Mark Zuckerberg

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While I have no problem with Zuckerberg personally, he has a reputation as an arrogant, contemptuous (of his customers), man-child billionaire. Sort of a "Steve Jobs knows best" view of the world, without having the talent to back it up. And Zuck lets his ego get him into things he knows nothing about (like politics). While all celebrities get mocked and Meme'd, Mark Zuckerberg has uniquely been able to parlay the bad will he's earned into being a parody of a caricature.


Zuck seems to be one of those rare people that is a founder who hurts his company and his companies stock, more than the cult of celebrity helps it. And the Facebook management team is both semi-competent in the short term, and highly alienating and creating problems for themselves in the long term. Every day is like Christmas with a dysfunctional family of know-it-alls.

Bad Management

Few Owner/Managers can drive a culture where diversity of thought is welcomed. Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is not that company. They're infamous in the Valley for being a cult of personality, all around worshipping their OpStaff (executive team), and following them enthusiastically, or finding opportunities elsewhere. [1]

Meme Factory

Again, I tend to find the coupling of corporations and their founders as somewhat gosh and un-nuanced: assuming the leadership isn't actively fostering it. It feels too ad hominem, to me, to confuse dislike of a company or the leadership, with one another. But nobody seems to do this worse than Facebook. Even Amazon has more separation between Bezos and the company. Most people think Zuckerberg is Facebook, thus they retaliate against Facebook by trashing Mark.

I imagine Mark is probably a nice (but arrogant) guy, 1:1 (like many founder CEO's). And that while he's done an embarrassingly bad job of getting the bigger brand picture, I don't necessarily think all these are fair -- I do think they are a fair representation of the public's dislike of benevolent dictatorships.

There's a bazillion meme's out there, all hinting at the problem. Either Mark is right and the world is wrong, or Mark is pissing off his base, and to egocentric to recognize that he's failing as a good leader. (Assuming being a good leader is about more than just telling others what to do... and includes making them feel like participants in the experience).

There's two ways to lead. (1) Annoy a few people (2) Annoy most people. I'd guess that Mark is firmly in the latter category. Which is fine, you can be successful in spite of yourself, just not as successful as if you had the maturity and likability of the average 30 year old.

Facebook
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Facebook is 3 things: bad interface, bad management, and biased policies. I want a social network that gives me control of what I see and share -- both to my friends and to advertisers. I realize they need to make a buck, and my information is their product, but the point is you can still give users the illusions of control. But Zuckerberg seems to have falling into the egocentric pit that many young billionaires do, they think because they timed things well, and worked hard, and got lucky that they're smarter than everyone else. This makes them arrogant, less mature, and slower to grow than the average human: Dunning-Kruger, inflated by being surrounded by yes-men.

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📚 References