Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Among Silicon Valley bigwigs, Zuckerberg and Musk are recognized as enemies.

In the early years, in order to enable users in poor areas to browse Facebook online, Xiaoza commissioned SpaceX to launch a $260 million communications satellite, but the rocket exploded and caught fire, shattering Xiaoza's dream. In anger, he sent a Facebook mocking how unreliable Musk and SpaceX were.

A few years later, just as Facebook was caught up in the Cambridge data breach scandal, Musk announced on Twitter that he had joined the "delete Facebook" campaign and ordered Tesla and SpaceX to cancel their Facebook accounts, adding a bundle of firewood to the bundle that was burning on the fire.

But in the past two weeks, the two men shared the gunfire of public opinion. Just before the end of Twitter's hegemonic layoffs, Meta's "Bloody Wednesday" was coming, and Zuckerberg announced that he was about to lay off 11000 people, or 13% of his workforce.

Musk has long been accustomed to playing his own cards against common sense, but Zuckerberg is different-the head of the world's largest social empire. The previous label has always been programming genius, robot, businessman, Bill Gates second.

How did he slip from a smug teenager to the "villain of the year" and drag Meta into the present quagmire?

The change out of control may begin with being out of control.

An entrepreneur who returned from Silicon Valley told noise reduction NoNoise that he once admired Zuckerberg in 2010 and the hacker spirit of break and fix. At that time, Facebook was even more entrepreneurial than Google.

In the Facebook office area, the mantra of many engineers is the same phrase-"code wins the argument." Influenced by Zuckerberg, this group of people believe that there will always be something better when a system is running.

This belief implies a sense of control over things and is the underlying support of Zuckerberg's worldview. Since there is always something better waiting to happen, the only thing they can do is to do it as soon as possible.

It sounds like Silicon Valley to move quickly and evolve through trial and error, but it is also in line with the 18-year development of Facebook.

Since its founding from the university campus in 2004, lightning growth and connecting more people has been the main theme of Facebook. One employee recalled that when Zuckerberg heard an idea for a product feature improvement, he went to a whiteboard, wrote down the word "growth" and told the engineers present that if a feature failed to do so, he had no interest.

This makes engineers believe that growth is the only important priority within the company.

In 2010, the 26-year-old Zuckerberg topped time magazine's person of the year. Time put it this way: if the 500 million people linked to Facebook are gathered together, the population is second only to China and India, equivalent to the third largest country in the world. The "citizens of this country" under Zuckerberg also have an advantage because they have the most information.

In 2012, Facebook had more than 900 million global users; by 2022, there were 3.7 billion users living in the territory of Meta. Facebook and acquired Instagram and WeChat have become the three city-states that maintain the prosperity of the world's largest social empire.

They fed the rapid growth of the empire. Revenue doubled from $40.65 billion in 2017 to $85.97 billion in 2020 and $117.929 billion in 2021.

On the other side of the coin, growth will also be troublesome to enlarge. Just as game companies can't get around their social responsibility to teenagers, real-name social platforms always have the paradox of privacy and regulation.

But ahead of the 2016 US election, Zuckerberg's attitude to product "privacy" can only be described as arrogant. The work in which he was nearly expelled from Harvard University is to hack into the school system and put pictures of beautiful girls on the website for students to vote. After the 2016 US election, a reporter asked Zuckerberg whether there was any possibility that Facebook content could be used to influence the outcome of the election.

At that time, Xiaoza responded coldly: this is a crazy idea. In his view, the mission of "connecting people" is to make the world more transparent, and no privacy will make the world a better place.

As for himself, he still attaches great importance to personal privacy. For example, his own computer will tape the location of the camera, and he will buy several houses near his mansion to protect the private space of himself and his family. He also developed an artificial intelligence monitoring system for his family.

The rest of the plot is all too familiar: in 2018, the Cambridge Analytics data Gate incident revealed that up to 87 million user data were leaked and suspected of interfering with the election. There are all kinds of fake news, bloody crimes and other contents on the platform.

Xiaoza posted an apology everywhere, saying that he would change and attach importance to privacy and content censorship. The number of auditors in Facebook has ballooned to more than 20, 000.

In fact, from then on, Xiaoza's ideal Facebook began to get out of control. This loss of control is not a decline in performance, or a change in the external competitive environment, such as the repeatedly mentioned squeeze of TikTok, but that every line of code in the background is no longer just a reflection of his personal will. He needs political correctness, mainstream social values and platform responsibilities.

Xiaoza's crown was soldered with a hoop spell. Facebook is still fighting for money, but it is no longer the founder's utopia.

Or from this dimension, it's not hard to understand why Xiaoza is desperate to bet on meta-universe, the next-generation terminal platform, and insisted on renaming Facebook to Meta in October last year, a name that puzzles both Volkswagen and investors.

Before Metaverse, the carrier of this new world was probably the digital currency Libra. In 2019, Facebook launched a high-profile cryptocurrency project, Libra, and the ambitious Libra plan fell silent after regulators and central banks worried that the move could affect financial stability and threaten privacy. And then Meta takes the baton.

Zuckerberg needs to find the next ownerless land, or a beautiful new world, where he can create a city-state and become the "king" who makes and builds rules. Even if it's still a barren place.

02. Soren's Eye and many of Zuckerberg's friends were impressed by his unusual desire for control.

Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, once commented, "Zuckerberg had an imperial tendency in his 20s and was very infatuated with things like the Greek Odyssey." "

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's praise of the young man with the "Gates second" halo is also related to the classical emperor: "I can't find a precedent in the history of the world." such a young man has so much influence-wait a minute, there is only one person, and that is Alexander the Great. "

He likes to be recognized. It is said that Zuckerberg prefers people who are full of personality, hacker temperament and drop-out to join the team because such people are more likely to identify with his ideas. Some executives described Zuckerberg's cold gaze as "Soren's Eye", with no bottom of the energy and frightening the viewer.

His control of Facebook runs through. He held a media call after being caught up in the Cambridge Analytics data scandal in 2018. A reporter asked, you said you made some mistakes in the past, do you still think you are the best person to lead Facebook forward?

Zuckerberg has no cover-up, "only I can lead Facebook forward." "

"if you create products and companies like Facebook that are unprecedented in the world, you're going to screw up a lot of things," he explained. If these things don't screw up, they will screw up other things. No one can avoid making mistakes, and we keep learning from them, constantly doing better, and constantly re-examining our perception of corporate responsibility. "

In an interview in April this year, enemy Musk did not forget to mock Zuckerberg: "he owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the ownership structure will allow Zuckerberg XIV to still control these entities." "

There's nothing wrong with that. Xiaoza has the right to vote in Meta55%, which you can interpret as a veto over other shareholders. So even if both inside and outside the company are not optimistic about his ambitious meta-universe plan, he can still take this giant ship into the "fog".

The only problem is that the door to the new world is too far away and too expensive at the moment. According to Zuckerberg's vision, at least $10 billion a year will be invested in the future, and the results will be seen in about 10 years' time.

Meta virtual reality department Reality Labs, the main business includes software-level VR social platform Horizon Worlds, and hardware project Quest.

According to media reports, Horizon Worlds has less than 200000 monthly active users, and Meta's own employees dislike the platform and do not want to work on it. When Zuckerberg released a selfie of his avatar on Horizon Worlds, the big embarrassing scene came. European and American netizens asked: why is this picture quality the same level as the 1997 PC game?

As for Quest, the situation is not clear enough. Under the subsidy, the Quest2 sold more than 14 million units, but the problem is that the product upgrade is too slow, and after the elimination of subsidies, sales are declining directly.

Reality Labs lost $10.2 billion for the whole of 2021 and another $5.77 billion in the first half of 2022. If you include 2019, Zuckerberg's total investment in meta-universe is close to $30 billion.

Many people on the inside foresee this step. Oculus Consulting CTO John Carmack has publicly expressed concern that "after years of investment and thousands of people may end up getting something of little value." He believes that the time for large-scale investment in meta-universe is not yet, and the most realistic thing at present is to make good hardware products first.

And Zuckerberg broke up with him. Within a year, Meta has left more than 20 executives, including COO Sandberg, Meta's "big parent" chief operating officer, and key roles such as chief technology officer (CTO), chief revenue officer (CRO), and vice president of advertising sales.

Zuckerberg the Great is a bit of a renegade. Even investors have lost confidence. The day after Meta's poor third-quarter results, the chairman of institutional shareholder Altimeter Capital wrote an open letter eagerly teaching Zuckerberg how to do CEO.

The chairman said that Meta has too many people, too many ideas and too little urgency. This lack of focus and lack of focus on financial health is masked when growth is easy, but fatal when growth slows and technology changes.

Experts use knives, oh no, use data to speak. He calculates that Meta shares have fallen 55 per cent in the past 18 months (compared with an average of 19 per cent for its big tech peers). "your price-to-earnings ratio has fallen from 23 times to 12 times, and now the trading price is less than half of the average price-to-earnings ratio of your peers. Meta invests more in capital expenditure than Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Snap and Uber combined.

He suggested that Meta cut labor costs by 20 per cent and limit metacosmos investment to no more than $5 billion a year.

I don't know if Zuckerberg envies the previous generation of Silicon Valley mogul Jeff Bezos. More than a decade ago, when Amazon lost money year after year, Bezos insisted on investing in his innovative business, AWS, and claimed to see the next future-the digital world will enter the era of cloud computing.

And the investors believed it.

But Meta investors are clearly not on Zuckerberg's side.

Under pressure, Zuckerberg stood up and admitted his mistake. He admitted that he had misjudged the situation. "at the beginning of COVID-19, the world quickly turned online, and the surge in e-commerce brought huge revenue growth." Many predict that this will be a permanent acceleration that will continue even after the end of the pandemic. I think so, too, so I decided to greatly increase our investment. Unfortunately, things didn't turn out as I expected. "

The halo of Silicon Valley's youngest idol has faded. The 19-year-old genius who founded Facebook, the youngest billionaire in history, who had a keen strategic vision to transform the mobile Internet in 2012 and did not hesitate to acquire Instagram and Wechat, is now the worst leader in Silicon Valley.

11000 employees are paying for his mistake. During the great prosperity, they were talents and the nourishment of the company; when the cold came, they became frightened birds and redundant denominators. This does not seem to include Reality Labs employees. Some media have found that Reality Labs does not seem to have been hit by large layoffs.

After all, the great cause of meta-universe cannot be shaken.

Zuckerberg looked depressed when the robot announced the layoffs. But many people can't tell whether this is an expression of sincere emotion or another decent performance. Just like he does every time he appears at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

After the data leak scandal in 2018, he attended a 10-hour congressional hearing alone, and his stiff, expressionless performance was jokingly called "robot" by netizens, while others said he looked a lot like Data in Star Trek. The moment he picked up the water cup, the screenshot was made into various memes.

The reason why some people doubt Zuckerberg's sincerity has to do with his consistent image in the past. His dentist father once described his son as "stubborn and ruthless".

In the operation of the company, his stubbornness affects the attitude of the world's largest social platform towards privacy. And every change in his perception takes place at a time of crisis or in his favor, and is questioned by the outside world for his lack of sincerity.

For example, when dealing with privacy issues, he said in a 2019 post, "when I think about the future of the Internet, I believe that privacy-centric communication platforms will become more important than today's open platforms." Privacy enables people to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks. "

This is different from what he has said before. There is speculation that this statement is a corporate defence he has to implement in the face of tough regulation. So two years later, when New Republic magazine selected the villain of the year, it still gave the nomination to Zuckerberg on the grounds that "what Facebook and Zuckerberg have in common is that it sucks." "

Zuckerberg's "improvisation" is reflected in many places. Such as his view of China. It was Zuckerberg who ran and learned to make dumplings in front of Tiananmen Square in his early years, and it was Zuckerberg who faced questions from lawmakers in 2020 and believed that "the Chinese government stole American technology."

The reason for this change in attitude may be complicated, but it is generally inseparable from "interests". It is obvious that the situation has changed, Sino-US relations needless to say, micro-level TikTok is becoming the biggest threat to Facebook's core business. In May 2022, Douyin and its overseas version of TikTok topped the global mobile app (non-game) download list with more than 64 million downloads, while Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp ranked second, third and fourth, respectively.

As for the United States, there have been many cracks in Zuckerberg's top student image after a Hollywood movie, the Social Network. There is a line in the movie that moves the audience: "Mark, you're not an asshole, you're just trying to be an asshole." "

With the dramatic plot, people see some labels other than genius, such as selfishness leads to betrayal, loss of their best friends in college, and court battles with them.

I wonder if a genius who has changed the way people make friends will feel lonely. A Douban netizen recorded an online communication with Zuckerberg as a Facebook user. She left a message on her Facebook account, saying that she and her boyfriend met and fell in love in Facebook, and was grateful for the platform.

She remembers Zuckerberg's reply, "I'm glad that you guys found each other." Finding love and friends this is what the site is all about. Mark Zuck. "

The Douban netizen said she felt inexplicably lonely from her reply.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: noise reduction NoNoise (ID:forjingyijing), by Sun Jing and Zhang Yaqi.

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