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Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.

He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.

Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.

Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.

What’s innovative about ads?

I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.

That's literally just a con. People have been doing this since the dawn of history. The only unique bit is the sheer scale it's happening at now

Zuckerberg influenced people to hand over their personal data.

His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).

And that is the pure essence of the business model.

Something something even Apple wants 10s of billion$ a year from it… building the big money machine is an innovation of a kind when only a few entities can really do it.

Well, I was trying to be a little charitable

Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.

> Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online

The credit for that belongs to the advertisers not Instagram.

I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.

I guess my argument is that it's not innovative or "hard" to sell ads to people who have given you massive amounts of personal and demographic information (voluntarily!)

Both Google and Amazon know a great deal about me and my purchasing habits. Neither shows me ads that feel very relevant.

Meta’s ad product is incredibly innovative. Just look at the fallout from ATT to see an obvious example

and even that is mostly attributable to Sandberg

Ya but he’s not young anymore. By his own logic he should step down and let a Stanford dropout run things.

Lol. Good one!

Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work.

Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.

Zuckerberg may not be a great strategist, but your two exceptions (WhatsApp and instagram) easily cover all the failures. This is sort of like saying “he’s a bad hitter, except for the grand slam”. Or more appropriately for HN, like saying “he’s a bad venture investor, other than the two fund returning investments.”

Instagram and what’s app were two of the best purchases in American history though. It’s hard to overlook how well they worked out

they really should have been blocked by anti-trust though

>I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former.

Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.

The way the sentence is structured implies he is evil either way. He is either (dim witted and evil) or (just evil).

It's like that old saying: “Don't attribute to malice – or incompetence – that which can be explained by path dependency.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

OK, not the saying. Perhaps should be.

Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.

A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.

Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.

It does not have to be either one. Zuckerberg is simply not a great leader, apparently. This is not surprising. Few people can run big companies. There is a huge spectrum between "dimwitted" and "great CEO".

Personally I believe very few people to be actually evil, but it's a question of definition. To me, you need to be deliberate to be evil. E.g. Elon Musk isn't evil (I think), he's just insane. Peter Thiel might actually be evil, because his actions are deliberate and planned. Zuckerberg also doesn't strike me as evil, just incredibly socially inept (and maybe dimwitted).

But no, you're right, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

I think one reason Google has been so successful is that the original founders did what they knew best and built a great startup, then stepped down and left the company for people who know how to run a corporation. I imagine these are very different skill sets.

> Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.

He saw that coming and slyly prevented it. He cannot be as dimwitted as you suggest.

It's possible for someone to be good at one thing and bad at another.

Zuckerberg isn’t dimwitted but Meta is probably at its peak as a company, lightning probably isn’t going to strike again, Metaverse and Meta AI are going nowhere no matter how much money he throws at it. But he’s not alone. Microsoft can spend and spend and it won’t help Copilot fly.

People gonna start using Bing, any day now. OTOH, Google's got this reputation for killing off products.

Given his war on the whistleblower and what we learned about Meta and Zuckerberg from her he is evil too

Facebook was evil from its very inception. Its origin is a site for non-consensually rating women's faces. Zuckerberg personally called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their personal information and offered to to give that data to his friend. There was never any doubt about what kind of person Zuckerberg is.

If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.

his biggest fear is not being the one to nail the next big thing. it happened with mobile, although that was basically irrelevant in hindsight. he thought it was metaverse, which failed, while in the meantime it was actually the new AI cycle, which he was late on / lost by the time llama 4 flopped.

i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?

I think Elon owns a lot of real estate in these guys’ heads. When you have $200B+ in the bank, little else matters others than being seen as a titan of industry IMO. I think the fact that Musk has Tesla and Spacex (even with all his extra curricular activities) makes a guy like Zuckerberg seethe that he’s just “the internet websites guy”.

Musk is not in their heads, the guy who died in 2011 is in their heads. You know the founder of Apple…

Yeah. Its crazy really. His legacy still carries Apple to new highs. And they will continue doing so, Tim did a great job preserving the values at Apple whilst scaling.

The thing is that metas massive consumer user base means that they haven’t lost the ai race I think. They don’t need to run the whole customer acquisition rat race. They’ve already got billions of customers who they can have using models within a month, they just need to keep pushing to create a model people are happy to use. Metas product compliments uniquely well with ai I think so they’re never really out of it until their users leave.