Ya but he’s not young anymore. By his own logic he should step down and let a Stanford dropout run things.

Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.

Zuckerberg may not be a great strategist, but your two exceptions (WhatsApp and instagram) easily cover all the failures. This is sort of like saying “he’s a bad hitter, except for the grand slam”. Or more appropriately for HN, like saying “he’s a bad venture investor, other than the two fund returning investments.”

Instagram and what’s app were two of the best purchases in American history though. It’s hard to overlook how well they worked out

It's like that old saying: “Don't attribute to malice – or incompetence – that which can be explained by path dependency.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

OK, not the saying. Perhaps should be.

Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.

A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.

Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.

It does not have to be either one. Zuckerberg is simply not a great leader, apparently. This is not surprising. Few people can run big companies. There is a huge spectrum between "dimwitted" and "great CEO".

The way the sentence is structured implies he is evil either way. He is either (dim witted and evil) or (just evil).

Personally I believe very few people to be actually evil, but it's a question of definition. To me, you need to be deliberate to be evil. E.g. Elon Musk isn't evil (I think), he's just insane. Peter Thiel might actually be evil, because his actions are deliberate and planned. Zuckerberg also doesn't strike me as evil, just incredibly socially inept (and maybe dimwitted).

But no, you're right, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

Zuckerberg isn’t dimwitted but Meta is probably at its peak as a company, lightning probably isn’t going to strike again, Metaverse and Meta AI are going nowhere no matter how much money he throws at it. But he’s not alone. Microsoft can spend and spend and it won’t help Copilot fly.

It's possible for someone to be good at one thing and bad at another.

Facebook was evil from its very inception. Its origin is a site for non-consensually rating women's faces. Zuckerberg personally called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their personal information and offered to to give that data to his friend. There was never any doubt about what kind of person Zuckerberg is.

I think Elon owns a lot of real estate in these guys’ heads. When you have $200B+ in the bank, little else matters others than being seen as a titan of industry IMO. I think the fact that Musk has Tesla and Spacex (even with all his extra curricular activities) makes a guy like Zuckerberg seethe that he’s just “the internet websites guy”.

The thing is that metas massive consumer user base means that they haven’t lost the ai race I think. They don’t need to run the whole customer acquisition rat race. They’ve already got billions of customers who they can have using models within a month, they just need to keep pushing to create a model people are happy to use. Metas product compliments uniquely well with ai I think so they’re never really out of it until their users leave.

Yeah, you're right, I edited it just now. I rewrote parts of the comment and moved things around and didn't re-read the whole thing.

Your boot sir

And therefore unable to be criticized by OP?

How do you figure? Do you know either of these people?