What we learned about the profile of Facebook CEO of New Yorker

Over the weekend, the New Yorker published a comprehensive and intimate profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a rarity given his aversion to the press. Longtime collaborator Evan Osnos visited Zuckerberg's home and conducted a series of interviews with the tech mogul. Osnos also has four dozen people in and around Facebook.

The play begins with an examination of Zuckerberg's reputation for ruthless domination, which drives his approach to everything from business to board games. Osnos includes a revealing anecdote about the CEO's strategy in a Scrabble series.

A few years ago, he played Scrabble on a business jet with the daughter of a friend, who was then in high school. She won. Before playing a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that looked for his letters in the dictionary so he could choose from all possible words. Zuckerberg's program had a narrow runway when the flight landed. The girl said, "During the game I was playing, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine."

Zuckerberg defends his competitive edge by noting that survival in the social media industry requires some zero-sum reasoning to attract users. He tells Osnos, "If we want to achieve what we want, it's not just about creating the best features. It's about building the best community. "

The last time Zuckerberg invited a reporter to his home for a profile of New Yorkers, it was in 2010, while he was trying to correct the record of his unflattering portrayal in the Oscar-winning film. . The social network, a controversy that seems ridiculously surprising in reading the Osnos poll on Facebook's crises since: the creation of fake accounts and groups by foreign agents to sow discord in the 2016 presidential election ; 87 million accounts, the outcry of several former leaders who claim that the site was designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of the human psyche, crushing the speeches of the founder of InfoWars, the explosion of speech of hate on the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Although Facebook has already lowered its offers in billions of dollars in 2010, the time was much simpler. Zuckerberg lived in a two-story, four-bedroom house that he described as "too big" for writer Jose Antonio Vargas. Osnos now writes that Zuckerberg lives in a mature oak forest and owns all the surrounding homes, as well as "an area of ​​seven hundred acres in Hawaii, a ski retreat in Montana and a townhouse in four floors on Liberty Hill, San Francisco. "Priscilla Chan, wife of Zuckerberg, appears in the Vargas play as a third-year medical student performing a highlighter through a textbook while basking in her back court. Now, in the Osnos Room, she is leading the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a $ 45 billion philanthropic LLC that would be structured to help elect politicians who are in agreement with her social programs at large scale. manage all diseases. "

And, of course, 2018 Zuckerberg turns out to be much more hardened and tired than Zuckerberg 2010. In Vargas' profile, he was just trying to prove that he was no longer an antisocial high school student. Osnos, on the other hand, compares it to Hillary Clinton, deeply concerned that opening it to the public would make him vulnerable to gaffes and put his society at risk.

Zuckerberg's behavior in response to Osnos' more difficult inquiries lies somewhere between Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter whose constant confession of anguish and humility toward the poisonous behavior on the casual platform self-flagellation, and Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX A CEO known to hit the press, government officials and anyone else who questions him. Zuckerberg is willing to recognize the blind spots and mistakes of the past, but he does not seem to think Facebook's recent mistakes are as big as everyone says. On the Russian misinformation campaign, Zuckerberg said: "I think the idea that people would only vote in a way that is too shocking." He is also incredibly confident that the company can solve the problems that arise. It overcomes the competition of MySpace, a disastrous IPO and the revolt of the users faced with the changes of the wire of news. "If you stick to your values ​​and what you think you want to do in the world, you can get away with it," Zuckerberg told Osnos. Of course, repelling violent hate speech is not the same as repelling MySpace. As Osnos writes in the end, "[Zuckerberg] A long time ago, I managed to make Facebook awesome. The challenge now is to make it good.