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dspillett 4y ago
    > most of the company is owned by someone else. Absolutely correct, but… > He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir. Which is what counts, in terms of being able to push through his ideas of where/how the company should (try to) move.

johnea 4y ago

People actually care wtf the zucker does? More navel gazing by the lost generations...

reso 4y ago

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.

sgt 4y ago

P/E ratio as of April 2023 (TTM): 24.7

aeturnum 4y ago

> 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?

soneca 4y ago
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)
- kozikow 4y ago
  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.
  - ReaLNero 4y ago
    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.
- aeturnum 4y ago

laweijfmvo 4y ago

> 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?

fdsvalkj 4y ago

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. https://stratechery.com/company/meta/ https://stratechery.com/company/meta/

deleted 4y ago

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LegNeato 4y ago

This person is in PR and has never built anything of value. Ignore the SEO.

seunosewa 4y ago

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.

dahwolf 4y ago
Exactly. 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.

whoisjuan 4y ago

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.

ekanes 4y ago

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.

dahwolf 4y ago

Would be quite bad for this author if Zuckerberg got fired, obsessively hating on him seems to be his identity. Too much narrative and axe-grinding.

deleted 4y ago

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irrational 4y ago

> 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.

speak_plainly 4y ago

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DueDilligence 4y ago

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w10-1 4y ago

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.

stephencanon 4y ago

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.

sledgehammers 3y ago

That man belongs to jail given all the damage he's done to the global society.