I really wonder how Zuckerberg will be looked back on. It's seemed obvious that he's an incredible CEO given the growth we saw with Facebook, but maybe he was just in the right place at the right time and had a cash cow that was difficult to mess up? Because when I look at the Metaverse and I look at this AI stuff... I dunno. Feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall.
He got on top because he has no ethics as evidenced by his actions from the start.
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
"He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time."
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. He pumped a whole bunch of money in VR that didn’t seem to go anywhere and now AI seems like a fine direction to go in, copying the herd, with dangerous disregard to ethics.
>I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down
That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at the right moment.
The Instagram purchase was in 2012. Who was still expecting mobile to come crashing down in the iPhone 5 era?
"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products."
Right? "How Zuckerberg will be looked back on" involves far more than just business/fiscal metrics, especially when "he's not a likable guy, and neither are his products". He may be hailed as a significant success as a CEO, but there's also the impact to individual privacy, the emphasis to get users addicted in an effort to maximize "engagement", the impact that social media (of which it's being argued here that he is king) on youth/society and political discourse writ large, the brutal impact to our attention spans, so on and so forth.
If I'm a magic eight ball, I'm going to go with "Outlook not good" on how history's going to view him. Being a CEO that is "performing better" than all the others is but a single piece of the puzzle.
Zuck is the poster boy for enshittification [0]. The dark pattern business model involves companies making money long after their users stop loving their offerings.
Well... In the early 1940s you could say that Hitler was the European leader that was performing better than all the others. But still, things took a turn.
You make interesting points so let's take a more nuanced view of things:
I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big).
However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who never built a foundational model in charge of all their AI efforts? It could be a great move, but might also be a swing and a miss.
Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity
I'd say he's got lucky in the being evil game too, because ethically speaking whatever he does in social and AI is largely overshadowed by Elon Musk's X and Grok.
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
> The new team has discussed making Meta’s next A.I. model “closed,” which would be a major departure from the company’s longtime philosophy of “open sourcing” its models. A closed model keeps its underlying code secret, while an open-source A.I. model can be built upon by other developers.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
Yeah I mean I know these are experienced AI experts, but they could be faking or coasting. We better give a twentysomething Sr. Software Engineer veto power over these hires just to be sure./s
I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing".
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
I follow him on LinkedIn: he works on the things that will come in 10 years, not on the products that Meta ships in 1-2 years. LeCunn is going to be there for some time.
I think no matter what Mark does to shake things up. ~Facebook~ Meta will always be out-innovated by a startup and forced to keep acquiring and gobbling up anything that becomes remotely successful.
I would disagree if this were a spurious quote that wasn't highly indicative of the preponderance of his record.
All the ethical quandaries where Facebook has been caught red handed. Over and over. Habitual denial of obvious problems.
The gross ineptitude and irresponsibility that facilitated actual genocidal coordination, in languages with no Facebook monitors. The consistently slippery talk we get from him via PR and Senate interviews.
And the deeply ethically challenged core business model of surveillance by any means not deemed illegal, and then some, as a means of individualizing the gaming of people's psychology - without transparent disclosure or a required opt-in.
I really wonder how Zuckerberg will be looked back on. It's seemed obvious that he's an incredible CEO given the growth we saw with Facebook, but maybe he was just in the right place at the right time and had a cash cow that was difficult to mess up? Because when I look at the Metaverse and I look at this AI stuff... I dunno. Feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall.
He got on top because he has no ethics as evidenced by his actions from the start.
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
"He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time."
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. He pumped a whole bunch of money in VR that didn’t seem to go anywhere and now AI seems like a fine direction to go in, copying the herd, with dangerous disregard to ethics.
>I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down
That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at the right moment.
The Instagram purchase was in 2012. Who was still expecting mobile to come crashing down in the iPhone 5 era?
Yes FB was all about HTML 5 and didn’t adopt native mobile until around 2012.
"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products."
Spot on.
Right? "How Zuckerberg will be looked back on" involves far more than just business/fiscal metrics, especially when "he's not a likable guy, and neither are his products". He may be hailed as a significant success as a CEO, but there's also the impact to individual privacy, the emphasis to get users addicted in an effort to maximize "engagement", the impact that social media (of which it's being argued here that he is king) on youth/society and political discourse writ large, the brutal impact to our attention spans, so on and so forth.
If I'm a magic eight ball, I'm going to go with "Outlook not good" on how history's going to view him. Being a CEO that is "performing better" than all the others is but a single piece of the puzzle.
The best performing founder / ceo in the 21st century is someone who is unlikable and promotes / develops unlikable products.
That seems impossible. What does that say about us?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the products being promoted are actually highly treasured by a large number of people.
Were highly treasured. Were.
Zuck is the poster boy for enshittification [0]. The dark pattern business model involves companies making money long after their users stop loving their offerings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Well... In the early 1940s you could say that Hitler was the European leader that was performing better than all the others. But still, things took a turn.
You make interesting points so let's take a more nuanced view of things:
I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big).
However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who never built a foundational model in charge of all their AI efforts? It could be a great move, but might also be a swing and a miss.
Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity
Which are those 7 companies?
What companies did Elon Musk start? [0]
[0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...
> I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg.
This is true but similar to saying Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest Commanders in Chief
Agree with you about ethics but it was a master stroke for him to buy both Instagram and WhatsApp.
He was just buying users of popular products in lieu of attracting new ones to his own.
Meta has subsequently ruined IG and seems busy working up new ways to ruin WhatsApp.
Sure but seeing where his users were going and buying those companies at what are now very low prices (especially instagram) were a big deal.
Not so much with Oculus though. The whole metaverse thing ended up being very cringe.
Let's not forget the crypto currency project he floated around.
And all the copycat divisions that melted away once the "template" companies he was copying, were bought out.
100% agree, so many flops right at the top
VR/AR Threads AI
Probably missing some more..
The crypto, Libra/diem was another.
I'd say he's got lucky in the being evil game too, because ethically speaking whatever he does in social and AI is largely overshadowed by Elon Musk's X and Grok.
Credits:
1. thefacebook
2. transition from desktop to mobile
3. building the machine that facebook became
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Everything he's done was either copied or bought. The guy has never had an original idea in his life.
> It's seemed obvious that he's an incredible CEO given the growth we saw with Facebook
Some of what you're remembering was Sheryl Sandberg's doing.
we wouldn't call anyone else who cheated at their job an incredible professional.
but if you illegally slurp up data and make tons of money, you're the best at what?
one-hit wonder
[dead]
https://archive.is/lTWs7
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/technology/mark-zuckerber...
MSL can already be written off as a failure.
Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
> The new team has discussed making Meta’s next A.I. model “closed,” which would be a major departure from the company’s longtime philosophy of “open sourcing” its models. A closed model keeps its underlying code secret, while an open-source A.I. model can be built upon by other developers.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
ok, but I want to know if these superstars still had to leetcode interviews.
Yeah I mean I know these are experienced AI experts, but they could be faking or coasting. We better give a twentysomething Sr. Software Engineer veto power over these hires just to be sure./s
Unironically a lot of AI researchers are trash at leetcode and will cheat on interviews.
$72 billion per year to create yet another chatbot. Imagine if this were spent on useful research or housing.
I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing".
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
EOL for LeCunn.
I follow him on LinkedIn: he works on the things that will come in 10 years, not on the products that Meta ships in 1-2 years. LeCunn is going to be there for some time.
[flagged]
I think no matter what Mark does to shake things up. ~Facebook~ Meta will always be out-innovated by a startup and forced to keep acquiring and gobbling up anything that becomes remotely successful.
> I think no matter what Mark does to shake things up. ~Facebook~ Meta will always be out-innovated by a startup
This happens to all companies that end up with - pardon my French - a shithole culture.
They "trust me"...Dumb f*ks
I would disagree if this were a spurious quote that wasn't highly indicative of the preponderance of his record.
All the ethical quandaries where Facebook has been caught red handed. Over and over. Habitual denial of obvious problems.
The gross ineptitude and irresponsibility that facilitated actual genocidal coordination, in languages with no Facebook monitors. The consistently slippery talk we get from him via PR and Senate interviews.
And the deeply ethically challenged core business model of surveillance by any means not deemed illegal, and then some, as a means of individualizing the gaming of people's psychology - without transparent disclosure or a required opt-in.