Mark Zuckerberg's maturity after the scandal
Mark Zuckerberg is considered to be in his "Bill Gates moment" with his mature demeanor, using AI and charity to erase past mistakes.
"Being hit in the face doesn't hurt that much. It just hurts," Mark Zuckerberg told Forbes about his recent style and future direction, starting with his hobby of practicing MMA martial arts.
Spending most of his time running Facebook , now Meta , Zuckerberg was once considered a "childish CEO" when he encountered a series of scandals and handled them with negative personal emotions. But recently, Zuckerberg has shown a series of signs of change, showing more maturity.
"What determines your fate is not your competitors. It's how you perform," Zuckerberg said.
Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Forbes
Zuckerberg will turn 40 in May 2024 and his assets are currently about 106 billion USD. In the 20 years since he created Facebook, he has been surrounded by fans, enemies and antitrust concerns. Bill Gates , co-founder of Microsoft, did the same. According to Forbes , he now appears to be experiencing a "Bill Gates moment".
Gates and Zuckerberg have many similarities. Gates dropped out of Harvard to build one of the most important technology companies in history. He is also a "strange face" who seeks to rise to the top of technology in many ways. And at age 40, the Microsoft co-founder flipped the script by transforming his image into a philanthropist on a global scale.
That's supposedly happening at Zuckerberg.
Important change
Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify and friend of Zuckerberg, described CEO Meta in the past as "arrogant and deceitful", then "marked by cruelty" with the Cambridge Analytica scandal .
"But that brings us to today's Zuckerberg. In public, he is much more authentic," Ek said. "Zuckerberg has learned a lot in the past few years. He has a new fire inside him. He realizes that he needs to act responsibly because of the huge platforms that have been created."
In fact, Zuckerberg still has the "old self", especially his stubbornness with the ambition of the virtual metaverse with tens of billions of dollars of investment that has not yet brought results, but he has made big changes, especially is the adoption of a "martial view of the world". CEO Meta is now more mature, based on a principle in MMA: maturity.
"When you go into a fight, you're not fighting with others, you're fighting with yourself. You try to become a better version of yourself," Zuckerberg said in the interview.
Zuckerberg has the opportunity to do that. At Meta, owning shares with a voting percentage of up to 61% helps him not be removed but also not fully responsible if the company encounters problems.
"Can you rally all the shareholders to vote against Mark?" Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz asked. "No you can not".
Most large-scale businesses avoid letting one person take full control of decisions, but Zuckerberg sees it as a "feature". "There are many companies that have a lot of capital, but their leadership structure or board of directors does not allow them to bet big on the future. We are a founder-controlled company," Zuckerberg said.
This leadership style helps Facebook continuously develop and acquire many other names such as WhatsApp, Oculus or Instagram, despite the risk of being acquired by Yahoo for two billion USD. But when he was at his peak, especially after the 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg began to become arrogant.
From this point on, his social network continuously encountered scandals. In 2014, Facebook's algorithm amplified calls for ethnic violence in Myanmar. In 2016, the Cambridge Analytica case became one of the biggest data scandals. In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook's leadership knew about the harm their products could cause to users, especially minors, but ignored it for profit.
"Zuckerberg's legacy will be a key player in undermining democracy through Facebook. Without Facebook, the world would be completely different, and much better. For one person there are so many opportunities. good society, this is a tragedy," Forbes once commented.
When Zuckerberg grew up
In September 2021, Facebook shares reached their highest level. The company has a capitalization value of nearly 1.1 trillion USD and Zuckerberg is among the 10 richest billionaires in the world with 136 billion USD. He made a bold decision: join the metaverse and change his name to Meta to pursue his ambition.
Over the next 14 months, Meta stock dropped 75%. Zuckerberg's assets at that time were only $33 billion.
Last year, the Meta boss decided to do something different. He did not make harsh statements or half-hearted apologies like before. Instead, he changed direction. The first is to lay off more than 21,000 employees at the end of 2022 and early 2023.
"Last year, we made some really difficult decisions. Obviously, it wasn't something I wanted to do," he admitted. "But we still try to get the company up and running with two goals in mind. One is to operate more efficiently and build good products, faster. The second is to make sure we have enough finance to compensate for possible difficulties in pursuing AI and the metaverse".
To date, that vision has not changed. The company currently has an operating loss of about $40 billion due to the metaverse, but Zuckerberg is not giving up. Instead, he tweaked things to make things more trendy by integrating more AI.
The new move was positively received by investors. Meta's stock price has more than tripled since its bottom in late 2022. This year, analysts expect revenue to rise 14% to nearly $133 billion and profits to rise 50% to $34 billion.
For Zuckerberg, the metaverse now includes not only VR/AR but also AI. Just as Gates considers AI as important as the Internet, Zuckerberg sees the popularization of AI as a transformative event. The company has created the large language model LLaMA 2, which is expected to appear on many Meta products in the near future.
"AI will handle everything," Zuckerberg said.
Meta boss also admitted that AI is one of the costly gambles towards the future, but did not give up. "It will take a long time to get a complete VR/AR headset and that is the ultimate goal of Reality Labs," he said. "Someone will ask: What is Meta spending money on? The answer is something like: We are trying to put a supercomputer in a pair of glasses."
Charity goals
Bill Gates started focusing on charity work from the age of 40, but Zuckerberg started even earlier. Since he was 26 years old, he signed a commitment to give away most of his assets like the Microsoft co-founder did.
"Bill strongly believes that if you want to be good at charitable work in a disciplined way and want to be good at it when you're older, you need to practice," Zuckerberg said.
In 2015, before their first daughter was born, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan said they would give 99% of their assets to the charity fund founded by both of them called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). To date, CZI has emerged as one of the world's largest philanthropic efforts, second only to the Melinda French Gates Foundation.
According to Chan, CZI's bold goal is scientific research applied to life, especially the treatment and prevention of diseases by the end of this century. To achieve, CZI plans to build one of the world's largest AI computing clusters for non-profit scientific research, as well as many other research infrastructures.
"Even if only a third of the money I bet on work, I think, that still creates a lot of value in the world," Zuckerberg added.
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