Mark Zuckerberg gushed with pride when Obama used data-mining apps to build a database of personal information on Facebook users, in 2012. Now, just a few years later, Trump did the exact same thing, and Mark Zuckerberg has lost his cool. What changed? Could it be Mark Zuckerberg’s age? Is The Zuck slipping?
The genius that is Mark Zuckerberg once said, “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don’t know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have a family. I only own a mattress. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.” Mark Zuckerberg went on to say that you need to strike while the poker is hot – by the time you are thirty, you might as well retire, for you have accomplished all that you are able to accomplish in life. Success, apparently, is a game for the young.
Mark Zuckerberg must be a profit, for at 33 years of age, he has proven himself correct.
Mark Zuckerberg was at his best when Facebook was a starving startup, and Mr. Zuckerberg was living on macaroni and cheese. Now, he has a net worth of over $68 billion (it was over $75 billion before he began botching things up), along with a wife, two children, a $100 million house in Hawaii, another house in Palo Alto, California, and a fleet of cars. Mark Zuckerberg is, by his own account, old, senile, and distracted.
His mistake is easy to see: he paid himself. To Mark Zuckerberg, the ideal employee is unsaddled by such unsettling things as pay. An employer, for example, can supply a mattress and a box of macaroni and cheese to its employees. As long as someone does not have more than a mattress and a box of macaroni and cheese, they can work 117 hours a week (the entire week, minus eight hours a day for sleep), and stay on top of their game. We don’t need wives, children, houses, cars, and other inconveniences. Pay is for losers. Now that Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world, he can’t even stay on task long enough to prevent application developers from selling the private personal details of billions of Facebook users. How could he have possibly stopped such things at the ripe old age of 33?
Step down Mark! You are too old!
Mark Zuckerberg tried to preserve his youth by refusing to eat the meat of any animal unless he killed it himself, but he got old anyway.
Perhaps if Mr. Zuckerberg divorced his wife, giving her sole custody of his children, and full ownership of all of his assets, working for her for the privilege of a mattress and a box of macaroni and cheese a day, she could squeeze a couple of more years out of him. As a genius, perhaps he could still function as a janitor or something, even at his advanced age, but to think that at 33 he can still serve as the creative leader of a major corporation is the peak of arrogance.
Zuckerberg has children. I think his oldest is three. She’s still got 27 years of productive life ahead of her. Perhaps she can take over the day-to-day operations of Facebook. His younger daughter should be given a prominent role too – she’ll be one in a few months. Neither of his children have enough productive time left to earn a pension. The clock is ticking.
To be honest, Mark Zuckerberg’s downfall began long before he turned thirty. The Zuckerberg quote I opened this article with was from 2007, which was eleven years ago, when he was but 22, and already he owned more than a mattress, and lived on more than macaroni and cheese.
Mark Zuckerberg says that his goal in life is to connect people, without lining his own pockets, and bemoans the greed of the rest of the world, all of whom (aside from six people) are more poor than he is. It truly touches my heart when someone with a net worth of $68 billion opens up about the evils of greed in the world, telling the rest of us that all we really need is a mattress and a box of macaroni and cheese. By thirty, we don’t even need the mattress anymore.
Mark – do you still have your mattress? Oh.. I forgot.. Your $100 million Hawaii house has a giant bedroom overlooking the ocean. I guess you get to keep your mattress.
Ever the non-greedy philanthropist, Mr. Zuckerberg did not purchase all of the property he wanted in Hawaii, but rather bought land that encircled land other people owned, and then sued those other people to try and force them to give him their land as well, on the grounds that, to get to their land, those other land owners had to cross Zuckerberg’s land. Oh – the outrage! How can anyone expect someone in the fight of his life, trying to acquire land owned by other people that he was too cheap to pay for, to have the time to safeguard user data? It would be particularly hard to safeguard data when the company that took the data in question did not violate any Facebook policies, but rather clearly stated that it was going to sell the user data it gathered. It turns out that letting app developers sell user data is one of the core parts of the Facebook business model. It is the ability to harvest and sell user data that drives application developers to develop for Facebook in the first place.
Mark Zuckerberg did not make a mistake – he simply got caught doing what he has been doing all along. And for that, Mark Zuckerberg really does need to step down. Perhaps Mark can now let the people he stole Facebook from run it.
