He created a company that tracks and profiles people, psychologically manipulates them, and sells ads. And has zero ethical qualms about the massive social harm they have left in their wake.
That doesn't tell me anything about his ability to build "augmented reality" or otherwise use artificial intelligence in any way that people will want to pay for. We'll see.
Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now.
Tesla hit the ball out of the park with EVs but can't figure out self-driving.
Being good at one thing does not mean you will be good at everything you try.
I was rather sad when everyone moved away from MySpace to Facebook. While the interface today would likely be poor, I felt it was much better than what Facebook was offering. Still its hard to believe it was around 19 years ago many started to move over.
While I cannot remember the names of these sites, there were various attempts to create a shared platform website where you could create a profile and communicate with others. I remember joining a few at least back in 2002 before MySpace, Yahoo360. There was also Bebo which, I think, was for the younger kids of the day.
Lets not forget about friendsreunited.
Many Companies become successful being at the right place at the right time. Facebook is one of those companies.
Had facebook been created a year or so beforehand (or a year or two after) we would likely be using some other "social media" today. Be interesting how that would have compared to facebook. Would it be "more evil" ???
Regardless, whether its Facebook/MarkZuckerberg or [insert_social_media]/[owner]... we would still end up with a new celebrity millionnaire/billionnaire.. and would still be considered "a fool" one way or another.
I’m always fascinated when someone equates profit with intelligence. There are many very wealthy fools and there always have been. Plenty of ingredients to substitute for intelligence.
It certainly doesn't hurt when the government profiles and grooms intelligent people out of Stanford SRI the dark side, Harvard, hands them an unlimited credit card and says, "Make this thing that can do x,y,z." and then helps them network with like-minded creators and removes any obstacles in their path. One has to at least admit that was a contributing factor to their success as the vast majority of people do not get these perks.
Intelligence probably IS positively correlated with success, but the formula is complex and involves many other factors, so I have to believe it's relatively weak correlation. Anecdotally I know about as many smart failures as smart successes.
You can be a wealthy fool who inherited money, or married into it. It is also possible to be a wealthy fool who was just in the right place at the right time. But I would guess that people who appear to have "earned" their money are much less likely to be wealthy fools than those who appear to have inherited/married into it.
We see this all of the time. Business makes successful bets in one area and tries to make bets in new area and fails.
Once you achieve wealth it gives you the opportunity to make more bets many of which will fail.
The greater and younger the success the more hubris. You are more likely to see fools or people taking bad risks when they earned it themselves. They have a history of betting on themselves and past success that creates an ego that overrides common sense.
When you inherit money you protect it (or spend it on material things) because you have no history of ever being able to generate money.
Aren't there enough examples of successful people who are complete buffoons to nuke this silly trope from orbit? Success is no proof of wisdom or intelligence or whatever.
Fortunes are just bigger now in both notional and absolute terms, inevitable with Gini going parabolic, says nothing about the guy on top this week.
Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.
Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.
Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.
The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.
The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.
are we going to overlook the big orange elephant in the white house? listen to him talk. it's hard for me to believe he wouldn't be labeled a moron by most if he wasn't the President.
> a special order, 350 gallons, and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream
yes, there are plenty
more recent example, every single person who touched epstein
There's a big discussion in there about the inherent requirement of labor, the definition of leadership, collective vs hierarchical decision-making, hegemonic inertia and market capture and more. This is probably not the best place to have it.
Not to say that Zuckerberg is dumb but there's plenty of ways he could have managed to get where he is now without having the acumen to get to other places he wants to be.
No one is rejecting the role of leader, it's just extremely exaggerated nowadays, like everyone thinks Facebook==Zuckerberg. And the leaders don't worth x1000 (or even x1000000 for some) unless they are doing a job of 1000 people. In most cases they are not even capable of doing 99% of the work people in their companies can do. Egomaniac Musk has already published his thoughts on programming problems, only confirming how dumb he is in this field.
There were dozens of social networking companies at the time that FB was founded. If Zuck didn't exist those same or similar workers would have been building a similar product for whichever other company won the monopoly-ish social media market.
$1.8 trillion in investor hopes and dreams, but of course they make zero dollars in profit, don’t know how to turn a profit, don’t have a product anyone would pay a profitable amount for, and have yet to show any real-world use that isn’t kinda dumb because you can’t trust anything it says anyways.
Meta makes > $160 billion in revenue and is profitable itself, of course they’re going to invest in future longer term revenue streams! Apple is the counter example in a way who have maintained a lot of cash reserves (which seems to by the way have dwindled a LOT as I just checked..?)
All that money was outside the US. The theory was for some time that they were waiting for the right moment (change of administration/legislation) so that they could officially recognize the profit in the US cheaply
He created a company that tracks and profiles people, psychologically manipulates them, and sells ads. And has zero ethical qualms about the massive social harm they have left in their wake.
That doesn't tell me anything about his ability to build "augmented reality" or otherwise use artificial intelligence in any way that people will want to pay for. We'll see.
Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now.
Tesla hit the ball out of the park with EVs but can't figure out self-driving.
Being good at one thing does not mean you will be good at everything you try.
> Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now.
Your EV knowledge is 3 years out of date. Both Ford and GM have well liked and selling EVs. Meanwhile Tesla's sales are cratering.
[flagged]
I was rather sad when everyone moved away from MySpace to Facebook. While the interface today would likely be poor, I felt it was much better than what Facebook was offering. Still its hard to believe it was around 19 years ago many started to move over.
While I cannot remember the names of these sites, there were various attempts to create a shared platform website where you could create a profile and communicate with others. I remember joining a few at least back in 2002 before MySpace, Yahoo360. There was also Bebo which, I think, was for the younger kids of the day.
Lets not forget about friendsreunited.
Many Companies become successful being at the right place at the right time. Facebook is one of those companies.
Had facebook been created a year or so beforehand (or a year or two after) we would likely be using some other "social media" today. Be interesting how that would have compared to facebook. Would it be "more evil" ???
Regardless, whether its Facebook/MarkZuckerberg or [insert_social_media]/[owner]... we would still end up with a new celebrity millionnaire/billionnaire.. and would still be considered "a fool" one way or another.
I’m always fascinated when someone equates profit with intelligence. There are many very wealthy fools and there always have been. Plenty of ingredients to substitute for intelligence.
Neither necessary nor sufficient.
I really don't see how a person can build one of the most successful companies in history from scratch without exhibiting intelligence.
There are many things we can and should say about Zuckerberg, but I don't think that unintelligent is one them.
You can be terribly intelligent and be an incredible fool at the same time. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
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It certainly doesn't hurt when the government profiles and grooms intelligent people out of Stanford SRI the dark side, Harvard, hands them an unlimited credit card and says, "Make this thing that can do x,y,z." and then helps them network with like-minded creators and removes any obstacles in their path. One has to at least admit that was a contributing factor to their success as the vast majority of people do not get these perks.
Partially related documentary [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][44 mins]
Intelligence probably IS positively correlated with success, but the formula is complex and involves many other factors, so I have to believe it's relatively weak correlation. Anecdotally I know about as many smart failures as smart successes.
You can be a wealthy fool who inherited money, or married into it. It is also possible to be a wealthy fool who was just in the right place at the right time. But I would guess that people who appear to have "earned" their money are much less likely to be wealthy fools than those who appear to have inherited/married into it.
We see this all of the time. Business makes successful bets in one area and tries to make bets in new area and fails.
Once you achieve wealth it gives you the opportunity to make more bets many of which will fail.
The greater and younger the success the more hubris. You are more likely to see fools or people taking bad risks when they earned it themselves. They have a history of betting on themselves and past success that creates an ego that overrides common sense.
When you inherit money you protect it (or spend it on material things) because you have no history of ever being able to generate money.
No kidding, that would make Larry Ellison the richest, most intelligent lawn mower in the world.
Zuck is top 10% intelligence...possibly top 1%.
Aren't there enough examples of successful people who are complete buffoons to nuke this silly trope from orbit? Success is no proof of wisdom or intelligence or whatever.
can you point to someone as successful as zuckerberg, who was later conclusively shown to be a fraud or a total moron?
Fortunes are just bigger now in both notional and absolute terms, inevitable with Gini going parabolic, says nothing about the guy on top this week.
Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.
Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.
Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.
The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.
The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.
5 replies →
I think he's busy arranging a UFC fight on the whitehouse lawn for the next Independence Day?
Henry Ford. He could make cars. His other endeavors were that of a lunatic.
are we going to overlook the big orange elephant in the white house? listen to him talk. it's hard for me to believe he wouldn't be labeled a moron by most if he wasn't the President.
What does the name of his company Meta refer to?
SBF comes to mind.
1 reply →
> a special order, 350 gallons, and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream
yes, there are plenty
more recent example, every single person who touched epstein
1 reply →
Elon Musk.
[dead]
past performance does not guarantee future results
also, great for the Wall Street, mixed bag for us the people
No the thousands of people working at Facebook did, he just got rich from it.
I'm no zuck fanboy, but i'm compelled to ask what purpose rejecting the role of a leader serves?
HN is "the smart reddit" as my brother coined, and i'm very aware of how much nonsense is on here, but it is in a relative sense true.
All to say, blindly bashing the role of a leader seems faulty and dismissive.
There's a big discussion in there about the inherent requirement of labor, the definition of leadership, collective vs hierarchical decision-making, hegemonic inertia and market capture and more. This is probably not the best place to have it.
Not to say that Zuckerberg is dumb but there's plenty of ways he could have managed to get where he is now without having the acumen to get to other places he wants to be.
No one is rejecting the role of leader, it's just extremely exaggerated nowadays, like everyone thinks Facebook==Zuckerberg. And the leaders don't worth x1000 (or even x1000000 for some) unless they are doing a job of 1000 people. In most cases they are not even capable of doing 99% of the work people in their companies can do. Egomaniac Musk has already published his thoughts on programming problems, only confirming how dumb he is in this field.
Which they absolutely would not have done if Zuck didn't start it, get funding, pay them handsomely, and tell them exactly what to do.
I'm sure that Zuck is worthy of huge amounts of criticism but this is a really silly response.
There were dozens of social networking companies at the time that FB was founded. If Zuck didn't exist those same or similar workers would have been building a similar product for whichever other company won the monopoly-ish social media market.
If you would let a billion monkeys invest there also would be a monkey billionaire by chance.
$1.8 trillion in investor hopes and dreams, but of course they make zero dollars in profit, don’t know how to turn a profit, don’t have a product anyone would pay a profitable amount for, and have yet to show any real-world use that isn’t kinda dumb because you can’t trust anything it says anyways.
Meta makes > $160 billion in revenue and is profitable itself, of course they’re going to invest in future longer term revenue streams! Apple is the counter example in a way who have maintained a lot of cash reserves (which seems to by the way have dwindled a LOT as I just checked..?)
I’m talking about OpenAI, not companies subsidizing their value-losing LLMs with value-generating branches of the company.
All that money was outside the US. The theory was for some time that they were waiting for the right moment (change of administration/legislation) so that they could officially recognize the profit in the US cheaply