> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
> You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery.
Yes, but where does this drive come from?
I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.
One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.
Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.
Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.
For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.
I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.
In addition, I think you have to be sort of selfish to become ultra-wealthy. At some point people who believe that they became rich not by their own merit would start to distribute some wealth around. While selfish and egotistical people would hoard all their wealth, compounding it into ultra-richness.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
There's a trove of truth in this <lottery / denial> perspective. It happens on all levels of success. But what a profoundly different world it would be if wholesome humility was the default tendency. I'm not saying it would be a panacea, but understanding the dynamics, even intuitively, of the myriad interdependencies that allow our every action would be a humble leap in a better direction.
For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I have trouble believing that highly competitive people enjoy winning against people who aren't trying to win.
Catan has a lot of luck, you'd expect to lose a lot of games.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason.
In a competition to be 'ever above everything else',
tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern,
be it Musk or Putin.
If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you,
he'd take your place.
So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this.
And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said.
Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
Board Games in the same vein as grand strategy/4x with a dizzying number of rules like Catan or HOI4 are very much initially a function of time invested, otherwise you literally have no idea what you're doing.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition.
Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.
Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people:
It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.
When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".
Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.
The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).
There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more.
Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
Probably he is insecure?
Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
>There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win.
Yeah, except that's not what happened at all.
they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better.
you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
I was tempted to stop reading after the shark attack story when she wakes up in the hospital and declares "I saved myself". Ugh. But I think it makes narrative sense: why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? It also makes the company leaders seem so much worse in comparison.
One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
> One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
Read threads at bogleheads for a month or so. The eighth post that is a variation on "we have fifteen million dollars in cash, and more in stock, can we afford to buy a used 2008 Accord" and you'll go insane.
> why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed?
Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do.
The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.
Many times its easier to look back over a period of time and see the differences than when you are gradually exposed to those things over time. Thats kind of how I'm understanding her recollection about it all. I do tend to take things with a grain of salt, not all Americans are as ridiculous as some of the people she makes us out to sound like. She does paint broadly with the "international community is all good and Americans are all morons" brush, again grain of salt.
About the money thing, I think she was probably compensated better at some point, probably when she was more involved with sandberg and zuck. But also sounds like she was working constantly so she may not have had time to worry about it or worry about spending it. I'm only ~20 chapters in, when they move to MP.
Overall I like the author/narrator, we all tell our stories from our perspective and I just keep that in mind.
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is if one person lied under oath (her) or several (all the people that her testimony implies perjured).
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?
a crucial weighting is -- how much was this person implementing the things being decried, versus "change from the inside". Without having read this book, I will personally take away the benefit of doubt on "change from inside" given that this person is an attorney by trade, and has been hired for real money by this company.
It's interesting, this concept of "just following orders" recurs so much in almost all contexts. War behavior really seems to be the baseline of human interaction.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."
That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
Their product is somewhat different though, Amazon sells stuff and cloud. Microsoft sells business tools and cloud. Google sells Gmail, a declining search engine and cloud. Apple sells iphones and macs. Facebook sells people's data, advertising and opinion.
Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
I think that's true for our society in general at the moment. Everyone can behave like an asshole and it's completely OK for a society if they say "I had a tough childhood and haven't received a professional help".
Literally none of these people claims that. What they actually say is "acting like an asshole is a cool manly thing".
Meanwhile, the help for people with tough childhoods is slashed and protection for kids is scaled back. People who had tough childhoods and did not received professional help are getting roughly no help or benefit of doubt.
I think the problem is people feel so entitled they think they can avoid consequences. And much to everybody’s surprise, they can do it if they pay the right people.
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
The author of the post tries to use this as an example of Kaplan being an idiot but (having read the books) struck me as a rare case of him being the only sane man in the room - Facebook pivoting from "we have to give free internet to refugees" to "we have to sell it" smacks of broader leadership not considering the wider context.
Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais
Holy moly! No matter what your feelings are towards the effectiveness of U.N, addressing the general assembly is a huge opportunity to stand out, send a message, do something good etc. What a waste
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
This is a small bit, and I don't know anything about Zuckerberg's personal life, but "he refuses to get out of bed before noon" is normally more a sign of depression than laziness.
This is something I try to be acutely aware of in myself. Not that I have any level of wealth worth mentioning.
I started working at a company where they just give me stuff. I can go to work in clothes my employer gave me, eat my meals there, use the phone they pay the plan for, etc.
It does affect you. I first noticed it when I went to buy some triviality. Something small I needed for something or the other. Something that would have been just given to me at work. The line to checkout was long and while waiting, I just thought "Why can't I just fucking go? It's not even $10. What does it matter?"
So now I try and be mindful of what I receive and to be sure to acknowledge it at least mentally.
I don’t think I ever connected that “Lean In” was from a C-suite member of Facebook and I certainly didn’t know how morally bankrupt it was. The case is made pretty well in the book that Sheryl does not practice what she preaches.
From the book, it appears that Sheryl used Meta as a platform for promoting her own image and book rather than do the things that prevented a lot of bad. It’s beyond sad
Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
I would put Meta, the Elon Musk companies, Uber, and some others in a separate category from Amazon, Apple, and Google. To be sure, Amazon, Apple, and Google have done some very immoral things, but there does seem to be something in the culture of those companies that understands that they wield enormous power and that sees value in acting responsibly - even if it's just because they think being cartoonishly evil isn't in their long-term interest. I do think there's been a change in ethos from the Jobs/Bezos/Page/Brin generation of leadership to the Musk/Zuckerberg generation.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
> Wynn-Williams's firsthand account of the next decade is not a story of these people becoming more reckless, rather, it's a story in which the possibility of consequences for that recklessness recedes, and with it, so does their care over those consequences.
I often feel similar when I witness rich people operate, and I’m sure others on different wealth scales observe the same in me. It’s wild to observe someone take risky/dangerous positions, fail, and then shrug it off when you would have been ruined. One of those observable moments of privilege. I feel like it would be something interesting to study.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
Leave it to a Kiwi to be naive about someone's intentions. There's a reason New Zealand scores well on the corruption perception index. Emphasis on perception.
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play.
Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.
My Ticket To Ride games are usually very passive, everyone has a sort of truce that lasts essentially throughout. But sometimes someone gives up on a big route and devotes themselves to messing up other people, and then things get spicy. Then again, I think we play wrong, because we don't ever use Stations (I think those are only in Ticket To Ride Europe though)?
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.
Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.
That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.
Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
here's a callous question: will it ever get to a tipping point where major businesses bail on react? is it already happening?
asking specifically because our backend is pretty much just esri and were heavily considering porting all of our web products to experience builder because of how robust it is these days. experience builder is on react, which sucks imo, but would be helpful to avoid getting the rug pulled on us
I don't think that's a necessary consequence. React is free, a sort-of recruitment loss-leader for Meta. Imo you can get to a moral zero on this pretty easily despite still using React, by supporting out-of-Meta React OSS and using your platforms to denounces Meta's carelessness.
On the other hand: Companies pay for Microsoft's offerings and they support the Israeli military in their genocidal campaign in Gaza, I think getting to a moral zero on that is significantly harder.
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
I think the comparison is not meant to be between degrees of horribleness between the two events, but between degrees of complicity and denial on the part of Facebook management.
Complicity in what, exactly? Democracy? Personally I'm less concerned about Facebook staying neutral in 2016 and more concerned about their election sabotage in 2020:
The comparison is that there are two events that Facebook couldn't mentally or emotionally acknowledge their involvement in even though they were clearly involved and had influenced, not that there is moral equivalence between the two events.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change.
One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
Some of the books that have stuck with me for the longest are the ones I listened to during the years I had a grueling 45+ minute commute. The only downside I've found is that it's a lot harder to find and reference passages you've found of interest. Otherwise I think it's a perfectly valid method of ingesting information. If you listen while doing something that really should require your undivided attention, then I'd agree that it falls short to reading the text.
They also state up front that they listened to the audiobook, so I'm not sure how much value there'd be in defining a term to differentiate reading versus listening to a book.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
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> You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery.
Yes, but where does this drive come from?
I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.
One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.
Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.
Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.
For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.
I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.
In addition, I think you have to be sort of selfish to become ultra-wealthy. At some point people who believe that they became rich not by their own merit would start to distribute some wealth around. While selfish and egotistical people would hoard all their wealth, compounding it into ultra-richness.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
There's a trove of truth in this <lottery / denial> perspective. It happens on all levels of success. But what a profoundly different world it would be if wholesome humility was the default tendency. I'm not saying it would be a panacea, but understanding the dynamics, even intuitively, of the myriad interdependencies that allow our every action would be a humble leap in a better direction.
For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
I kind of wonder if they have to dominate to be the unquestioned leader.
Like Steve Jobs dominating the whiteboard, or Elon Musk angrily emailing in early Tesla after not being mentioned by PR at the beginning.
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I wish I could upvote you twice.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.
Edits: Removed some misremembered information.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
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It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
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> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
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Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago:
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
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I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
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A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
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I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I have trouble believing that highly competitive people enjoy winning against people who aren't trying to win. Catan has a lot of luck, you'd expect to lose a lot of games.
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I suppose I assumed “choosing your battles” had to be a skill they were also good at. Only 24 hours in a day.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason. In a competition to be 'ever above everything else', tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern, be it Musk or Putin. If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you, he'd take your place. So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this. And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
The Bill Gates Chair Jump is another great example of this.
https://youtu.be/YUGk30Wy8vU?t=175
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I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
Sure, one single anecdote doesn't say much.
But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
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In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
> this insecure
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
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>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...
Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
The game thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
But if you knew people were letting you win, wouldn't that ruin the feeling forever?
It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
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Board Games in the same vein as grand strategy/4x with a dizzying number of rules like Catan or HOI4 are very much initially a function of time invested, otherwise you literally have no idea what you're doing.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
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Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
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Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition.
Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.
Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people:
It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.
When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".
Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.
The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).
There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
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I'd think the ruining society for profit part would be a red flag.
You should read about what he did on Kauai. He fell in love with the community so he stole their birthright.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
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I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
I think it is part nature, part nurture.
To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.
As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.
So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.
Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
>I think it is part nature, part nurture.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
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We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
There is a huge difference between not wanting to lose and getting angry when someone doesn't let you win.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
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> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
One of my favorite tweets:
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more.
Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
Probably he is insecure? Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
Yay, progress.
Deep-seated insecurity?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-need...
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
I don’t understand why people try and justify or defend these tech villains. What has Mark done to defend you? Besides harvest and sell your data.
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It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy
It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I see you answered your own question.
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
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People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all
That story is disputed, to say the least.
Dex Hunter-Torricke:
>There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win. Yeah, except that's not what happened at all.
Read on: https://www.threads.com/@dextorricke/post/DHCUpnssuuw/theres...
I for one don't believe it.
At my work, we play much much better board games than Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I feel for Zuck and his colleagues.
they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better.
you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric
Maybe you just hate to lose, which drives you to relentlessly pursue "success?"
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
It’s a personality trait that leads him to success.
Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
used to be such accusations were grounds to seek satisfaction in a duel.. might be time to revive that practice
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games.
I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.
First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online.
Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
Because they are psychopaths and sociopaths.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
And I don't feel bad for it
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
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> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
Did you find the author/narrator very unlikable?
[mild spoilers ahead]
I was tempted to stop reading after the shark attack story when she wakes up in the hospital and declares "I saved myself". Ugh. But I think it makes narrative sense: why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? It also makes the company leaders seem so much worse in comparison.
One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
> One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
Read threads at bogleheads for a month or so. The eighth post that is a variation on "we have fifteen million dollars in cash, and more in stock, can we afford to buy a used 2008 Accord" and you'll go insane.
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> why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed?
Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do.
The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.
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Many times its easier to look back over a period of time and see the differences than when you are gradually exposed to those things over time. Thats kind of how I'm understanding her recollection about it all. I do tend to take things with a grain of salt, not all Americans are as ridiculous as some of the people she makes us out to sound like. She does paint broadly with the "international community is all good and Americans are all morons" brush, again grain of salt.
About the money thing, I think she was probably compensated better at some point, probably when she was more involved with sandberg and zuck. But also sounds like she was working constantly so she may not have had time to worry about it or worry about spending it. I'm only ~20 chapters in, when they move to MP.
Overall I like the author/narrator, we all tell our stories from our perspective and I just keep that in mind.
It's called the Streisand Effect. :)
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
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It's right there in the URL, along with #ZDGAF
For a company that supposedly runs on data and strategy, they're shockingly bad at anticipating how people will react when they try to bury criticism
What is the thing? (you can rot13 it for spoilers)
It's hardly just one single thing. The book is full of absurd scenes all the way through.
Sounds like the book is similar to the almost famous movie main idea.
Please tell me exactly when it gets interesting, Im listening to it and completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
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Sheryl inviting the author to go to bed with her, and then holding it against her when she didn’t. That was my double-take moment in the book.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8
As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
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"The big thieves hang the little ones." Czech Proverb
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Citizens United has enshrined this in law by allowing wholesale purchase of politicians via the current campaign finance system.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is if one person lied under oath (her) or several (all the people that her testimony implies perjured).
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
Maybe you should, you know, read the book or court files or something before publicly speculating.
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I used the form on the author of the book's website a few weeks ago to invite her on our books podcast:
https://sarahwynnwilliams.com
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
She certainly didn't code that contact form. Still an oversight from her, but...
But what? It’s her website and is ultimately responsible. “I didn’t code it” is not an excuse.
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This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?
a crucial weighting is -- how much was this person implementing the things being decried, versus "change from the inside". Without having read this book, I will personally take away the benefit of doubt on "change from inside" given that this person is an attorney by trade, and has been hired for real money by this company.
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It's interesting, this concept of "just following orders" recurs so much in almost all contexts. War behavior really seems to be the baseline of human interaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
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This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
The Koolaid is stronger at Facebook, because it has to be.
It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.
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I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."
That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
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Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
'absolute power corrupts absolutely'
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
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Who was Jane?
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
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What was the app feature you worked on?
Have you heard the stories about Uber?
I haven't. What stories?
Because Zuckerberg is a worse human being than the senior people in the other FAANG companies.
Their product is somewhat different though, Amazon sells stuff and cloud. Microsoft sells business tools and cloud. Google sells Gmail, a declining search engine and cloud. Apple sells iphones and macs. Facebook sells people's data, advertising and opinion.
Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
David Brin has it as “absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible.”
I think power also can and often does corrupt. Partly due to the corrupting pressure that comes at a person who has power.
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
I think that's true for our society in general at the moment. Everyone can behave like an asshole and it's completely OK for a society if they say "I had a tough childhood and haven't received a professional help".
Literally none of these people claims that. What they actually say is "acting like an asshole is a cool manly thing".
Meanwhile, the help for people with tough childhoods is slashed and protection for kids is scaled back. People who had tough childhoods and did not received professional help are getting roughly no help or benefit of doubt.
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I think the problem is people feel so entitled they think they can avoid consequences. And much to everybody’s surprise, they can do it if they pay the right people.
this cracked me up
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
The author of the post tries to use this as an example of Kaplan being an idiot but (having read the books) struck me as a rare case of him being the only sane man in the room - Facebook pivoting from "we have to give free internet to refugees" to "we have to sell it" smacks of broader leadership not considering the wider context.
Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais
Holy moly! No matter what your feelings are towards the effectiveness of U.N, addressing the general assembly is a huge opportunity to stand out, send a message, do something good etc. What a waste
"Zuck it! We'll do it live!!"
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
This is a small bit, and I don't know anything about Zuckerberg's personal life, but "he refuses to get out of bed before noon" is normally more a sign of depression than laziness.
True but we don't know if the dude is getting drunk every night like the CEO from Ex Machina
Far more likely to be "keeps insane hours and refuses to change them"
I read the book. It’s a very interesting read. A few things stood out ( no spoilers )
- Casual indifference at exec level to atrocities happening because of FB/ Meta.
- Money/power does make you insensitive
- Tech bro view of the world permeates most decisions that Meta takes.
- Casual sexual harassment for women ( follows from the tech bro worldview I guess )
- US centric world view influencing how execs treat world leaders.
All in all worth a read or two!
> - Money/power does make you insensitive
This is something I try to be acutely aware of in myself. Not that I have any level of wealth worth mentioning.
I started working at a company where they just give me stuff. I can go to work in clothes my employer gave me, eat my meals there, use the phone they pay the plan for, etc.
It does affect you. I first noticed it when I went to buy some triviality. Something small I needed for something or the other. Something that would have been just given to me at work. The line to checkout was long and while waiting, I just thought "Why can't I just fucking go? It's not even $10. What does it matter?"
So now I try and be mindful of what I receive and to be sure to acknowledge it at least mentally.
I don’t think I ever connected that “Lean In” was from a C-suite member of Facebook and I certainly didn’t know how morally bankrupt it was. The case is made pretty well in the book that Sheryl does not practice what she preaches.
From the book, it appears that Sheryl used Meta as a platform for promoting her own image and book rather than do the things that prevented a lot of bad. It’s beyond sad
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Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
I would put Meta, the Elon Musk companies, Uber, and some others in a separate category from Amazon, Apple, and Google. To be sure, Amazon, Apple, and Google have done some very immoral things, but there does seem to be something in the culture of those companies that understands that they wield enormous power and that sees value in acting responsibly - even if it's just because they think being cartoonishly evil isn't in their long-term interest. I do think there's been a change in ethos from the Jobs/Bezos/Page/Brin generation of leadership to the Musk/Zuckerberg generation.
There's a reason the Silicon Valley TV show's humor was so biting.
The casual indifference part really got to me too.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
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> Wynn-Williams's firsthand account of the next decade is not a story of these people becoming more reckless, rather, it's a story in which the possibility of consequences for that recklessness recedes, and with it, so does their care over those consequences.
I often feel similar when I witness rich people operate, and I’m sure others on different wealth scales observe the same in me. It’s wild to observe someone take risky/dangerous positions, fail, and then shrug it off when you would have been ruined. One of those observable moments of privilege. I feel like it would be something interesting to study.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Chronologically, this event happens a good bit before Mark realizes just how much power he has. I don’t know if he would repeat that behavior now.
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
Don't mess with a Kiwi I guess :)
That said FB sounds evil not careless.
Evil and careless can be one and the same. They (FB) could not care-less about the consequences of their actions on other peoples' lives.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
Leave it to a Kiwi to be naive about someone's intentions. There's a reason New Zealand scores well on the corruption perception index. Emphasis on perception.
The banality of evil.
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
> "[Zuck] blows key meetings because he refuses to get out of bed before noon."
Is this meant to be taken literally or is it an expression for arrogance?
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
Can't see any reason not to take it at face value. It's not a common phrase or expression.
I suddenly now imagine Zuck no differently from some of my unemployed friends.
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play.
Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.
My Ticket To Ride games are usually very passive, everyone has a sort of truce that lasts essentially throughout. But sometimes someone gives up on a big route and devotes themselves to messing up other people, and then things get spicy. Then again, I think we play wrong, because we don't ever use Stations (I think those are only in Ticket To Ride Europe though)?
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Almost finished with it after few days. I think it is must read and the fact author testified adds more reasons.
Glad to see this on HN.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.
Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.
That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.
Why does our country continue to exalt people like this? Can we have some compassion up top for once?
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Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
Will definitely read the book after this readout.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
> ... but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it.
Sounds like the work of Barbra Streisand's PR firm LOL
here's a callous question: will it ever get to a tipping point where major businesses bail on react? is it already happening?
asking specifically because our backend is pretty much just esri and were heavily considering porting all of our web products to experience builder because of how robust it is these days. experience builder is on react, which sucks imo, but would be helpful to avoid getting the rug pulled on us
I don't think that's a necessary consequence. React is free, a sort-of recruitment loss-leader for Meta. Imo you can get to a moral zero on this pretty easily despite still using React, by supporting out-of-Meta React OSS and using your platforms to denounces Meta's carelessness.
On the other hand: Companies pay for Microsoft's offerings and they support the Israeli military in their genocidal campaign in Gaza, I think getting to a moral zero on that is significantly harder.
Whenever these kind of articles pop up, I always think how sad it is that PyTorch, Llama and many widely used opens source projects are tied to Meta.
They are open-source. Shouldn’t we be happy that at least something good comes of that sentient pile of cash?
So get a group of other sympathetic people and fork them.
This is virtually the only place where you have a chance to take power from them by your actions.
"The best way to complain is to create things," and yes that's a poster I got for free back when I worked at Facebook.
> fork them
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
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Be thankful they are open source at all. See OpenAI for the alternative.
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
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Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
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To be fair, Catan really brings out the worse in people, despite it being a friendly Euro game. It's worse than Monopoly in a lot of ways.
Its a good book I read it, the only thing that she messed up though is not letting her exec level shares vest and be quiet until then imo :)
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
just the opposite. She put her money where her mouth was and didn't trade her dignity for some cash
Yes correct in some absolute ethical context, but would have been easier to fight with a few hundred million budget to pay for legal fees
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
How abstract is this book? Are there many examples of things that are relevant at meta today, especially on the web and developer front?
Maybe depends on if by relevant you mean, "I'm working on airflow surface turbulence" vs "am I making a cruise missile?"
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
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I don't think so. It just underlines the title of the book "Careless People".
Facebook doesn't care about anything, takes no responsibility, "can't be touched", be it on their home turf or across the globe.
I think the comparison is not meant to be between degrees of horribleness between the two events, but between degrees of complicity and denial on the part of Facebook management.
Complicity in what, exactly? Democracy? Personally I'm less concerned about Facebook staying neutral in 2016 and more concerned about their election sabotage in 2020:
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3616579-zuckerberg-tel...
Of course in the end things turned out for the best, but that's almost certainly not what Sheryl wanted, so I guess it's on theme for the book.
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The comparison is that there are two events that Facebook couldn't mentally or emotionally acknowledge their involvement in even though they were clearly involved and had influenced, not that there is moral equivalence between the two events.
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The opposite - Zuck begged Xi to name Zuck's child as a form of flattery.
;) I know but it can be read both ways. Leaning into the ambiguity.
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signed, "I have had more money than I will ever need for the last decade". Get fucked.
Signed, 8 month old AI generated account meant to push far left propaganda and should be deleted by dang as it violated HM guidelines.
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I read the book.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
Judging authors parenting is way off topic.
"Careless" is doing some seriously heavy duty lifting here.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
That’s what she is referring to.
That line is quoted either in the foreword or the first chapter.
Yeah, that’s rather the point of the article. They are careless in many ways as the author points out.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change. One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
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That's what the author (the linked blog's author, not the book's) also believes and concludes his post with.
Lina Khan just needed a couple more years.
It’s jarring when people refer to having read something and then it turns out they listened to the audiobook.
This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing.
There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
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Some of the books that have stuck with me for the longest are the ones I listened to during the years I had a grueling 45+ minute commute. The only downside I've found is that it's a lot harder to find and reference passages you've found of interest. Otherwise I think it's a perfectly valid method of ingesting information. If you listen while doing something that really should require your undivided attention, then I'd agree that it falls short to reading the text.
They also state up front that they listened to the audiobook, so I'm not sure how much value there'd be in defining a term to differentiate reading versus listening to a book.
What's wrong with "listening" as that term?
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
> We all fuck shit up and ruin lives
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
Where is it “thoroughly debunked” in that link?
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.
Please, for God's sake, don't.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Nazi_Germany
Disgruntled ex-employee disparaging their old colleagues and bosses is extremely common, I don't get why this is getting so many upvotes...
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
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Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
ex-employes can be disgruntled for good reasons