Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He Is Accountable as Company Preps for Mass Layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He Is Accountable as Company Preps for Mass Layoffs

wsj.com

49 pointsahiknsr56 comments

Him saying he's accountable and not actually being held accountable is not really being "accountable".

Well, he still owns >10% of the company. Accountability when you're a significant owner, not to mention a founder, doesn't just mean that you get fired and sent away from the table.

And has >50% of the votes via special shares. He is basically unaccountable.

So what does it mean?

He's really doing them all a tremendous favor, and he'd just like to see a little gratitude.

lol of course

He's losing 10s of billions, that seems like a very real way in which he's being held accountable.

Once you're worth north of a few hundred million dollars, what practical, concrete, difference does a few billion added - or removed - from one's personal wealth make?

This is why being a billionaire should be functionally illegal. Tax away all of that wealth. It is immoral that we allow people to control that much wealth. Vast wealth should be under democratic control.

Tax away… all the Meta stock? We’re talking about ownership of assets, not about income. What do we do when we take his stock - do we sell it back on the market crashing the price or do we establish government ownership of every large company? How did you come up with 1 billion as the appropriate number? Do we get to decide that part democratically?

You are presupposing that Meta should be allowed to exist at its present scale and market share. I am not.

Then what are you proposing? You didn't answer a single one of GPs questions about the details of what you're proposing. You're just throwing out vague one-liners and expecting everyone else to see how this plan of yours is supposed to work.

> It is immoral that we allow people to control that much wealth

In my mind, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights. Maybe you don't share this view, but quite a few people do.

Is being a billionaire necessary for any of those or even related? Possibly on the liberty angle but someone controlling that much wealth is decreasing the liberty of everyone else in the economy

It's the pursuit of happiness. Zuckerberg is pursuing his own happiness. You claim we, as a society, have to curtail that at a given level. I for one don't subscribe to that theory.

I’ll be very frank on the fact that if your pursuit of happiness requires millions to billions of others to suffer, I will ascribe zero importance to what makes you happy.

Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose and all that. I’m also gonna quickly cut ahead on your libertarian style argument here and ask you how you think negative externalities generated by individuals should be handled. If your opinion is to ignore them because you should be allowed to do whatever you want, then I will treat you the same way you treat others and completely ignore your political opinions.

I legitimately hope you surprise me

> I will ascribe zero importance to what makes you happy.

You are saying zero, but it appears to me you ascribe quite a lot of importance. Enough to propose to put limits on what he is allowed to do.

Externalities and tip of the nose? I fully concur with you here. If he's hurting anyone, he should be punished. But the externality you are talking about here is a very vague one, that him being rich makes the life of other people in some sense harder.

And that may be so.

But then, maybe not. The way you are saying it, all rich people are guilty. I'm against blanket statements like that. Maybe some rich people are guilty, and some are not. How will you tell which?

How do you account for positive externalities? Musk did more for the advancement of electric vehicles than any other person on Earth. And even more for the space exploration renaissance. Does he get any brownie points for that?

Musk did not do anything for the advancement of electric vehicles. the Tesla Engineers did that, a company he bought into and was operating without him.

Jesus libertarians drive me up a wall.

> the Tesla Engineers did that

For some reason the Lucid Air engineers are not doing the same. Or the engineers at Rivian, or Fisker, or Lotus, or Koenigsegg. Are those engineers really so bad?

> a company he bought into and was operating without him.

When Musk took over Tesla, half a year after it was founded, Tesla was producing exactly zero cars per month. And per year. And next year, and the next, and the next.

After that they started selling the Roadster. Many other businessmen would have been perfectly happy to have a boutique car company focused on delivering luxury sports cars at a good margin.

The decision to move downmarket and towards mass production was not an engineering decision. All the Tesla engineers deserve zero credit for that. That's a bold business gamble. Musk bet the house, and won.

It's very easy to claim leaders are just leaches sucking the blood of the workers who work for them. And we should confiscate their wealth, because they don't deserve it. It's a bit more sobering to accept that some of these people do actually bring something to the table. Something that an additional 1000 or 10000 engineers in the company can't bring. Look at Microsoft under Balmer and then Nadela. Same engineers. Just a different leader. Or look at Apple before Jobs came back onboard to save it from bankruptcy in 1997. Same engineers, just a new leader with a different vision and different drive.

Finally, welcome to HN. In time you'll come to appreciate the level of discussion around here. A good read to get familiar with the etiquette is [1]. It's all really, really good, and this one paragraph in particular

  When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> How do you account for positive externalities?

The market did by assigning them enough wealth to not have to care about any needs anymore. I’m saying there should be a cap on that since eventually they accumulate enough wealth to distort the market and harm everyone else by their existence, like a financial singularity.

The idea that you’re asking what extra brownie points you can assign to people who are so wealthy that they can buy a company as a joke and then get rid of thousands of jobs, already implies that you see zero value in human lives and are full on the lolbertarian train

It’s looks like I remain unsurprised

Society often prevents people from pursuing their happiness, when such pursuit would be harmful to others. This doesn't mean the pursuit of happiness isn't important, only that it isn't an absolute.

So it’s somehow more moral to gang up and take someone else’s property by force?

Can you explain your idea of morality?

Yup, it was done when abolishing slavery, you just need to think outside of the box on what "property" means to you :)

And he'll still have billions. Real accountability would be being removed from his position (which I know isn't possible or at least extremely difficult). He doesn't care about the money, he cares about control.

And his lifestyle would change...how exactly? And where do I sign up for that kind of accountability?

Equating accountability to his lifestyle changing makes no sense to me.

Sorta, but I have trouble taking a bad outcome that is "your great-grandchildren still won't have to work for a living, unless you choose to make them" as, like, real consequences.

If someone who's already got $10m in the bank would happily trade their success for your "consequences", I dunno, just seems... fake. Like playing poker with quarters—sure you "care" but losing doesn't actually hurt in any meaningful way if your total stakes were $10 or whatever.

Yes, he’s a billionaire and he’ll be fine anyway. Does accountability mean something only if his life is ruined or he loses everything? I don’t get that line of thinking at all.

Not ruin but at least something more tangible to lose than just paying your way out of it. Like losing control of the business, decision making powers, could be anything else that he doesn't have vast resources to plug the hole immediately.

Pure financial consequences are meaningless to the ultra-rich.

This is a good call. Losing, or giving up, something that you can't trivially get back in short order purely by throwing money at it and telling a lackey to go fix it, is an actual consequence. Needing to add together slightly fewer poor countries' GDPs to equal his net worth is meaningless.

I mean, if my waking up to find a flat tire on my car causes a lot more actual harm to my life than his "accountability", seems pretty weak and that's still leaves a lot of room short of "life ruined" or "loses everything".

[EDIT] I'm not calling for him to be jailed or something, I'm pointing out that "accountability" that amounts to going from fabulously rich to... still fabulously rich, ain't shit. Hell, part of the motivation for getting rich is precisely that it insulates you from ever experiencing actual harm, so it's entirely expected that this would be the case.

Just like we've seen the word "literally" transform into meaning roughly the same a "figuratively, but very strongly" we'll might see the word "accountable", start to mean "no consequences for me, but I do want people to think I feel bad (but don't worry, I don't)".

While I don't agree with the sentiment in this incident, the "accountable" word often means like "I wish I could make this better by doing absolutely nothing".

What would you consider being held accountable?

Sure, resigning is an atomic option, for a CEO, founder, board member and person having controlling amount of votes. Is there anything else that you'd consider as true to that statement?

Well he do something meaningful - say pay a full years wages for everyone laid off from his personal funds

You think he should donate $1,000,000,000+ to the employees his company needs the least?

If the layoffs are indeed his fault (and not his employees, as he says in his announcements), why not?

Call it an "punitive fine" to stop him from making this same mistake.

well yes, he brought them in - many if not most were probably just fine in the previous jobs. If he truly feels accountable for what's happening to the people being laid off why shouldn't he.

It's not like he's depriving them of a job, they can go work somewhere else.

Think of it another way: accountability is answering to someone. As the majority shareholder and CEO, who is Zuckerberg accountable to? Nobody, really. He might say "I am accountable to the billions of Facebook users", but of course that's lip service: try scheduling a meeting with him to review his performance and put him on an improvement plan.

He has arranged the company so that he is not accountable to anybody, so him saying he is accountable is either a lie, or a misuse of that term.

If he does nothing, then eventually none of his employees will have a job.

Being accountable could look like taking a hit himself - dropping his pay or stock option grants or a portion of his golden parachute, etc.

If this isn't happening, he's not being held accountable.

sure, but nobody forced him to hire 87,000 people in the first place, to work on bullshit projects. That's what he's "holding himself accountable" for. That's a lot of friggin people!!

> at least four months of salary as severance

That is very generous severance. Financially it was worth working for Facebook even when you were hired a year ago.

Funny how even if your position (you believe) is relatively secure, this news sucks the air out of the working environment and everyone has it in the back of their mind even as they continue holding meetings, etc.

Specific info (1st hand knowledge):

Concur has had a suspicious outage today, preventing people from submitting final reimbursement claims. As well as a general hold on purchasing requests (people I suppose trying to get their benefits in).

A mysterious slowdown in meetings with director level leaders, etc. and certain things (project plans, kickoff meetings) being asked to wait for some more information before publishing.

Shitposting forum blowing up with half-joking memes.

https://archive.ph/IeS1X

Layoffs are always unfortunate, but didn't his company have the bright idea of making meetings all day into a virtual Second Life world where you can actually _see_ the other person's dog barking on the call? The experimental parts of the company hired a lot of those people and now can't keep them.

If he gives outgoing employees months of health care, all their PTO, etc. then what is the issue?

The thing he seems to miss is that people that have business meetings over Zoom/Teams do not actually look at each other much. They're looking at a shared screen showing an Excel sheet, some slide deck, code, whichever. The video feed is just a nice little touch.

Depending on company culture, quite a few meetings may be audio-only, further proving the point that seeing each other really isn't that important. It's nice, but not exactly the main purpose of the meeting.

Update:

> employees who lose their jobs will be provided with at least four months of salary as severance

OK yeah for a decently skilled software engineer, that's 1 year of free rent in a very nice place in San Francisco. Those not laid off may wish they were.

Responsible, but not really accountable. Accountable would mean falling on his sword.

Interesting:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountable

1: subject to giving an account : ANSWERABLE held her accountable for the damage

2: capable of being explained : EXPLAINABLE … leaving aside variations accountable as printer's errors … Peter Shaw

Does "accountable" imply there's a price to pay for the person who is held accountable? (Wondering aloud, not challenging you.)

I think in context and common usage "accountable" means facing some consequences for your actions or mistakes. Watching your net worth shrink (on paper) counts in some respect, but Zuckerberg won't lose his job, his benefits, have to move, or have to scramble to find a job in this climate.

I suppose we can call the Meta situation "capable of being explained" too. That won't really help the people getting laid off in the next week or two.

https://archive.ph/dIJ6A

Newer version with more details: https://archive.ph/IeS1X

going through captcha hell with that one, did about 10 of these and it doesn't stop

CEOs saying they're accountable is just another way of saying sorry (not really) and being polite. This is just business and as long as reasonable severance packages are paid, employees will be willing to work there when times are better.

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