I agree that when it comes to vision, he doesn't have much. But he is - from shareholders perspective - an excellent CEO and steward of both a growing and a large business and he excels at reading the market, see what works and then bulldoze his company into first place. I think he fails at foreseeing the future, e.g, he bought Instagram and beat SnapChat at their own game, but when he tried to invent the future in Metaverse he failed miserably.
> The IG and Whatsapp Acquisitions? I mean when you have all that insider knowledge (years of deep knowledge of the product space), it was an inevitable ploy to acquire a monopoly at whatever price - serving billions of people at scale was always going to lead to tremendous cash flows.
That is such a reckon.
He did buy a tiny startup for an almost unheard of amount of money, and totally made bank on it. Everybody thought, at the time, that he overpaid for Instagram and he proved to the world that Instagram sold themselves short.
> Then during the high-growth phase of FB, he relied on a team of individuals who cared nothing but running scientific experiments with large amounts of data - again nothing he did there.
That is exactly what a good CEO does. There is a thousand ways he could have stewarded Facebook and he decided to invest heavily in data science experiments and it paid off.
I also think it is worth to point to how MySpace threw away their lead: They tried monetizing early and hard after the Murdoch takeover. They limited photo uploads to curb costs. Meanwhile Zuckerberg managed to convince investors to keep running Facebook without _any_ revenue streams, and give people unlimited photo uploads.
> He brought in Sheryl to run the show w.r.t forming the business model and operations.
Again, that is what a good CEO does.
I really don't believe that the success of Facebook, now Meta, just happened to him.