i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.

honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.

No the strategy of having a professional looking social space in the web, specifically focused on college folks solely was novel - this is what he stole and without this it wouldn’t have gotten to the place of success it is today. Knowing about the technology is no good without a solid strategy - with a solid strategy anyone can raise the funding to go build it. It’s easy to know what to build when you have a vision specifically of what you’re building into.

Nobody else has this targeted focus.

Search was not novel, but PageRank was novel.

Stealing an idea is different from lying to people in order to steal their actual business, which is more like what Zuckerberg did.