Facebook Exec Overshares, Calls WhatsApp Founder "Low Class"

The day was exciting for anyone who cares about the tension between the ultra-rich Big Tech, as two executives have laid a beard on Facebook's management philosophy.

The beef warmed up this morning when Forbes published an interview with WhatsApp founder Brian Acton. Acton left Facebook a year ago – three and a half years after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $ 22 billion. A few months after his departure, he helped lead the charge to #DeleteFacebook and donated $ 50 million to Signal Foundation, which created a competing messaging application, Signal, as well as an encryption protocol used by WhatsApp. In Forbes' Wednesday article, Acton explained why he was so eager to bail out on Facebook that he was ready to also sell $ 850 million in unvested shares.

Acton said the main reason he left was that he disagreed with Facebook's willingness to focus on business analysis tools and targeted ads. And he told Forbes that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, had given priority to monetization over encryption. "I've sold the privacy of my users to a greater advantage," said Acton to Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with it every day.

The article came out two days after Instagram's founders, Kevin Systrom, and Mike Krieger, had left Facebook, a decision that would be linked to their clashes with Zuckerberg. While Instagram executives were more sympathetic in their membership statements (explaining that they wanted to "re-explore our curiosity and creativity") that Acton, the attention Facebook's concern with the former leaders of both companies acquired negative attention to Zuckerberg's leadership.

Well, Facebook and Zuckerberg now have a defender in David Marcus, who leads blockchain efforts on Facebook after a stint at Facebook Messenger. In Marcus' public Facebook publication "The Other Side of History," he said he felt "compelled to write" because of his "memory of events very different from the reality of which I live." have been witness ".

Facebook did not respond to a request from Gizmodo regarding statements by Marcus or Acton. Marcus wrote that Facebook did not ask him to write the post and that it contained his "personal opinions exclusively".

Marcus wrote that Zuckerberg had acceded to the request of the WhatsApp founders for a more spacious desktop layout, even though it "irritated Facebook's people." Regarding the disagreement over encryption, Zuckerberg defended a strong Zuckerberg encryption of the importance of it. And Marcus responded to Acton's comments on Facebook's approach to the WhatsApp business model, writing that Zuckerberg "was protecting WhatsApp for a very long time" and suggested that Acton was "passive-aggressive" in its approach and, and never really went for it. "

Then Marcus dug into:

Finally, call me old. But I find that the attack on the people and society that made you a billionaire, and that you have been unprecedented to protect yourself and accommodate you for years, low-end. It's actually a whole new lower class standard.

He concluded that Facebook improves billions of lives. "Because connecting people is a noble mission and the good far outweighs the good," he wrote.

Despite the dissatisfaction and difference of opinion, there are two lives that have greatly benefited from Facebook – those of Marcus and Acton.