Mark Zuckerberg

Scott Galloway says the biggest risk-adjusted upside in AI right now is Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Meta is delivering AI to consumers, has the biggest moats, has the capital for the arms race, and is already using AI inside the company.

Anthropic is supposedly worth $2 trillion, which Scott Galloway calls a ridiculous dislocation between private and public markets. Meta is competing neck and neck with Anthropic and also has one of the most profitable businesses in the world. The downside is heavy spending on capital expenditure, which looks a little crazy. If the strength of the recommendation algorithm is a function of AI and machine learning, the return shows up in the earnings. Nvidia is

Jared Diamond says he is not aware of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg having a philosophy of life beyond their business. The business leader he admires as a person is the Patagonia leader he knows. For the Patagonia leader, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life, and he has a philosophy of life. Steve Jobs had a philosophy of life as regards business.

Jared Diamond has had several lengthy conversations with Bill Gates and likes him. People who met Bill Gates under other circumstances hold different views. Jared Diamond met Elon Musk once and met Jeff Bezos once, and he does not know many leaders in the business world. The Patagonia leader emphasized time off for his staff and Pata

Ezra Klein asks whether broader society is protected because Alphabet, Meta, and the other major companies can absorb huge losses on their own balance sheets. He reads Mark Zuckerberg's line, that it would be sad to misspend hundreds of billions of dollars, as proof the spender can misspend hundreds of billions and still be fine. Ezra Klein then asks Paul Kedrosky, who has followed the private-credit side, whether the debt changes that.

Paul Kedrosky says broader society is not protected. A year ago, people told him to stop warning about the spending, because the companies are smart and have prodigious cash flows. A year later, the data shows spending moving away from cash flow and toward d

Kevin Roose calls the AI race a Red Queen race, a term from evolutionary biology for a survival-of-the-fittest contest among rivals. No matter how fast a lab goes, someone else is always going faster, so the labs race just to stay in the same place. He left less reassured than at his starting point that the technology can be developed safely.

He went in thinking there were grownups in the room and they seemed trustworthy. He liked that AI leaders seemed to take safety and the harms of their products very seriously, at least next to social media, which he grew up covering. Mark Zuckerberg was not going around during the early days of Facebook saying the product could kill millions of people.

On Pirate Wires, Mike Solana and Liv Boeree open on a week of superintelligence news. The show says Donald Trump answered Bernie Sanders by signing an executive order that renamed artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal departments, at a White House meeting the episode calls a morally binding pact for AI labs to police themselves. It places Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg in the room. Solana describes Sanders's Stop Artificial Superintelligence Act as a pause on advanced AI, a permanent ban on superintelligence work, and prison for violators, plus only a soft maybe on withholding technology from countries trying to build it. He says Eliezer Yudk

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says Mark Zuckerberg wants to escape Apple because he does not hold the ground his empire is built on. Inside his own court he is sovereign. Shareholders and the board cannot control him. He held the territory only once, when Facebook was a desktop site on the open web. When the smartphone appeared, he lost that ground and never got it back.

The loss has stayed with him. During the 2012 IPO he scrambled to rebuild Facebook and its advertising business around a mobile shift he had not seen coming. Senra reads that Facebook's move to mobile more or less made Apple's App Store, and the App Store in turn made Facebook. Zuckerberg does not like b

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says Mark Zuckerberg cannot be removed from Meta. Zuckerberg holds majority control of Meta's voting power, and that control makes his removal effectively impossible. The same fact follows him into meetings with heads of state. Those officials will one day leave office and die. Zuckerberg could still be ruler of his empire in 50 years.

The profile puts that empire at 3.6 billion users and a market cap of $1.6 trillion. Senra says that is not a normal situation for a person to be in, and Zuckerberg has been in it since he was 19. Three hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology, the profile says, do not hand someone in that seat an easy w

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, calls the most important line in the profile the one that says you cannot take building away from Mark Zuckerberg, because he would not be himself if he stopped. He loves being at Meta because he still gets to create things. He did not set out to build a company. He just loves building things, and building is who he is.

The woman who has known Mark for 23 years asked him, around year 18 or 19, whether they were tired and could be done. She was tired. He was tired. They had gotten through a hard chapter, and she wanted other chapters in their life. Mark refused.

Their daughter later showed the same pull, untaught, delighted by bringing somet

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says Mark Zuckerberg is pronounced dead every few years even while his empire survives and keeps expanding. The same cycle covers the last 10 to 14 years of the company Zuckerberg created.

After the IPO in 2012, a mobile crisis left Facebook declared an overvalued website whose audience had moved to a platform it could not monetize. Zuckerberg was considered in over his hoodie and too immature to run a public company. Between 2013 and 2017, teens left in a mass exodus for Tumblr and then Snapchat, and Facebook was left to die as the next MySpace after Snapchat rejected a $3 billion acquisition offer.

The arc matches the biographies Senra re

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says nearly all of Facebook's management team quit in 2006 after Mark Zuckerberg, then only 22, rejected their pleas to sell the company to Yahoo for a billion dollars. The refusal set a central tenet of the culture: in the face of opposition, Zuckerberg is right.

Much of the inner circle has been with him for over 15 years, since before Facebook's IPO in 2012, and some were already there in 2006. Others long ago accepted that they cannot do what he does and that, despite many mistakes, he is in a class by himself. Many of the men and women have lives they never dreamed of, and they owe all of it to him.

They may simply be too grateful, a w

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says Mark Zuckerberg has thought like an emperor since he was a child. At 12 he built a game set in the Roman Empire where the player conquered the world one territory at a time. In high school he excelled at Latin. Nearly a decade later he still recalled Jupiter's Latin verse: "I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end."

At Harvard, one of the first websites he built was a class study tool for the art history course Rome of Augustus. In Facebook meetings held to fend off threats from Google, he ended speeches by declaring Carthage must be destroyed. All-hands meetings ended with him shouting domination. Sean Parker,

On Divot, a study says the vast majority of people do not live within their means. A large percentage of really wealthy people still do not live within the incredible life they created, because they are always trying to get more and always trying to go for more. Derek Andersen lives in Northern California and says what is enough, and what is right for him, is a question only he can answer.

He used to rent down the street from Mark Zuckerberg, who owns like eight homes there. Every day the drive home went past the house, where a security guard would be. They live on the same street, both sleep on a bed, and both breathe the same air. The drive still left open whether the rented life is enoug

Andrew Huberman took a leave of absence from UC Santa Barbara. He did not drop out. A leave of absence is a mechanism most universities have. Huberman says it was designed for family situations, like a pregnancy or a sick family member, so a student can leave and come back. It is distinctly different from dropping out. He was pretty close to dropping out or being forced out for poor grades and poor behavior. Fortunately, that did not happen.

People hear that Bill Gates dropped out of college, Steve Jobs dropped out of college, and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Huberman thinks it might have been Ryan Holiday, whom he does not know, who said people doing poorly in college should sta

Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that Facebook has moved when the public pushed back. In 2006 a beer photo could get you fired. After enough Las Vegas and golf pictures, a drink stopped mattering. He traced the same loop to Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard site Facemash: Zuckerberg got in trouble, was told to add privacy controls, and built them into the next product. A phone that can reach any country is a real gain. Twenty years earlier that took a studio. He would not flatten the verdict. Facebook Groups had more than 1.5 billion people, and Instagram was testing a version without likes in Canada. Privacy is a separate question from whether the network was worth having.

Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that Mark Zuckerberg pairs wide reading with rare foresight. Morin pictured him three or four moves ahead, and on more than one board, able to see options other people miss. Zuckerberg could also write the code, which Morin said is unusual in a founder who thinks that way. The other trait is competitive will, a drive and an energy Morin called preternatural, closer to an elite athlete than to a typical executive. He also described a large heart that most people never see. Product reviews could be long. You left having argued every angle over a year of conversations, rather than taking an order the way people describe Steve Jobs.

Understanding that asking for help is ok and being selfless were essential for Kevin’s success, especially because he never finished his degree and often found himself surrounded by graduates of prestigious universities. During a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Mark described how he had surrounded himself with a slew of mentors that worked alongside him to make decisions for the company. Kevin believes that not being the smartest person in the room and putting one’s ego aside can benefit them in the long run.

The blog focused on what the Facebook staff needs to do in order to make Facebook feel private and trusted by its users. This includes changes with private interactions, reducing permanence, and feel secure about their data storage and private interactions.