Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.
He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
This. Yes.
Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.
Greed
It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.
I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have
They lied to content creators about how much money could be earned by switching to video on FB. This bankrupted multiple businesses, including Collegehumor and FunnyOrDie: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120?l...
Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.
And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"
FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.
You can fool some of the people some of the time...
No, incompetence and naivety.
They were young, dumb and all from the same college/upbringing.
People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to
his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it.
Of course, for those immediately impacted and hurt/angered by his actions I certainly wouldn't blame anybody for venting.
But it would be much more productive to talk about "thing Zuck did good" or "thing Zuck did bad."
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.Google was the next to up the ante in mid-2000s with things like daycare, a ball pit, food, drycleaning. All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.
Food might have been okay by 90s standards, but was pretty mediocre overall until ~2010 when they started redoing all the cafes to have a higher quality food. Still, it was slightly subsidized but not free and many, many employees went offsite or brought food from home.
There was a "coffee pool", where you joined to contribute a dollar or something a week and someone would buy the supplies.
At big companies there were often food trucks. Also a cafeteria, which probably sucked. There might also be a small library where you could hang out and read relevant trade journals.
Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.
This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
Not defending Zuck here, would just like to read about that if possible.
This is legal fiction that has no bearing in the kinds of subjects that it often gets brought up in. Simply put, those responsible for a company (e.g. officers of a corporation) have a fiduciary duty towards its owners (e.g. the shareholders), and it means that the owners would have legal recourse against the officers if they were provably pissing money away on things that don't benefit the company at all.
That latter part is a high bar and critically does not mean that they are, for example, legally required to prioritize quarterly profits over the long-term success of the company or to pay employees as little as possible, as is often mentioned. It just means that officers must take action that furthers the interests of the company in the way that they prudently and reasonably see fit.
Obviously this isn't a legal requirement, but pretty much every CEO would be out of a job if they choose country over company. Shareholders are generally not interested in furthering national geopolitics.
I don't think that's true. Look at all the corporate action about Ukraine for an example of interest in geopolitics - lots of donations, public statements, etc. And then there's companies actually in Ukraine, or next door - when politics gets unstable enough, contributing to the stability/security of the country over the short term of the company looks like the right move. Evaluating when that point is reached is probably about as contentious as any other decision in politics.
You are required to abide by shareholder decisions at official meetings, and generally not act against shareholder interests, but there is absolutely no law stating that you must act to maximize shareholder value. (And it's a damn good thing that's the case; things are bad enough as it is.)
It's not about producing profits it's about doing what the shareholders want.
He might have lost Costco and their low margins, but he picked up an army of high-margin D2C sympathizers who have been shown to be generous with their money (if the cause is right).