Mark Zuckerberg’s big deal has been obvious for 17 years, but no one wants to admit it

Imagine if you had only ever had one job since you were a teenager and it made you extraordinarily rich and powerful – way beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

In other words, imagine being Mark Zuckerberg. Now imagine that you are completely wrong about something that could ultimately mean the end of Facebook.

Here’s why it’s important now. There are only a few forces on the planet powerful enough to take on Facebook. National governments could to be among them, may be. But if not, we take a look at the other tech behemoths.

As it turns out, one of those behemoths, Apple, has declared war on Facebook, while another, Google, appears to be gearing up to join the fight. My colleague Jason Aten recently did a great job recounting the battle:

• Apple is set to change its privacy rules so that app developers will have to seek permission before following most users.
• This applies squarely to Facebook, where the whole business model is basically about following users in order to sell “personalized ads”.

Apple’s move could be an existential threat; at least Facebook seems to think so. I can’t predict how it will all turn out.

But, a lot of people could have predicted that something like this would eventually happen. The reason? It’s simple and it’s a byproduct of Zuckerberg’s runaway success.

In short, like any successful leader, Zuckerberg has always run the risk of surrounding himself with people who owe their success to him, and who therefore cannot effectively say “no” to him.

Because of his track record – again, having only really done one thing: build Facebook – he’s probably even more at risk from this phenomenon than many others. In retrospect, it was obvious from the start, 17 years ago this month.

We can see what Facebook looked like back then, as Zuckerberg built the first iteration in a Harvard dorm, and the student newspaper wrote about it.

The articles are still online: “Hundreds of people sign up for new Facebook website” and “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: the genius behind thefacebook.com”, for example. Review them now, and it becomes clear that Zuckerberg never had a normal life.

He never had a boss. He never had to apply for a job. He never had to worry about paying rent or paying student loans. He never had to work where he didn’t want to, or in circumstances and in an environment he didn’t create himself.

In other words, he never had to listen to anyone else. And it always, always, always paid off. At least until now.

For the sake of argument, imagine Zuckerberg is 100% wrong about how Facebook should respond to Apple. How would he know? Who is it around him that he would respect, who would oppose, and to whom he could turn, trust and respect?

I don’t pretend to know. I imagined that Bill Gates might somehow play the part in his life, given their surprisingly similar backgrounds – and also that I think Gates acknowledges how Warren Buffett was that kind of outside mentor for him.

But if anyone fills that role for Zuckerberg, it has remained obscure to me.

A colleague pointed out how he was on Clubhouse recently, and he reportedly described Facebook’s immersion in virtual reality and augmented reality, and how this could impact remote working.

His idea was that before long, Facebook would allow people to virtually appear with each other, almost as if they were in the same physical room, instead of talking through screens like Zoom. No one would ever really need to go anywhere.

“We should teleport, not transport ourselves,” he reportedly said.

I don’t really know what it really means, but it sounds a bit dystopian, right away Black mirror– a technological solution that would aspire life to what it means to have real fulfilling relationships with other people.

Look, I’m not one of those people who hate Facebook to the ends of the earth. I take the good with the bad: on the one hand, my college girlfriend and I reconnected on the platform; we are now married and have a daughter.

I’m also very clear that I wouldn’t have done as well as Zuckerberg if you had taken the stupid things I was 19 or 20 in, extrapolated them and told me I would still be doing them. [censored] years later.

But I also think that it is possible to keep in mind two competing things at the same time:

• gratitude for all the positive things social media has promoted, and
• the skepticism and even fear of what happens as the goals of the public for-profit company behind it seem less and less aligned with what people really want.

People learn to hold these competing views through hardships, setbacks, and seeing that good things come out of bad, while sometimes bad things come out of good.

They learn them by sometimes having to do things they don’t want to do and recognizing that no matter how successful they are, there are other people they can learn from.