THE FINAL TASK on Mark Zuckerberg’s calendar before a July 4 vacation trip is our last interview for this book. As I walk the path through the well-landscaped front yard of the Zuckerberg house in old Palo Alto—a pleasing, century-old Craftsman-style house to be sure, but not the imposing mansion that one of the world’s richest people might occupy—I am thinking of Andrew Weinreich.
Weinreich, you’ll recall, was the lawyer and entrepreneur who first concocted the idea of an online social network as we know it today, and envisioned that the entire world might be bound in a single network. I wonder what it would have been like if Weinreich, and not Zuckerberg, had fulfilled that vision. Certainly my talk with the founder of the defunct sixdegrees would have been conducted in a vast headquarters building. As it was, I’d met with Weinreich in a small conference room he’d reserved in a noisy WeWork office. As he described how sixdegrees was ahead of its time, through glass walls we could see a bustling pageant of Millennials and Gen Zs striving to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Weinreich, fit at fifty, had a quick answer for my question as to whether he’s haunted by what someone else accomplished with his idea: No. He also had no hesitation when I ask him, in light of Facebook’s experiences, whether he still thought connecting the world is a good thing. He does. If he had been in Zuckerberg’s place, though, he is sure he would have been quicker to pick up the warning signs when things were going wrong.
Mark Zuckerberg would undoubtedly tell Weinreich it’s not so easy. He greets me with his sheepdog, Beast, whose exuberance leads Zuckerberg to consign the animal to a windowed parlor.
We’ve been talking for this book for three years at this point, and by now our interviews are conducted with as much candor as I think he’s ever going to exercise. He has come a long way from the reluctant communicator I first met in 2006: He now sees interviews as not only opportunities to make his points but also a means to learn more about how he is being perceived. In this meeting, and in a similarly frank interview we’d had a few weeks earlier, he’s willing to take on the question of culpability, dancing between contrition and defiance. (Since those two sessions were like one extended interview, I’m including comments from both here.)
Yes, he does take responsibility for Facebook’s inattentiveness as the platform became a host of fake news, misinformation, and hate. But his mea culpas are tempered by a refrain that the emergence of those problems, and Facebook’s inattention as they proliferated, were results of over-optimism rather than complacency or greed.
“The big lesson from the last few years is we were too idealistic and optimistic about the ways that people would use technology for good and didn’t think enough about the ways that people would abuse it,” he says.
And he acknowledges that his decision to basically delegate key parts of the company to others compounded the problem.
“Maybe it just takes someone far better than me to do this,” he says. “Starting at nineteen, having not had the life experiences in all these areas, I think it would be, at least for me, impossible to internalize all of the different parts of what running a company could be. And Sheryl was so good at doing this stuff that maybe it was easier to turn that over.” By necessity, he’s more dialed-in now. “Part of my personal journey over the last fifteen years has been taking more responsibility for each of those pieces.”
There is merit to the point that a bunch of college students would be unprepared for the unprecedented consequences of opening up an unfettered global platform for speech and commerce. Who could have anticipated what would come of connecting people on such a massive scale? How could someone be faulted for pursuing the idealistic goal of binding humanity?
But the naïvety/idealism defense only goes so far. Didn’t Facebook ignore the problems that arose from its relentless pursuit of growth? There is also the fact that the company’s business model led it to become a supremely polished machine, running on the high-octane fuel of an unmatched trove of personal data. And while Facebook did start in a dorm room, within a year Zuckerberg was getting advice from Silicon Valley’s most experienced entrepreneurs and investors, as well as respected CEOs like Don Graham. Furthermore, its problems emerged while one of the best executives in the industry was its chief operating officer.
I do think that Zuckerberg is sincere when he says he has continued to believe in the values of sharing and free speech he embraced a decade earlier. But the decisions he has made over the course of the past fifteen years have reflected a secondary set of goals—growth, competitive supremacy, and seeking massive profits. Because executing these sub-goals would help Facebook in its quest to connect the world, they became hopelessly intermingled with the mission itself, often leading Zuckerberg to make decisions that, in isolation, seemed anything but idealistic.
When I share these thoughts, he pushes back.
“I think you can either look at [our problems] as a result of idealism or you can look at it and say that it was a result of cynicism,” he says. “And I think people who know me think that it’s not [cynicism]. I’ve never been running the company saying, Well I’m just trying to optimize this to make as much money as possible so let’s run ahead. I just think we did not pay enough attention to the way that people would abuse things, because we were too idealistic about how the technology could enable a lot of good.”
That idealism thing again.
“It’s true that the people who know you don’t say you are a cynic,” I say to him. “But they do say you are hypercompetitive.”
He gives me one of his trademark zone-outs for a few seconds. “I think that’s right, yeah,” he finally replies.
Zuckerberg has other concessions. When I suggest that the Twitterization of the News Feed opened the door to unintended consequences such as misinformation and dopamine distractions, he agrees. “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have pushed so far,” he says, noting that as part of Facebook’s recent cleansing it has reversed course to some degree. “But we learned important things,” he says.
He has a similar upbeat view on privacy. As we spoke Facebook was just weeks away from the FTC settlement that would cost it $5 billion and force a set of oversight rules on the company. But he feels that despite mistakes, Facebook’s current role as a villain is overstated. “If you ask people what their perception of Facebook and privacy is, it’s generally true today that we don’t have a good reputation,” he says. “People think that we’ve eroded [privacy] or contributed to eroding it. I would actually argue we have done privacy innovations, which have given people new types of private or semi-private spaces in which they can come together and express themselves.”
I ask him about growth, suggesting that he had empowered a team whose mission was solely to add and retain users, subsuming Facebook’s putative mission to connect the world and make it a better place. Didn’t this make growth in itself the North Star of the company? “I agree with a bunch of what you’re saying but not all of it,” he says. “I think you can look at this from a cynical perspective that we were trying to grow because growth went in its own direction. [But] the reason people use social products is to interact with other people. The most valuable thing we could do for people was make sure that the people they cared about were on the service.”
Maybe it was a mistake to distance himself from the policy issues that would cause Facebook so much trouble. Maybe he pushed the Twitterization of the News Feed too far. Maybe he was so busy growing Facebook that he was late to realize the importance of monitoring content. But a worse sin, he believes, would have been timidity.
“I think a lot of people would be more conservative and say, Okay, this is what I believe should happen but I’m not going to mess with it because I’m too afraid of breaking something. I am more afraid of not doing the best thing we can than I am of breaking the thing that we currently have. I just think I take more chances and that means I get more things wrong. So in retrospect, we have certainly made a bunch of mistakes in strategy, in execution. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not living up to your potential, right? That’s how you grow.”
He says this even while conceding that some of those mistakes have had terrible consequences. “Some of the bad stuff is very bad and people are understandably very upset about it—if you have nations trying to interfere in elections, if you have the Burmese military trying to spread hate to aid their genocide, how can this be a positive thing? But just as in the previous industrial revolution or other changes in society that were very disruptive, it’s difficult to internalize that, as painful as some of these things are, the positive over the long term can still dramatically outweigh the negative. If you can handle the negative as well as you can.
“Through this whole thing I haven’t lost faith in that. I believe we are one part of the Internet that’s part of a broader arc of history. But we do definitely have a responsibility to make sure we address these negative uses that we probably didn’t focus on enough until recently.”
Fishing for rosebuds is a futile pursuit with Mark Zuckerberg. He is who he is. Facebook may have to change, but Zuckerberg doesn’t believe he has to.
“I couldn’t run this company and not do things that I thought were going to help push the world forward,” says the man who some think has done as much destruction to that world as anyone in the business realm. And as he looks me in the eye, it’s clear he believes it.
IT’S TIME TO leave. Zuckerberg frees Beast from the sunroom. He walks me to the door. Just as I go, standing on the top of the steps outside his house, Zuckerberg mentions his notebook. Early in the interview, I’d told him I had pages from the Book of Change he wrote in 2006, and he’d told me he wished he still had it. It would be cool to see it, he now says. I happen to have a scan of it on my phone, and I open the file and hand it to him.
Zuckerberg gazes at the cover page—with his name and address and the promise of a $1000 reward to anyone locating it—and his face lights up. “Yes, that’s my handwriting!” he confirms.
I realize that I am, in a sense, doing what twenty-two-year-old Mark Zuckerberg asked in his offer of a reward: restoring a precious treasure that seemed irretrievably lost.
As he swipes the pages, a rhapsodic smile spreads across his face. It’s as if he has been suddenly reunited with his earlier self: the fresh-faced founder, unacquainted with regulators, haters, and bodyguards, blissfully parsing his visions to a team that would alchemize them into software, and then change the world in the very best way.
He seems almost reluctant to break the trance and hand me back the phone, but of course he does, turning back to his house and closing the door.