[jamesaguilar]

I don't understand why this person thinks Mark owed him all the information he complains about not being given. Am I obliged to inform my competitors of my intentions at every turn? Am I obliged to tell them when I change my mind about my plans? Am I indeed obliged not to deceive them? How do we know that Mark even viewed this guy as a friend, rather than perhaps as a friendly acquaintance? I can say for sure that I had many more and longer conversations on AIM with my real friends.

Maybe this guy has a reasonable beef, but it's far from clear to me.

[corporalagumbo]

I don't think Greenspan is complaining - I think this is meant as a warning. He's not saying that Mark acted unfairly and that he should have been nicer to Aaron (which would come across as petulant, and I think Greenspan seems quite realistic and calm about what happened), but that Mark has acted with only ruthless, narrowly-defined "self-interest", displaying no loyalty or kindness, and this bodes very poorly for the company, its investors and its users. Facebook is Mark's creation, and at the core of the company, beneath its social-open-sharing buzzwords there is no philosophy of human relationships, only Mark's shallow, self-centered heartlessness and lust for power and profit. We might think so what, but maybe we've been desensitised by the often shitty and kinda sociopathic (or socio-agnostic) behaviour of web entrepreneurs. Anyway point is the arbiter of "friendship" on the internet is a megalomaniac who seems to understand nothing about friendship - a strange situation perpetuated by a star-struck, gutless press too busy slathering him with praise to think critically. Greenspan is just pointing this out, fairly it seems.

[jamesaguilar]

Isn't this basically the same as saying tesla and spacex will fail because Elon Musk is a jackass?

[patrickk]

You don't hear stories about Elon Musk shafting his friends and acquaintances, stringing them along and stealing their ideas.

Apparently Musk was a bit of a jerk when x.com merged with PayPal, and is supposedly difficult to work for even today (he works 100 hour weeks, probably demands the same high standards of his employees as he does of himself), but there's none of the skeletons in the closet with Musk as there is with Zuckerberg.

Plus there's the fact that Musk is tackling really difficult problems like online payments (fraud), mass-producing electric vehicles, making solar installations viable and aiming to make humans a multi-planetary species. Zuckerberg just created the latest social fad, IMO which is now in the process of self-destructing.

[jamesaguilar]

Did you not read about his divorce?

[cuergas]

Neither Tesla nor SpaceX rely on millions of fickle web users handing over their personal information and regularly signing in to a website to look at photos and status updates. Nor can they be easily replicated by a competitor who is not a jackass.

[jamesaguilar]

Apparently neither can Facebook, if recent attempts are any indication.

[cuergas]

Replicated is the wrong word. Superceded is maybe a bit better. Never say never my friend. These things take time.

[jamesaguilar]

I see. You get to baldly assert that SpaceX and Tesla are hard to copy, though few have yet tried, but when I point out that people have tried and failed to beat Facebook at their game, these things take time?

[jimbokun]

"Am I indeed obliged not to deceive them?"

From the perspective of being a decent human being, the answer to this question is pretty much always "yes".

[zingahgud]

If you read all the IM's, carefully, and you know a bit of Facebook history, you should see that the targets Zuckerberg chose from which he stole the ideas he used for Facebook, like Greenspan, were the type of people who could easily be taken advantage of. He knew who he was dealing with. But there is no empathy.

In the IM's Zuckerberg goes so far as to tell Greenspan he considers him to be "like a friend" (see IM for exact wording). This is really sickening.