I'm curious as to why you hold Zuck in such regard. I agree he is far more palatable than Elon, but my sense is that he is fundamentally self serving and self aggrandizing. I'm not as plugged into the bay as you are, but I feel like in my mind there is a firm distinction between the CEOs who eventually give a damn about their fellow man (e.g. Gates/Collison), those who just want to run a good business (Bezos/Cook), those who aspire to a vision (Jobs/Dario), and those whose first allegiance is their ego (Musk/Zuck).
I'm curious if you disagree with the dichotomy itself, where I put Zuck, or both.
> I'm curious as to why you hold Zuck in such regard
Yea it's a good question. Many smart people disagree with me, so ymmv.
I think that social media is a particularly hard area to build a business. Social media is rife with problems, but they are all fundamentally *human* problems. People lie, and misrepresent things, and scheme, and are generally dicks. They're xenophobic and hate change and hate 'the other'. They stalk each other and harass each other and sometimes drive each other to literal insanity. And social media exacerbates all of these problems by ~8 billion.
Because people are people, they will not have the emotional maturity and introspection necessary to fix these problems, or even recognize the root. Instead, they will blame the technology. And the person who runs that technology has a massive amount of power -- power to influence others, to grift, to generally take advantage of the masses.
And, like, you can't *not* have social media. It's a natural outgrowth of the web. It falls out immediately from the idea of 'sharing websites'. And people really like social media. They can't help but like it. Social media has a lot of really positive upsides -- people forget how much of the 2000s were filled with stories about grandparents reconnecting with long lost friends or whatever. So, you have this thing that *everyone* wants, that a lot of people could easily build a successful business out of, but also anyone who does is raked over the coals and shit on by everyone from world governments to your grandma.
Meta has, across all apps, 4 billion MAU. That is an immense amount of power. And in that time, afaict, Zuck has earnestly tried to steer his company towards creating a mostly safe, mostly equitable, and mostly earnest environment where people can get all the good things about social media. I don't think he's succeeded all the time, but I cannot imagine someone else who, given that level of responsibility (at that age!) would have done nearly as well. And with Musk, we have a direct comp. Musk, to me, is what Zuck could have been. I think Zuck does not get nearly enough credit for the work that he has put in to ensure that his platform does not devolve the way twitter so obviously has.
Separate from this, I know several people who are connected to these CEOs in their personal lives. And everything I have ever heard about Zuck from the people who know him is overwhelmingly positive. He's a nerd. He cares about his employees. He cares about his family (sadly a rarity among his peers). He takes criticisms of his platforms to heart and tries to fix things. He is a *decent* person. I can't think of any *personal* stories of people really hating Zuck (besides, you know, Saverin). Which is surprising, because of course the media would pay a lot for such stories.
So Zuck is working in a thankless space, essentially shouldering the burden of all of humanity's immaturities, and he does so as thoughtfully and ethically as possible. For all this, Zuck gets as a reward "The Social Network" and ten million hit pieces a month.
I don't think Zuck's first allegiance is his ego. If it was, he would act more like Musk. I think Zuck came in with a vision shared by *everyone* in tech at that time: that the internet was going to change humanity for the better by bringing us all closer together. It's not clear to me if Zuck still holds onto this belief, but he has imo performed admirably in trying to minimize the harms of social media in general while emphasizing the places where social media can benefit humanity.
This is possibly quite naive. But if I try and put myself in his place, I think I would have done significantly worse.
I'm curious as to why you hold Zuck in such regard. I agree he is far more palatable than Elon, but my sense is that he is fundamentally self serving and self aggrandizing. I'm not as plugged into the bay as you are, but I feel like in my mind there is a firm distinction between the CEOs who eventually give a damn about their fellow man (e.g. Gates/Collison), those who just want to run a good business (Bezos/Cook), those who aspire to a vision (Jobs/Dario), and those whose first allegiance is their ego (Musk/Zuck).
I'm curious if you disagree with the dichotomy itself, where I put Zuck, or both.
> I'm curious as to why you hold Zuck in such regard
Yea it's a good question. Many smart people disagree with me, so ymmv.
I think that social media is a particularly hard area to build a business. Social media is rife with problems, but they are all fundamentally *human* problems. People lie, and misrepresent things, and scheme, and are generally dicks. They're xenophobic and hate change and hate 'the other'. They stalk each other and harass each other and sometimes drive each other to literal insanity. And social media exacerbates all of these problems by ~8 billion.
Because people are people, they will not have the emotional maturity and introspection necessary to fix these problems, or even recognize the root. Instead, they will blame the technology. And the person who runs that technology has a massive amount of power -- power to influence others, to grift, to generally take advantage of the masses.
And, like, you can't *not* have social media. It's a natural outgrowth of the web. It falls out immediately from the idea of 'sharing websites'. And people really like social media. They can't help but like it. Social media has a lot of really positive upsides -- people forget how much of the 2000s were filled with stories about grandparents reconnecting with long lost friends or whatever. So, you have this thing that *everyone* wants, that a lot of people could easily build a successful business out of, but also anyone who does is raked over the coals and shit on by everyone from world governments to your grandma.
Meta has, across all apps, 4 billion MAU. That is an immense amount of power. And in that time, afaict, Zuck has earnestly tried to steer his company towards creating a mostly safe, mostly equitable, and mostly earnest environment where people can get all the good things about social media. I don't think he's succeeded all the time, but I cannot imagine someone else who, given that level of responsibility (at that age!) would have done nearly as well. And with Musk, we have a direct comp. Musk, to me, is what Zuck could have been. I think Zuck does not get nearly enough credit for the work that he has put in to ensure that his platform does not devolve the way twitter so obviously has.
Separate from this, I know several people who are connected to these CEOs in their personal lives. And everything I have ever heard about Zuck from the people who know him is overwhelmingly positive. He's a nerd. He cares about his employees. He cares about his family (sadly a rarity among his peers). He takes criticisms of his platforms to heart and tries to fix things. He is a *decent* person. I can't think of any *personal* stories of people really hating Zuck (besides, you know, Saverin). Which is surprising, because of course the media would pay a lot for such stories.
So Zuck is working in a thankless space, essentially shouldering the burden of all of humanity's immaturities, and he does so as thoughtfully and ethically as possible. For all this, Zuck gets as a reward "The Social Network" and ten million hit pieces a month.
I don't think Zuck's first allegiance is his ego. If it was, he would act more like Musk. I think Zuck came in with a vision shared by *everyone* in tech at that time: that the internet was going to change humanity for the better by bringing us all closer together. It's not clear to me if Zuck still holds onto this belief, but he has imo performed admirably in trying to minimize the harms of social media in general while emphasizing the places where social media can benefit humanity.
This is possibly quite naive. But if I try and put myself in his place, I think I would have done significantly worse.