I really wonder how Zuckerberg will be looked back on. It's seemed obvious that he's an incredible CEO given the growth we saw with Facebook, but maybe he was just in the right place at the right time and had a cash cow that was difficult to mess up? Because when I look at the Metaverse and I look at this AI stuff... I dunno. Feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall.
He got on top because he has no ethics as evidenced by his actions from the start.
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
"He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time."
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
But it does somewhat rely on luck to operate in a regulatory environment that allows it. I don't know that anti-competitive behavior requires any particular genius.
I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. He pumped a whole bunch of money in VR that didn’t seem to go anywhere and now AI seems like a fine direction to go in, copying the herd, with dangerous disregard to ethics.
>I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down
That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at the right moment.
The Instagram purchase was in 2012. Who was still expecting mobile to come crashing down in the iPhone 5 era?
>That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile.
I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.
1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure
2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.
As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.
Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.
Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.
"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products."
Right? "How Zuckerberg will be looked back on" involves far more than just business/fiscal metrics, especially when "he's not a likable guy, and neither are his products". He may be hailed as a significant success as a CEO, but there's also the impact to individual privacy, the emphasis to get users addicted in an effort to maximize "engagement", the impact that social media (of which it's being argued here that he is king) on youth/society and political discourse writ large, the brutal impact to our attention spans, so on and so forth.
If I'm a magic eight ball, I'm going to go with "Outlook not good" on how history's going to view him. Being a CEO that is "performing better" than all the others is but a single piece of the puzzle.
Key word "performing". If you want feel warm feelings about your heroes, don't make your heros CEOs who are ultimately judged on how large of a return they can give their shareholders.
Zuck is the poster boy for enshittification [0]. The dark pattern business model involves companies making money long after their users stop loving their offerings.
Well... In the early 1940s you could say that Hitler was the European leader that was performing better than all the others. But still, things took a turn.
You make interesting points so let's take a more nuanced view of things:
I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big).
However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who never built a foundational model in charge of all their AI efforts? It could be a great move, but might also be a swing and a miss.
It's far too early to call anything with "AI" - and I will be unsurprised if we enter another AI Winter as LLMs turn into a dead end.
If GPT-6, 7 and 8 continue to see diminishing returns on performance as we say from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5, then I see it becoming a winner take all of OpenAI.
What I think is ignored is how at the time, all the investors were singing Meta's doom due to Apple retiring IDFA and META's stock was crashing. Then it comes out that Meta had spent that last year buying a ton of GPUs just before the GPU supply crunch and the stock completely rebounds. Zuckerburg seems incapable of being caught with his pants down.
All the recent talk of Zuckerberg reeks of recency bias. He could completely screw up AI and he'd still be head and shoulders above every other founder/CEO.
I really disagree with this take, if LLMs stop progressing you still have major FAANG corporations (like Meta!) paying gobs of money to Anthropic to increase dev productivity.
If LLMs only help the average office worker increase their productivity by 10%, that is still a huge multi-billion dollar market waiting to be captured.
You make good points about people doubting Zuck and Meta before and them being spectacularly wrong, I'm certainly not willing to bet the house against him right now. I think if he had been able to buy Thinking Machines I would have thought it was very similar to Instagram or WhatsApp.
But he wasn't able to, so now i'm not sure it's a done deal that Meta won't be wasting many billions.
Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity
Okay... When he joined it was what 7 months old, had no product at all, they didn't even own the name and now it's the 9th most valuable company on earth. By the same token, if I start a company, you join the very next day, I don't do anything and you do all the work and provide all the money, you are not a founder.
If that's your definition then technically he's not a founder.
>Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO
Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.
You must be kidding. Telsa isn't impressive? The first real EV manufacturer? Going from nothing to the best selling car on the planet in 20 years? Not impressive. One of only 11 companies in the world. With a trillion dollar valuation. More than tripling revenue from 2020 to 2024?
Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards.
I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X was a far harder company to build.
1. I've never denied any of the accomplishments of tesla, so I don't know why you keep re-iterating them. Do you work for Tesla's marketing dept?
2. The first Roadster was shipped (to Musk, funny enough), 8 months before Elon became CEO. Let's be reasonable - I don't know how you can apply the founder/ceo label to a guy who was not ceo when their first product had already shipped.
There are plenty of stories (especially pre-Zuckerberg), or people starting companies, then being replaced by the board by a "real CEO" once they raised real money. These people are not founder/ceos. Google has a near identical path to Tesla; after Google's first real venture round, they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Eric Schmidt is not the "founder" of Google.
I understand Elon has tied his public image to being the "founder" of Tesla; to the point that there was a lawsuit involved. However let's talk in plain terms here, he is not a founder of Tesla in binary terms.
Again, if it makes you feel better - you can read through my comments and note that I have never said anything qualitative about Tesla. I've said nothing about their growth, market cap, or Elon sleeping on production floors. I've simply said Elon was not a founder at Tesla, and therefore is not the group of people I think of as exceptional founder/ceos.
If you really wanted to steelman your argument, you'd be using SpaceX, which he did start, and was involved with before Tesla.
I'd say he's got lucky in the being evil game too, because ethically speaking whatever he does in social and AI is largely overshadowed by Elon Musk's X and Grok.
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
Yeah I mean I know these are experienced AI experts, but they could be faking or coasting. We better give a twentysomething Sr. Software Engineer veto power over these hires just to be sure./s
> The new team has discussed making Meta’s next A.I. model “closed,” which would be a major departure from the company’s longtime philosophy of “open sourcing” its models. A closed model keeps its underlying code secret, while an open-source A.I. model can be built upon by other developers.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing".
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
Do you think you're a god? You're are a general intelligence, that has the capacity to learn and create. This is the stated goal of most of these companies: make a general intelligence that allows autonomous agents (possibly controlling robots) to do general, human like, work with sufficient, and ideally superior, competency. No silly claims of gods required.
It's interesting how these conversations usually turn irrational, immediately.
You have to have these people that can speak these horrible languages, study for years unimpeded for likely no goal, can finance expeditions to the bottom of the ocean and fail again and again, sacrifice the right victims at the right times, etc. These people that will awaken Cthulhu have to be some of the most brilliant in human history (so says the lovecraftian mythos), and then they have to throw away all their brains and money and time to awaken the 'do not awaken under any circumstances' dark god of terror and soul consuming ambivalence.
Like, there isn't anyone out there that is that stupid. Totally breaks the immersion of the worldbuilding, right?
I follow him on LinkedIn: he works on the things that will come in 10 years, not on the products that Meta ships in 1-2 years. LeCunn is going to be there for some time.
I think no matter what Mark does to shake things up. ~Facebook~ Meta will always be out-innovated by a startup and forced to keep acquiring and gobbling up anything that becomes remotely successful.
I would disagree if this were a spurious quote that wasn't highly indicative of the preponderance of his record.
All the ethical quandaries where Facebook has been caught red handed. Over and over. Habitual denial of obvious problems.
The gross ineptitude and irresponsibility that facilitated actual genocidal coordination, in languages with no Facebook monitors. The consistently slippery talk we get from him via PR and Senate interviews.
And the deeply ethically challenged core business model of surveillance by any means not deemed illegal, and then some, as a means of individualizing the gaming of people's psychology - without transparent disclosure or a required opt-in.
Agreed. They were also happy to give up a US citizens to the CCP in the hope of gaining marketshare in China.
There was a senior whistleblower in Facebook that revealed this a little while ago.
