[duud]

Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.

[littlestymaar]

> Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights)

You're right to clarify, but it's “Just” the only thing that matters.

> Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders.

Oculus is a “market leader” in a really narrow niche. Is FB marketplace really a market leader? I didn't even know that was the thing actually (it may very well depends on your country). FB groups is just Facebook, it's like the only feature to be still significantly used. That's pretty much true for Whatsapp, but they've already started to dynamite it up earlier this year with their monetization attempt: a third of my phones contacts now have signal including one neighbor and my plumber (and also a random lady I had a car crash with last year, I should really tidy my contact list up), they have severely damaged Whatsapp position with this move, and now they are doing the same with instagram.

[duud]

The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter?

FB marketplace has a billion monthly active users. That's more than Amazon and eBay combined. Anecdotally I know people who hated FB before it was cool that have returned because of Marketplace. The feed, Facebook video, birthdays, events and a host of other features are still significantly used.

VR is a rapidly growing narrow niche which Oculus is dominating. I am a Signal fan and I actively push my contacts to use it but I don't see it surpassing WhatsApp anytime soon.

Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.

[littlestymaar]

> The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter?

Zuck has all power needed to decide if he wants those extra billions. I argue that he has no valuable reasons to want them and he's destroying his company's future by getting them. Amazon would never have become what it is now if Bezos managed it this way, and Facebook would be much, much more powerful if Zuck managed it the way Bezos did.

> Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.

Being relevant ≠ having users. Yahoo! had hundred millions of users long after it stopped being relevant. Like Yahoo! Facebook is now running almost exclusively on its inertia, and every year short-profit guided decisions are actually harming Facebook's position.