[tombert]

Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective.

I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.

It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.

[kajumix]

Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.

[tombert]

I don't see how any of that proves that founder CEOs don't care about stock price. Just because they don't take the first easy-out doesn't imply that they're not susceptible to doing things to try and drum up investor hype. I own stock in Apple but I don't panic-sell every single time that AAPL drops in price.

VR is neat but the "metaverse" suggests a lot more, which is why I called it out and not VR.