Fire Mark Zuckerberg

It’s a public company. Yes, I know he still owns the majority of it so it’s not like he’s violating the law by grinding it into the ground but still. It’s woven into the fabric of modern life for better or worse (worse) and I think it’s fair to write an article saying “This man is doing a bad job running it”.

> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

At the point where the machine that is built starts having very real external effects.

Facebook has been used for artificially amplifying some incredibly extremist social movements.

It is a reasonable expectation to put some limits on that in the same way that we would want to put some limits on say… a family owned pharma company that actively encouraged doctors to prescribe addictive drugs.

He built it alone? Just him? Why does he need so many tens of thousands of employees then? Just because I initiate something doesn't mean I fully own it.

You make an interesting point. I initially do think there is a scale where someone should not be allowed to just destroy something just because it's theirs. In the same way the US government has eminent domain to stop someone from hoarding land that serves the greater good, I think there needs to be a similar process for a corporation that is has more influence than many countries. I don't think Facebook is necessarily there or doing something bad enough to warrant anything like that, but I do think that threshold exists where the people can say "thanks for this incredibly valuable thing, but your right to destroy it is significantly less important the benefit we receive from it so we'll take it from here." For example, what if Google just said "we're tired. We're deleting all your emails and documents and websites and domains and we're closing down tomorrow." Shouldn't someone be able to step in and say that you don't get to destroy so much value for absolutely no reason?

It's not controversial. It's just factually wrong.

Public company has different rules than private company. He now has fiduciary duty to other owners. It's true that he has locked in majority of votes, but that's only because Meta has dual class structure.

It's unfortunate that it's possible to build this kind of monstrosities with dual class stocks.

That's not how a public company is supposed to work. Once Mark sold a single share of the company to someone else, he is obligated to make the business successful.

Maybe he is trying to establish a grand sweeping narrative arc, like the rise, decline, and eventual fall of the Roman empire

> He still owns the majority of it

Not quite, although he controls the majority of votes due to the controversial dual class shares. Owning shares in Meta/Facebook is really owning shares in Zuckerberg Inc. He has total control, your share ownership means nothing. Investing in Meta is nothing other than an investment in him and his management.

This is a relatively unusual situation (although Google was similar) and I believe the SEC don't like these structures and they don't really happen anymore.

Most other company's don't have these absurd structures and so an investor has a right to an opinion. So while I agree with the parent in relation to Meta, it is not a normal situation, and it not "right".

> Facebook has Class A shares and Class B shares. Investors hold Class A shares, but Mark Zuckerberg holds Class B shares, which have 10 votes each. His shares represent roughly 14% of Facebook's economic ownership but control nearly 60% of the voting rights.

https://www.wyrick.com/news-insights/what-is-a-dual-class-st...

I mean, I don’t know where you’d draw the hard line in terms of user count, but it’s definitely somewhere before half of the human race.

Once that many people use your products I would argue there is a moral imperative to do right by those people. Yes, at that scale, people other than the original builder/owner do have the right to make demands.

At the extreme, the demise of Microsoft would trigger an immediate and prolonged crisis response to everyone whose IT systems depend on it (i.e. essentially everyone, either directly or indirectly), both on-prem and for cloud services. At some point it is less about who owns the tree, and more about how much of the forest it will take down with it if the owner shows up and chops it down.

Facebook is not exactly at Microsoft scale on this, but it would still require an enormous about of human effort to reconstitute all the organizations, event planning infrastructure, relationships etc. that people currently manage via IG and Facebook.

> He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him.

Sheryl Sandberg, the person responsible for actually making Facebook profitable, would like to have a word...

> He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.

If we transpose this to the medieval period, you could say the same thing about many kings who built their kingdoms by invading their neighbours. The problem, as others have pointed out, is that the number of stakeholders is huge. Some people make their living on Meta's platform so his decisions can have far-reaching consequences.

I would argue that Meta should never have been allowed to get this big in the first place. Allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions was a mistake.

Minority shareholders still have rights to good governance... so yes... they can make these demands, but are unlikely to prevail.

When someone else owns a majority of voting shares of the company they get to make demands of how it's run.

Unfortunately for regular investors in Facebook, their shares are each worth 1/10th of the votes of Zuckerberg's special Class B shares, and if they wanted to have a say in anything they probably should've invested in a company where the CEO/founder doesn't hold a huge pile of special voting shares.

A very good starting point would be when it started harming people. This is not a difficult question.

>> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

This is a pretty weird take. Do you apply the same logic to citizens of a country? I mean, they're just one vote, what right do they have to make demands of a country they only joined 20/30/50/70 years ago? Meta isn't some plucky little privately held startup. Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity combined own more than Zuckerberg, and those funds are primarily the savings of individuals and pension plans, so I think people do have legitimate grounds to make demands. He's maintained control without ownership, and I think this makes him extra worthy of criticism. He's highly leveraged and gambling with far more than his own outcome.

He didn't build that company, him and thousands of talented professionals built that company to where it is now. I'm not saying his contributions weren't a major part of that, but lets not act like he alone made this happen and this company is his alone to destroy, including all those jobs.

Zuck has the singular moral obligation to pile drive Meta deep into the earth.

Spectacularly.

To such a degree as to trigger a permanent social media winter. Dragging the parade of freemium, attention economy, dopamine hacking, panopticon, and manufactured outrage biz models down too.

Dorsey cowardly delegated that task to Musk. Which is probably for the best; like with all his manias, Musk will go above and beyond anything Dorsey could imagine, much less managed.

Any nominations for antihero(s) to warp TikTok into the sun?

"At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?"

Well, presumably the point when they no longer own it and turn it into a public company with shareholders that are going to go down with the $500b ship.

A quick google says that Mark owns 13.4%, not a majority of the company.

So he has a pretty large voice and might be the largest single shareholder but it's no longer his -- it's not his prerogative or risk to take, if the board decides it's not. And there's a good argument that the board should replace him.

Frankly, I think Facebook burning to the ground would be a net positive for society. Let the man keep doing his thing.

And beyond prerogative, it's pretty clear at worst he's wandering his way down. "Driving down" would look more like what is going on at the other blue social media company.

>At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

Zuck still has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders, who expect a return on their investment. Running Meta into the ground because of his own hubris is not acceptable behavior from the CEO of a publicly traded company.

> He built that $500B company.

He did have a bit of help along the way. Even if their contributions were smaller, it's sick to pretend they're zero.

> He still owns the majority of it.

AIUI he owns the majority of the voting rights but not of the total shares. He still has a duty to act in the interests of the shareholders as a group, and can be sued if he does not. Beyond the merely legal to the moral, he has duties to other stakeholders as well, and to society.

> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

"Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose." Others contributed. Others are affected. Those facts give them some right, however small, to make such demands. The only situation in which someone has sole right to make every possible decision is an utter vacuum. Does he or the company operate in a vacuum?

I agree the lack of commitment is weird. Microsoft stuck to Bing for a long time before it now having a shot of becoming something relevant to MS’ bottom line (i.e. > 1% of MS revenue)

I think it's a unique artifact of the way that software work is done.

Software is, at its core, an intellectual exercise. When you start up a new multi-billion dollar thing, there's very little physical manifestation. There isn't a sprawling factory, a company town, a bustling assembly line...

There's just a piece of software. Building it takes a lot of effort, but not like effort effort the way you have to move the ground and get machines in to build a factory.

So even though walking away from a massive software project means, in dollars, the same as abandoning a giant factory, it isn't legible in the same psychological way. If you're Intel, and your new process node isn't working the way you expected, do you board up the factory? No, of course not! It's a gigantic thing that you can look at and say "wow, we spent a billion dollars on this." But if you're Facebook, come monday morning, you can just tell all of your ICs -- "hey, you guys aren't working on this any more."

This is kind of related to how quickly money flows into software. Money come money go. Software come, software go. Not so in the physical world.

That's my theory.

That also means -- if you treat your software projects like a big factory, you can actually distinguish yourself. Like many on HN, I am very hesitant to sign up for a new google service, even if it's really really cool and I would pay for it! Because there is no factory, there is no machines, there's just information, information that can stop being improved tomorrow.

How does your career grow if you launch a product, vs grow or maintain an existing one?

Really contrasts to PlayStation doesn’t it?

Seemingly they are more committed to tight financial KPIs, which will never allow them the flexibility to successfully traverse the moat of their own bad PR in certain product niches.

My understanding (as someone who worked at Meta and sold a startup to a large corporation) is that, in this particular case, money-printing giants are cursed by their own blessing.

The thing that prints them money limits them in terms of what margins and growth rates are acceptable. As a public company, your metrics are all bundled for simplicity into EBITDA, profit margins, etc. Investors buying your stock and your existing investors care a lot about these numbers.

So when your new product has a lower margin or a lower growth rate, this affects your whole company's metrics. This is why they try to isolate such projects into "labs" and the like, and this is why it's challenging to move from this "lab" into the main company portfolio. Your metrics need to be as high as your main product line - this one-in-a-million exceptional thing that made you huge. Which is pretty impossible.

Basically, the bar is very high, and not killing it and maturing it instead has very negative externalities in most cases. And so, it goes to the history dump.

Very unfortunate, and as a startup founder, I'd think twice about who to sell to. Also, as a startup founder, I know that often there's not much choice.

My thoughts exactly while reading this. In addition to his hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate, Zuck also lives in this guy’s head rent free.

He's just showing off how many of his predictions have come true.

Yes, agreed. Further, this has always been the case, and it's been discussed since the Facebook IPO.

The rules of the game are clear. Someone who doesn't like this game is free to walk away and do something else (most public companies don't have a CEO with majority voting power). Complaining without acknowledging the rules seems like misdirected energy.

Exactly.

The author should do some reading on Facebook's share ownership structure and come back to tell their readers on who owns the majority of the voting power and then just delete this entire article; since honestly, I stopped reading when I read the title.

Good luck on "Fire Mark Zuckerberg" without his 'say so', unless he does it himself.

This. Owning ~20% of normal stocks and ~60% of voting stocks shouldn't be allowed for public company. At some point company becomes just CEO's toy to do things they want, in this case "metaverse".

He elects a majority of the board members through his shares. In fact, the board can indeed fire him even if he (as a member of the board) votes against the rest of the board. I wouldn't characterize the current board as being Mark loyalists https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/?section=b....

Even as a controlling shareholder, the ex-CEO could take months to go through the process of nominating new board members and holding a shareholder election according to the corporate bylaws before his new hand-picked board members could hire him back.

I agree those things are easier (or more accessible) now, but I don't think that was the major thing holding back people from using the metaverse.

I think hardware is the biggest barrier to Zuckerberg's view of the metaverse. It's not good enough yet.

A close second is that the users and the interesting content are largely in other non-VR metaverses (like Roblox, Fortnite). Making it easy to make content probably benefits those just as much.

Starting to work on the experiences in 2d-screen-land while working on the VR hardware in parallel looks like the move that Facebook missed.

Megacorps can (thankfully) barely swim in new waters. These guys didn’t even start out in a completely new field.

The hubris when they think they can just create a new entire platform which people have no experience with, no mistakes to learn from etc. Especially so when the ones taking the wheel are anxious upper-mid PMs which are used to AB-test a color changed button for engagement improvements. It may sound harsh, but I can assure you that many, many of these decision makers haven’t even played Minecraft/Roblox etc and have no idea what would be compelling to “real” people. That’s why you get a remote office in the metaverse, because that’s at least one thing they live and breathe.

In my view, novel areas need grassroots “see what sticks” type of innovation, often by tiny teams/passion oriented nerds. I think the gaming world, with all its faults, understand this MUCH better than the FAANGS, because they simply have to.

Exactly.

The task ahead is to find something new that brings in a billion or so in profit per quarter, with headspace to several billions. And it needs to be a kind of winner-takes-all success that cannot be replicated easily.

Does the author have any idea how fucking hard this is? It's pretty much a once in a decade event: search, social networking, smartphones, AI. And most of these are ad-driven. So where do you go when you reach peak-ad?

The idea that because a company has lots of money and engineers it should be easy to launch one product success after the other at this scale, is insane. It should be thought of as near impossible.

Right.. I mean in my book only a disgruntled investor would be pissed about something like Facebook burning down. And investors have a moral responsibility, so..

Yes, the only person who can fire Mark is Mark.

Yes, no. Regardless of how many shares he owns, the CEO can be fired by the board of directors.

If that CEO happens to be a controlling shareholder who wants his job back, he would have to nominate a new slate of board members and schedule a shareholder vote according to the corporate bylaws (that are in turn regulated by the state of incorporation), which is a process that could take months to finish.

Presumably the new directors that the ex-CEO elects would hire him back, though it is worth noting that the directors have a duty to represent the best interests of all shareholders, not just those who voted them in. So if the CEO was fired for legitimate reasons and the directors act according to their duties, the ex-CEO should not be hired back.

> One thing I always wondered was why Facebook never started their own cloud services offering like Amazon did with AWS?

I think the article addressed that:

>I’ll get right to it: Mark Zuckerberg is an ineffective, incompetent, and directionless executive, one bereft of complete or concrete ideas. He has entirely failed to innovate since the very beginning of Facebook — a product that he never envisioned as a business — and nearly 20 years later, he appears completely and utterly out of ideas.

Right? This article makes a good argument for why he should stay on if anything.

But will the competitors allow for third party worlds connecting to their headset... This will be a walled garden.

Facebook makes a lot of money. Twitter doesn't. Jack Dorsey seems just as bad, maybe worse, his politicking and backstabbing had surely hurt Twitter a lot more than his management ever bore fruit?

> The same could be said about Jack Dorsey

The same should be said of Dorsey. And Musk. And also Pichai, while we're at it.

What's your point?

I am no expert on Jack Dorsey, but have been continually impressed by his ability to answer sensible relevant questions, without actually saying anything. And without giving away anything to hang follow up questions on.

He has mastered the passive equivalent of repeating "Nothing to see here", in ASMR voice, over and over.

I bought the stock in the $30's, so I'm not complaining. It's had a good run over the past 10 years, so might sell soon.

Mark controlled nearly 60% of the votes for meta when ur IPOd. He’s be a fool to let go of that level of control, and if that is still true the board works for him. Not the other way around.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...

At best the only leverage on him from the market is in reducing the stocks price, but it is not obvious to me how much that actually matters to him.

Zuckerberg singlehandedly owns the majority of the voting power, he can focus on whatever he feels like. The board and the share price are just along for the ride, getting sued notwithstanding.