[nemothekid]

>I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company.

I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).

I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.

[afavour]

> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down

That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at the right moment.

The Instagram purchase was in 2012. Who was still expecting mobile to come crashing down in the iPhone 5 era?

[nemothekid]

>That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile.

I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.

1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure

2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.

As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.

Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.

Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.

[herbturbo]

Yes FB was all about HTML 5 and didn’t adopt native mobile until around 2012.

[ethbr1]

For fair context, it was only ~2007 when Apple (Jobs) pivoted from pushing web apps to native apps.

[SamvitJ]

"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products."

Spot on.

[jjulius]

Right? "How Zuckerberg will be looked back on" involves far more than just business/fiscal metrics, especially when "he's not a likable guy, and neither are his products". He may be hailed as a significant success as a CEO, but there's also the impact to individual privacy, the emphasis to get users addicted in an effort to maximize "engagement", the impact that social media (of which it's being argued here that he is king) on youth/society and political discourse writ large, the brutal impact to our attention spans, so on and so forth.

If I'm a magic eight ball, I'm going to go with "Outlook not good" on how history's going to view him. Being a CEO that is "performing better" than all the others is but a single piece of the puzzle.

[tejohnso]

The best performing founder / ceo in the 21st century is someone who is unlikable and promotes / develops unlikable products.

That seems impossible. What does that say about us?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the products being promoted are actually highly treasured by a large number of people.

[nemothekid]

Key word "performing". If you want feel warm feelings about your heroes, don't make your heros CEOs who are ultimately judged on how large of a return they can give their shareholders.

[jjulius]

>... CEOs who are ultimately judged on how large of a return they can give their shareholders.

At first, sure. The more time passes, however, the less CEOs are judged solely on monetary returns.

Hell, IMO, to judge a CEO solely on monetary returns in the present is selective reasoning at best.

[Nevermark]

Were highly treasured. Were.

Zuck is the poster boy for enshittification [0]. The dark pattern business model involves companies making money long after their users stop loving their offerings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[amanaplanacanal]

Well... In the early 1940s you could say that Hitler was the European leader that was performing better than all the others. But still, things took a turn.

[VirusNewbie]

You make interesting points so let's take a more nuanced view of things:

I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big).

However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who never built a foundational model in charge of all their AI efforts? It could be a great move, but might also be a swing and a miss.

[nemothekid]

It's far too early to call anything with "AI" - and I will be unsurprised if we enter another AI Winter as LLMs turn into a dead end.

If GPT-6, 7 and 8 continue to see diminishing returns on performance as we say from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5, then I see it becoming a winner take all of OpenAI.

What I think is ignored is how at the time, all the investors were singing Meta's doom due to Apple retiring IDFA and META's stock was crashing. Then it comes out that Meta had spent that last year buying a ton of GPUs just before the GPU supply crunch and the stock completely rebounds. Zuckerburg seems incapable of being caught with his pants down.

All the recent talk of Zuckerberg reeks of recency bias. He could completely screw up AI and he'd still be head and shoulders above every other founder/CEO.

[VirusNewbie]

> as LLMs turn into a dead end.

I really disagree with this take, if LLMs stop progressing you still have major FAANG corporations (like Meta!) paying gobs of money to Anthropic to increase dev productivity.

If LLMs only help the average office worker increase their productivity by 10%, that is still a huge multi-billion dollar market waiting to be captured.

You make good points about people doubting Zuck and Meta before and them being spectacularly wrong, I'm certainly not willing to bet the house against him right now. I think if he had been able to buy Thinking Machines I would have thought it was very similar to Instagram or WhatsApp.

But he wasn't able to, so now i'm not sure it's a done deal that Meta won't be wasting many billions.

[galoisscobi]

> I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg.

Depends on your definition of 'performance'. Does it include ethics?

[DoesntMatter22]

Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity

[haar]

Which are those 7 companies?

[DoesntMatter22]

Tesla, Space X, Boring Company, XAI, Neuralink, Paypal, SolarCity. Also funded and did recruiting for OpenAI.

[Nevermark]

What companies did Elon Musk start? [0]

[0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...

[afavour]

Unsurprisingly the AI agent is wrong. For one, Musk did not start Tesla.

[DoesntMatter22]

Okay... When he joined it was what 7 months old, had no product at all, they didn't even own the name and now it's the 9th most valuable company on earth. By the same token, if I start a company, you join the very next day, I don't do anything and you do all the work and provide all the money, you are not a founder.

If that's your definition then technically he's not a founder.

[nemothekid]

>Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO

Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.

[DoesntMatter22]

You must be kidding. Telsa isn't impressive? The first real EV manufacturer? Going from nothing to the best selling car on the planet in 20 years? Not impressive. One of only 11 companies in the world. With a trillion dollar valuation. More than tripling revenue from 2020 to 2024?

Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards.

I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X was a far harder company to build.

[nemothekid]

__FOUNDER__/CEO. Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He invested in 2004, then became CEO in 2008.

[DoesntMatter22]

He is listed as a founder and was the CEO before they took in any actual money and it's now the 9th largest company in the world.

[nemothekid]

1. I've never denied any of the accomplishments of tesla, so I don't know why you keep re-iterating them. Do you work for Tesla's marketing dept?

2. The first Roadster was shipped (to Musk, funny enough), 8 months before Elon became CEO. Let's be reasonable - I don't know how you can apply the founder/ceo label to a guy who was not ceo when their first product had already shipped.

There are plenty of stories (especially pre-Zuckerberg), or people starting companies, then being replaced by the board by a "real CEO" once they raised real money. These people are not founder/ceos. Google has a near identical path to Tesla; after Google's first real venture round, they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Eric Schmidt is not the "founder" of Google.

I understand Elon has tied his public image to being the "founder" of Tesla; to the point that there was a lawsuit involved. However let's talk in plain terms here, he is not a founder of Tesla in binary terms.

Again, if it makes you feel better - you can read through my comments and note that I have never said anything qualitative about Tesla. I've said nothing about their growth, market cap, or Elon sleeping on production floors. I've simply said Elon was not a founder at Tesla, and therefore is not the group of people I think of as exceptional founder/ceos.

If you really wanted to steelman your argument, you'd be using SpaceX, which he did start, and was involved with before Tesla.

[bdangubic]

> I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg.

This is true but similar to saying Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest Commanders in Chief