7 ms·

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's ric

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).

saubeidl 1y ago
It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > meritocracy is a comforting lie. Meritocracy used to be a dirty word, before my time, of course, but for different reasons than you may think. Think about the racial quotas in college admissions and you’ll maybe see why the powers that be didn’t want merit to be a determining factor at that time. Now that the status quo is in charge of college admissions, we don’t need those quotas generally, and yet meritocracy still can’t save us. The problem of merit is that we rarely need the best person for a given job, and those with means can be groomed their entire life to do that job, if it’s profitable enough. Work shouldn’t be charity either, as work needs to get done, after all, and it’s called work instead of charity or slavery for good reasons, but being too good at your job at your current pay rate can make you unpromotable, which is a trap just as hard to see as the trap of meritocracy. Meritocracy is ego-stroking writ large if you get picked, just so we can remind you that you’re just the best one for our job that applied, and we can replace you at any time, likely for less money.
jocaal 1y ago
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
- vovavili 1y ago
  Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.
  - estearum 1y ago
    Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others. There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
    - skeezyboy 1y ago
      for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
      - dylan604 1y ago
        But then we wouldn't have had that great soundtrack from Trent and Atticus
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it. Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back. What risk?
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Once you go deep enough into a personal passion project like that, you run a serious risk of flunking out of school. For most people that feels like a big deal. And for those of us with fewer alternatives in life, it's usually enough to keep us on the straight and narrow path. People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.
PhantomHour 1y ago
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it. A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked. A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about. A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping". Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely. The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
- NickC25 1y ago
  As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders. He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
  - PhantomHour 1y ago
    Zuckerberg started as a sex pest and got not an iota better. But we could, as a society, stop rewarding him for this shit. He'd be an irrelevant fool if we had appropriate regulations around the most severe of his misdeeds.
    - NickC25 1y ago
      Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed. And since we live in the era of the real golden rule (i.e "he who has the gold makes the rules), there's no chance that we'll ever get the chance to catch the ship. Mark lives in his own world, because we gave him a quarter trillion dollars and never so much as slapped him on the wrist.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  youre thinking of ordinary people by john lennon
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago
    I'm thinking of exactly what I said[^1] :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
    - skeezyboy 1y ago
      i think you might still be a little confused
benterix 1y ago
It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0]. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...
- marknutter 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - oa335 1y ago
    What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?
    - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
      They failed to not go to an Ivy League school and failed to have poor parents.
    - lucianbr 1y ago
      Or Gates or Buffet. That claim is just patently false.
    - thebigspacefuck 1y ago
      Alexa, Metaverse, being decent human beings
      - ghurtado 1y ago
        When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.
  - tovej 1y ago
    IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N. Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?
balamatom 1y ago
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about. Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant. Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition? And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist. To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome. For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
- ghurtado 1y ago
  why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes? It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
  - balamatom 1y ago
    >why is there so much of this on HN? Where?
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people. It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success. You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing. Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
- epolanski 1y ago
  But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it. At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service. After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    >But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it. Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble. They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
  - amalcon 1y ago
    The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things. The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).
  - 1y ago
ghurtado 1y ago
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).

saubeidl 1y ago

It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.

aspenmayer 1y ago
> meritocracy is a comforting lie. Meritocracy used to be a dirty word, before my time, of course, but for different reasons than you may think. Think about the racial quotas in college admissions and you’ll maybe see why the powers that be didn’t want merit to be a determining factor at that time. Now that the status quo is in charge of college admissions, we don’t need those quotas generally, and yet meritocracy still can’t save us. The problem of merit is that we rarely need the best person for a given job, and those with means can be groomed their entire life to do that job, if it’s profitable enough. Work shouldn’t be charity either, as work needs to get done, after all, and it’s called work instead of charity or slavery for good reasons, but being too good at your job at your current pay rate can make you unpromotable, which is a trap just as hard to see as the trap of meritocracy. Meritocracy is ego-stroking writ large if you get picked, just so we can remind you that you’re just the best one for our job that applied, and we can replace you at any time, likely for less money.

jocaal 1y ago

Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.

vovavili 1y ago
Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.
- estearum 1y ago
  Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others. There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
    - dylan604 1y ago
      But then we wouldn't have had that great soundtrack from Trent and Atticus
- dgfitz 1y ago
  What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it. Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back. What risk?
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    Once you go deep enough into a personal passion project like that, you run a serious risk of flunking out of school. For most people that feels like a big deal. And for those of us with fewer alternatives in life, it's usually enough to keep us on the straight and narrow path. People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.

PhantomHour 1y ago

The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it. A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked. A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about. A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping". Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely. The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.

NickC25 1y ago
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders. He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
- PhantomHour 1y ago
  Zuckerberg started as a sex pest and got not an iota better. But we could, as a society, stop rewarding him for this shit. He'd be an irrelevant fool if we had appropriate regulations around the most severe of his misdeeds.
  - NickC25 1y ago
    Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed. And since we live in the era of the real golden rule (i.e "he who has the gold makes the rules), there's no chance that we'll ever get the chance to catch the ship. Mark lives in his own world, because we gave him a quarter trillion dollars and never so much as slapped him on the wrist.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.

skeezyboy 1y ago
youre thinking of ordinary people by john lennon
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  I'm thinking of exactly what I said[^1] :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    i think you might still be a little confused

benterix 1y ago

It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0]. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...

marknutter 1y ago
[flagged]
- oa335 1y ago
  What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?
  - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
    They failed to not go to an Ivy League school and failed to have poor parents.
  - lucianbr 1y ago
    Or Gates or Buffet. That claim is just patently false.
  - thebigspacefuck 1y ago
    Alexa, Metaverse, being decent human beings
    - ghurtado 1y ago
      When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.
- tovej 1y ago
  IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N. Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?

balamatom 1y ago

I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about. Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant. Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition? And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist. To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome. For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.

ghurtado 1y ago
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes? It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
- balamatom 1y ago
  >why is there so much of this on HN? Where?

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people. It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success. You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing. Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.

epolanski 1y ago
But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it. At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service. After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  >But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it. Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble. They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
- amalcon 1y ago
  The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things. The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).
- 1y ago

ghurtado 1y ago

When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.