Zuckerberg could retire at any point and do the exact same thing Tom is doing. It's clear he wants to continue to be the CEO of Facebook, that it's something he values more than traveling and taking pretty photos for instagram. Seems to me like being one of the most powerful people in the world is a more interesting prospect for him.
Uh, that's not the point at all.
Maybe it's overly simplistic, but the point of the article is that Tom went from being on top to having his company become a punchline. But in retrospect, having $650 million dollars and not a care in the world is quite possibly a better place to be in than the guy who's worth tens of billions, but it is spearheading one of the most socially destructive organizations on the planet.
It's obviously arguable, but in my opinion, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg's legacy so far, is a big fat net negative on the world.
At it's best Facebook offers me a paltry and superficial insight into the lives of people that I don't really care about enough to talk to on a regular basis.
At it's worst, Facebook feeds social insecurity and anxiety; builds and sells terrifyingly accurate personality profiles of people; deepens partisanship and tribal tendencies; and has become one of the premier conduits for falsehoods and propaganda.
I won't demonize Zuckerberg because I can't presume to understand his motives; and I will give him the benefit of the doubt that what he wants to do is make the world a better place. But so far, like giving a time machine to a chimpanzee, he's really making a fucking mess of things.
There's a bunch of negative externalities. I don't want to be a user anymore. I will share things I care enough to share with my friends directly, not through an abstraction of a "wall" where an opaque algorithm decides who sees what. It's incredibly impersonal. It is by no means "connecting" us. Facebook sows far more division than connection.
They've lost their way, sure. But I think they could fix things fairly easily - reduce the amount of advertising, provide a way to hide all "shared" posts and "someone tagged you", "remember this day 5 years ago" etc.
They won't do that but... you know.