Mark Zuckerberg: Move fast and get rich

24:15Let's take a journey back to 2003. Canadian teen sensation Avril Lavigne was topping the charts and turning the music industry upside down. But what if I told you that the Avril Lavigne we know and love might not be the same Avril? What? Did Avril die? Was she replaced by a doppelganger? I'm Joanne McNally and I'm doing a deep dive into a notorious internet conspiracy. Who replaced Avril Lavigne? Listen on BBC Sounds. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster. But you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

25:03Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. Cheaper? OCI costs up to 50 % less for computing, 70 % less for storage, and 80 % less for networking. Better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

25:45Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:31So remember the Winklevoss twins? I do. In 2004, the founders of the site Harvard Connections, who'd asked Zuckerberg to code it, took him to court saying that he'd stolen their business plan, he'd sourced their code and he'd stalled their site so he could set up his own one. One of the rowing twins, Tyler Winklevoss, said, it's sort of a land grab. You feel robbed. The kids down the hall are using it and you're thinking, that's supposed to be us. I must say they were very unflatteringly portrayed in the film, weren't they? Oh, yeah, 100%. Rich jumped up posh kids who felt entitled to the Facebook.

27:02So Facebook also sued Eduardo Saverin and then was counter-sued by Saverin. Yes, because Zuckerberg had diluted Savarin's stake after he hadn't raised enough funds. He'd placed unauthorised ads on the site. So basically, they brought in additional funding, which diluted him out. And so his proportion of the company had shrunk. Both cases, however, were eventually settled out of court. And, you know, these stories are central to the social network biopic. It's worth noting, however, that that film by David Fincher is actually based on a book by a journalist who was approached by Savarin. So it's very much Savarin's point of view.

27:39Well, funnily enough, Savarin now says he doesn't resent Zuckerberg. You know why? He's worth$26 billion himself. Most of that came from his stake in Meta. Yeah, that's a court battle I'd love to be in. So in 2005, the Facebook was moving pretty fast. Thiel's money was part of the seed round. The next injection of money would be what they call the A round. OK, what does A stand for? Well, there's seed funding and then there's a very sophisticated ecosystem in Silicon Valley which has different rounds of investors and investors specialize in really early. Then I want to get into the A stage. Then there'll be a B series.

28:12Then there'll be a C series. And these are all stages in the development of a company. C is pre-income. A is like, you know, pre-profit. C is when you're scaling up. So these are different stages. And by the time you're getting C around C, people are taking you incredibly seriously. Right. Okay. So the Facebook's at an A round of investment. Yeah. And Zuckerberg accepted an investment offer from a friend's dad, the Washington Post publisher, Donald Graham. But then he got a$12.7 million offer from a Silicon Valley firm. And apparently this was a big dilemma. What's he going to do? And apparently he was found crying in the toilet, something I find hard to imagine.

28:50Graham, you know, was quite the good guy about it. He said, take the better offer. And they actually remained friends. And Zuckerberg later asked him to be on the board of Facebook. So it worked out for him. And a crucial moment, one of the first things the Facebook spent that investment money on was buying the domain name Facebook.com. So Zuckerberg obviously had always wanted it because let's face it, Facebook.com is much nicer and rolls off the tongue better than the Facebook.com. Are you saying that it would be any different if it was called the Facebook rather than Facebook? I don't know if it would have materially differed for their outcomes, but, you know, it just rolls off the tongue in a much nicer way.

29:25So they used the money to buy Facebook.com and soon Facebook had more than 5 million users after allowing high school students to join. More venture capital investments flowed in, but there was then a massive offer to buy the site. Despite not generating an income yet, in June 2006, Yahoo come along and offer$1 billion. You know, we talked about how he turned down almost a million dollars. This is quite the upgrade. Well, he's turning down at this point. His stake is worth 30%. He's turning down$300 million, age 20-something. Like I say, I'm out at this stage. Okay, to be fair, he was quite torn.

30:06So he asked his mentors, including Teal, for advice. And Teal said, what would you do with that money? Basically, Zuckerberg realised his answer would be, create another Facebook. So why not carry on? I wouldn't have turned it down. No. $300 million? Anyway. You're sorted for life. You are. But Facebook is evolving. It keeps adding features. In 2006, it launched the news feed. That had taken a year to code. And this was a kind of feed that showed you what everyone you were following was up to. It kind of put it all into this news feed for you to look at. And though it seems strange now, there was an immediate backlash.

30:43Within 48 hours, 7 % of users joined an anti-news feed group. They said it was invasive, users were angry that relationship status and holiday photos were being shared on what it felt like was a public message board. I mean, we've moved on so far from being angry about stuff like that. It's really quite something to look at it, what it was like back then. But, you know, this caused a panic among investors. Facebook actually had to hire their first security guard to protect the office from protesters. And Zuckerberg wrote an apology of sorts titled, Calm down, breathe, we hear you. One line said, We agree, stalking isn't cool.

31:17but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is. Despite the protests, data showed that he was right on the money. People spent more time on the site. Newsfeed made Facebook unique. It offered a customised landing page for each user. So my Facebook landing page is different to yours because you've got different friends, so we have different feeds. And it's that customisation that would be copied across the internet. So in the same way now you look at your Instagram feed and it looks different to everyone else's feed, that's exactly what Facebook pioneered. Yeah, and Matt Kohler, who was then the vice president of Facebook's product management, said it was a microcosm of Mark and the company.

31:53The intent was good. There were some misfires along the way. We acknowledged the misfires. We fixed it and we moved on. Broke something and moved on. Their next challenge was to expand their market. Twitter, by the way, had launched in July 2006. So Facebook realised it had to look beyond students if they wanted to compete in the big wide world. Just a few weeks after News Feed launched, Facebook became open to everyone. It was called open registration. At the time, it seemed like it might trigger an even bigger backlash. You remember it was initially founded on this idea that you were signing up and giving this public information away, but only within a trusted group of people.

32:27But Facebook learned their lesson. They briefed the press beforehand. And this time, no protests, no need for a security guard. And it worked. Yeah, in 2005, they had five and a half million users. By the end of 2006, they had 12 million plus. That's a lot of people. But also worth knowing that at this point in time, it had been running for four years, but not making any money. They had some adverts on their site, but they needed to boost revenue, needed to monetize this thing. Investors wanted them to start making money. And enter at this point Bill Gates, another one of our billionaires. He's no longer chief executive of Microsoft, but he's still the executive chair.

33:04He took an interest in Zuckerberg, not least because he was being touted as the next Bill Gates. Microsoft were very interested in online advertising. They understood that whoever controls the platforms for online ads would control the future of the internet market. Yeah, and at this time, Google were dominating the advertising market, the online ad market, and Microsoft had been competing with them to buy up new sites. In 2006, Google had bought YouTube for$1.6 billion, beating out Microsoft. Microsoft initially tried to buy Facebook, but Zuckerberg, once again, wasn't interested in selling the company.

33:38But in 2007, they accepted a$240 million investment for a 1.6 % stake in Facebook. So doing the maths, it's$240 million for 1.6%. That price valued Facebook at a whopping$15 billion back in 2006. You know what's cooler than a billion? $15 billion. A lot of people were shocked by that valuation. Facebook had 50 million users compared to MySpace's 300 million. And MySpace was valued at less than that, at$12 billion. So there seems to be a mismatch. What's going on right here is there is a land grab. This is a scramble for online eyeballs. And this is them divvying up the future of advertising, basically.

34:17Right. And in that kind of firestorm, people end up paying quite a lot of money for silly amounts of money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because investors get FOMO as well as Facebook users. So tech journalist Cara Swisher at the time famously wrote about how ridiculous this price was. She said that Facebook was a lemonade stand and Microsoft was desperate. And that was pretty common. I've interviewed Kara Swisher many times. And, you know, she's considered one of the sharpest people on technology anywhere in the world. And a lot of people thought that. I would say the majority of people were watching these valuations just going, this is insane.

34:51But crucially, there were some investors who weren't thinking that because some people actually followed Microsoft with big investments at actually similar rates. And remember, he's got a 30 % share. So at this point, 30 % of$15 billion, he's comfortably a billionaire. And the following year, he's included on the Forbes list as the world's youngest billionaire. Forbes were cautious of the$15 billion valuation. They went with a lower figure of$5 billion. So they estimated his net worth at a cool, but now looks tiny,$1.5 billion.

35:29So let's take it to beyond a billion because Zuckerberg has many, many billions to come. So one key to his success was surrounding himself with the right people. There's Sean Parker, there's Peter Thiel, there's Bill Gates. He's very good at drawing on other people's skills and experience. And that might make you think he's a kind of passive person, an eager student. But an early Facebook employee said whether it's Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, These people thought they were manipulating Mark, but Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most, fundraising. In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.

36:04So he's not being exploited here. He's doing the exploiting. And if you see him when he gets dragged in front of the Senate and all that kind of stuff, he always talks about, we have a set of tools to do this. We have a set of tools. It's a bit of a kind of mantra for him. That's the way you think, tools to do his bidding, basically. Yeah. People as tools, tools that help him get ahead. And I suppose, in a way, there might be something in the billionaire mindset here that, you know, they know that they can't do everything themselves. They need to use other people to get things done for them. People always say, oh, delegate, delegate.

36:35That's the sign of a good manager. The dark side of delegating is that you're basically delegating flunkies to do the stuff that you don't want. Now, I don't know how Sheryl Sandberg would like being called a tool in this. Or a flunky, to be fair. Or a flunky to go because she was one of the next big people in the Facebook story. She kind of supercharged Facebook, right? And she was a rock star executive herself. She was the vice president of sales and operations at Google. And remember that the people at Facebook, I remember talking to one of the people saying, we looked at Google and we thought they're the holy grail.

37:06They've managed to monetize advertising. We need to do the same. And Cheryl was absolutely key in that. And they were looking for a chief operating officer to help boost that advertising revenue. So enter Cheryl Sandberg. She'd grown that team at Google from 4 ,000 to 4 ,000. And she'd built this program called AdWords, which was incredibly groundbreaking, lucrative, and allowed Google to make money off ads. It's the Rosetta Stone of Google's making money, the AdWords program. She was 38. Zuckerberg was 23. She's a very charismatic woman, Sheryl Sandberg. And there's an iciness to her, but she's pretty cool.

37:41And I can imagine a 23-year-old being quite goggle-eyed at the 38-year-old Sheryl Sandberg. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. But anyway, I think they probably had a different relationship than he might have did with Sean Park or whatever. They spent a lot of time together. When Sheryl Sandberg was up for the job, the two met at her house for dinner once or twice a week for six weeks. Her husband described it as it was like dating. They were like dating and sizing each other up to see if they could go into a partnership. I'm not sure that's an entirely comfortable phrase from the husband there.

38:11A Facebook executive said people can be intimidated by Mark, but Cheryl cut right through that and she was the adult in the room. She took on the business side, left Zuckerberg to run the product side although Mark Zuckerberg would always have the final say. And it's worth noting that Sandberg understood the business completely. She knew Google could offer advertisers search terms but Facebook could offer advertisers access to specific demographics from using all that data they collected on their users over time. All those things that you were liking, all the things that you were tagging your friends in, all the places you were checking into.

38:44all that builds a very accurate profile of who you are. What am I interested in? What are my likes and my dislikes? Which bands do I like? Who you're dating, who you're going out with. I mean, when you think about it, the amount of stuff and information we gave Facebook willingly. Because that was a big thing about Facebook, whether you were single or in a relationship. Or it's complicated. What does that mean? That's a maybe. This is why, in a way, Facebook was brilliant, to have a relationship status that just said it's complicated. Yeah. So Sheryl Sandberg explained, And while Google had monetized intent, Facebook could monetize demand.

39:16Advertisers could sell Facebook users things they wanted even before they thought they knew they wanted them. So three years in, under Sandberg, Facebook grew from 130 to 2 ,500 employees. And the platform went from 70 million worldwide users to nearly 700 million, overtaking MySpace as the biggest social media platform in the process. Then in 2012, Facebook has its IPO. This is the bit where you sell shares to the general public. You get a view on what the whole company is worth. And the company was valued at$104 billion. That's the largest internet IPO ever, still to this day. And I remember very clearly at that time, people were looking at that and saying, $100 billion?

39:56You've got to be out of your mind. There's no way is this company worth that. Well, Zuckerberg still at the time had 22 % share of the company. So at that point, he was worth over$22 billion. But important note, although he had 22 % share of the company, because of those two different classes of shares with different voting rights, he actually had 57 % of the voting rights. So he's still very much in control. And, you know, all those other competitors that were coming up at the time, Facebook saw them off by simply buying them. In April 2012, Facebook paid$1 billion for Instagram. Instagram had 12 employees, okay?

40:3412 employees. So they've spent a billion dollars, but it turned out to be one of the greatest deals of all time. Zuckerberg understood that while Facebook had been designed for PCs, Instagram was a perfect fit for mobile users. So he bought that competition. And I dare say, if people knew what Facebook was going to become, or Meta as we now know it, that deal would never happen. It would be allowed to happen again. Because it would be a monopoly. If today Instagram was an independent company and Facebook was an independent company, Facebook trying to buy Instagram, there's no way that would be allowed by competition authorities.

41:06They would just think it's too antitrust. They would say that you're taking up too much of the online pie. Well, Facebook was allowed to do it. And then in 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for nearly$19 billion. Yeah. And Zuckerberg said at the time he wouldn't meddle often with the messaging app so as not to mess with a good thing. It's worth knowing that WhatsApp is massive in places like the UK and India. It's actually not so huge in the US, but, you know, in the UK, it is massive. I would say that in the business world as well, 5 % of people use MSN, just simple texts, and 95 % of people use WhatsApp.

41:41So WhatsApp is the normal channel for sending a text these days. Yeah. And Zuckerberg actually says that now WhatsApp is at the core of the business. He said, if you're envisaging what the private social platform of the future starting from scratch, I think it will basically look like WhatsApp. So he's thinking about WhatsApp not just as a messaging service, but as a social media platform. And meanwhile, the growth of Facebook itself has continued. In 2012, they reached the one billion user milestone. Fast forward to today, it's over three billion. So let's take a look at the impact Facebook has had on the world, because that is a lot of the world's population that has signed up to Facebook.

42:16Yeah, in 2010 and 2011, Facebook was cited as a key tool for democracy when protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt that turned into the Arab Spring. Many news outlets refer to it, in fact, as the Facebook revolution. Some have downplayed its importance. But, you know, the general consensus is that it did allow people to disseminate information. It helped people on the ground cover events as they happened. Yeah, one study found that nine in 10 Egyptians and Tunisians said they use Facebook to organise protests or spread awareness about them. But from that height of being the champion of democracy, Facebook has had quite the fall since.

42:54Facebook's role in democracy has actually been questioned quite a lot. Because there were some reports in 2018 in the New York Times and The Guardian, up to 87 million Facebook profiles had been harvested and sold to a company called Cambridge Analytica. And this is an interesting one, because if I told you that a corporation which wanted to sell stuff had harvested 87 million users' information and pushed ads to them, you would think, what's wrong with that? That's how commerce works, right? I think it's different with elections, though. And it's around this time that Facebook starts introducing publishers onto the platform.

43:28So, you know, newspapers, magazines, online websites start getting into Facebook. And you are able, as a user, to see where articles rank. You know, you can pass around links. And it's worth noting that around the time of the election, there was an awful lot of fake news going around. There were publications that, honestly speaking, did not exist, did not have an office, did not have a so-called editor-in-chief or editorial standards. And those articles were going viral and people were reacting to them and reading them as if they came from real, legit publishers. Zuckerberg initially refused to acknowledge that misinformation on the site affected voters, calling it a pretty crazy idea, saying that voters make decisions based on their lived experience.

44:09He also lived to regret that comment because a year later he said, this is too important an issue to be dismissive. So all of this was floating around in the ether and it eventually meant that in 2018 Zuckerberg was holed up before Congress. And everyone expected him to be grilled when he faced US Congress for five hours in 2018 for social media privacy and the use and abuse of data. In fact, his staff was so worried he would sweat profusely, like he'd done in previous hearings. They actually persuaded congressional aides to turn up the air con. But he came away pretty much unscathed. This is largely because of the fact lawmakers actually didn't really understand what Facebook did.

44:48I watched those sessions and it was clear they hadn't got a clue what was going on. One of them asked, why am I suddenly seeing chocolate ads all over Facebook? And another one asked, is Facebook spying on the emails I send via WhatsApp? I think now the role of social media in elections is considered, you know, no one thinks they don't matter. No one thinks that. But the thing is, is that you talk about fake news. If I go out there into the studio in the BBC and say something which is false, there'll be a complaint to Ofcom. I'll probably get sacked. Let's not game plan that too far. Let's not carry that thought experiment too far.

45:24But the point is, is that as a publisher or as a broadcaster, there are rules about what can be published. Facebook has always said that it is not a publisher, it is a platform and therefore doesn't have the responsibility that the stuff that appears on its service is checked for veracity, basically. And that's a battle that's still going on. Yeah, so you have a badly spelled, badly sourced, completely inaccurate news report from a publisher that, you know, nobody has heard of goes viral on Facebook. Facebook's kind of general attitude is that wasn't us. We've got nothing to do with it. That's people sharing it on their platforms.

45:57And that's absolutely fine. That's what Facebook does. And this is the whole thing about social media, social harms. One of the many appearances Mark Zuckerberg has made in front of politicians in the US, there was that famous hearing where there were people behind him in the room who had suffered various types of social harms, you know, people either eating disorders or suicides or whatever it was. And they were all behind him and they all had pictures of the person in their family who had suffered that social harm. And he was forced to turn around and off mic. He said, I apologise to them. So, I mean, this is a live issue, right?

46:33During that congressional hearing where, you know, parents were holding up pictures of the children who had died following sexual exploitation or harassment via social media. He actually told senators his company had 40 ,000 people working in trust and safety. That's the division that is ostensibly meant to be protecting users from harms like this. Yeah. And he announced they're putting in protection to give teens more age appropriate experiences. But it didn't stop, as Senator's saying in that hearing, telling Mark Zuckerberg that he had blood on his hands. You have a product that is killing people to applause from the people in the room.

47:04Let's not feel too sorry for Mark Zuckerberg because at this point he is now richer than ever. Yeah. In 2021, in fact, Facebook changed its name to Meta to better encompass all the companies that own the WhatsApp, the Instagram and Facebook. A bit like Google did, changing its holding company name to Alphabet. It also coincided with the announce of the Metaverse, their virtual reality company. The Metaverse is something of an obsession for Mark Zuckerberg. This is a boy who loved world-building games. Fair to say the jury's still out on it? There was a lot of hoo-ha when it first came in. Yeah, I think it's very much we're going to have to wait and see.

47:39In 2022, Shara Sandberg stepped down as COO. And in 2024, she actually left the board of Meta under her revenue group from$272 million in 2008 to nearly$118 billion in 2021. That's incredible. Zuckerberg himself is now titled as the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta. And although tech companies don't usually pay dividends, in February 2024, Meta announced they would pay their first ever quarterly dividend to investors after they beat revenue expectations in 2023. Yeah. And remember, Zuckerberg has got 350 million Metashares. That's a 13 % stake now. He gets 700 million a year in dividends. So before he even gets out of bed, 700 million a year.

48:22Also, this paying a dividend is quite a big moment in a company's development because particularly for tech companies, it means that you've got to a kind of thing where you're never going to have that explosive growth ever again. You would never pay a dividend if you thought you could double in size. You would reinvest all the money in expanding the business. So it's a sign that it's a maturity. It's like a utility now. It's sort of a really mature company, which is generating cash, so much cash that it can afford to pay it out without having to invest it all in the future growth. Right. The kids grown up and moved out of the parents' houses, now paying for the parents' rent.

48:54Exactly. And that dividend announcement saw Meta's market value surge$204 billion in one day. That is the largest surge in value in history. And Meta is currently valued at $1.2 trillion. Oh, my God. I think that's one of the few times we've actually used the word trillion. I know. It's one of the most valuable companies in the world. In fact, only a handful of companies, Apple, Google, NVIDIA now, are worth more than that. You know, it's in the trillionaires club. And obviously, all that meant that Zuckerberg's wealth has expanded. So he's now valued by Forbes as being over$170 billion. So it's tough at the top.

49:33And there's not many people up on that level. But in 2023, one of the few men richer than him, Elon Musk, challenged Zuckerberg to a cage fight. I don't think this was a good call because at this point, Zuckerberg just won several medals at his first Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament. He replied with send me location. Musk never did. I don't think that I'd be surprised if that ever happens. And I know who I'm betting on. I mean, yeah, it would be a good bet to bet on Zuckerberg.

50:04Well, let's judge him himself. Is he good, bad or just another binion? Let's go through our categories. First out of 10, wealth. Oh, he's a nine out of 10. He's definitely nine. Yeah, I mean. 9.9 almost. So because, I mean, there's only Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault who are richer than him. So on wealth, yeah, nine, possibly 10. Yeah, I think nine. Okay. There's always more to earn. There's always more to earn. So nine out of 10 for wealth. Rags to riches. He was born comfortably middle class. His parents invested in Facebook. Went to a swanky private school, went to Harvard. Yeah, pretty comfortably well off.

50:42Wouldn't have struggled. And probably that's why he was able to turn away so much money, right? That's interesting, isn't it? I wonder if you came from a really poor background, whether you would have been able to turn down half a million dollars at the age of 20. Yeah, exactly. You'd be like, oh, no, I could buy my parents' house. I could make sure they retire comfortably. I'm going to give him a three. Two, two or three. I'm going to give him a two. When you're called the prince by your mum from age dot. Get out of here. Yeah. Okay, two. Two from both of us. Villainy. Now, on this one, it's difficult to separate the person from the product.

51:15I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is inherently a bad person. In fact, I'm pretty sure he isn't. But I think we're judging Facebook here as well, aren't we? Yeah, definitely. And you know what? I think if you control a company with that amount of determination, you kind of want your product and you to be one and the same. So in a way, he's asked for it. Yeah, that's true. He's always wanted to have the most power of one of the most powerful companies in the world. Let's look in the positive column first. On the positive side, Facebook let you stay in touch with your friends and your family, no matter where you are.

51:48And Instagram does this as well. You can keep in touch with people all over the world and be more connected. There's a lot of bad sides to that, though. I don't personally use Facebook at all, but I do use Instagram and it's kind of nice. And what Instagram started out was like sending postcards, really, of your holidays or look, a little selfie of me standing next to someone famous or in front of a famous building. It's very different now, though. Oh, it's really different. You can build an entire career off Instagram alone. But, you know, I keep coming back to this whole idea of what Facebook and Meta have done for journalism and publishing.

52:21You know, the algorithm that it's created essentially kind of pushes people down a wormhole. So it's like you want to drive up engagement. You want people to use your platform more. You'll just send them stuff, you know, will either enrage them or tickle their fancy or, you know, it just encourages people to spend so much time online. I don't know if that's necessarily good for people. Yeah. And if you think about it, sort of Instagram, Facebook and Google, to be fair, have completely revolutionized the advertising industry. they suck up so much of what used to be spent on TV, in magazines, in adverts and newspapers.

52:54I mean, they've sort of destroyed whole bits of the publishing world, haven't they? I suppose some people have drawn a line between social media, like Facebook, WhatsApp, whatever, and the rise of populism, a direct threat to democracy, because the algorithm can influence how people think. Maybe that's too strong, but it's certainly a factor. I mean, it's hard to imagine misinformation and disinformation having the amount of power that it has over people without Facebook's involvement. There's a virality to this communication, which is unprecedented. And also because, you know, Facebook knows so much about people.

53:32If you were a bad actor with bad intentions, you could easily tailor make your content towards people you know would be affected by it. Yeah. OK, so questionable, difficult issues there on villainy. And you know what? We have judged him based on Facebook, but as a person, he also screwed over quite a lot of people in his 20s. Oh, that's true. I mean, he basically pushed out his old friends, Eduardo Saverin. Yeah. And he also, according to Winklevoss twins, screwed them over. Yeah. He's definitely made some moves in order to seize more control and ultimately make more money. So I'm going to give him quite a high rank on this one.

54:09He's not Victor Boot, the Merchant of Death. He's not El Chapo. He hasn't personally killed 2 ,000 people. But I'm going to give him a seven for villainy. Oh, I'm going to give him an eight. I'm going to be harsher. Okay. It's the fact that he's personally, at the beginning of Facebook's story, not a very nice guy. And you can tell from the way he used to deal with his old partners. And also the product he created is also not a very nice product. So eight out of 10 for me. Okay, seven and eight. Philanthropy is going to score pretty well on this one. Yeah. So in 2015, him and his wife pledged to donate 99 % of their Facebook stock over their lifetime.

54:43Since then, their foundation has granted$4.8 billion in grants. So, you know, that's quite a lot of money, but it's not nearly everything he owns. Yeah. It was funny, actually, in 2018, there was a lot of criticism. He handed out$3 million to help the housing crisis in Silicon Valley. And people said that was a bit rich because the crisis was in part caused by the success of companies like Facebook. He doesn't really have a kind of, I'm going to save the world, kind of, I'm going to give away all my money. and he's going to start now. He said, I mean, he basically set up a kind of rival to the giving pledge, didn't he, basically?

55:20So they have said they're going to give away 99 % of the money. They're not getting there very quickly. No, I mean, I know they're young, but you know, guys, you better get going. I'm going to seven question mark on this one. Yeah, I'm going to give them a seven. Okay. Power. Oh, he must score really highly on this, just for building Facebook and owning Instagram alone. Yeah, he owns the most powerful social media platforms in the world and he is in charge of them. This is not run by committee, this company. And it's funny when you think about it, if Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suddenly went down for whatever reason, people would be like, oh, wait, how do I how do I talk to people?

55:57Do I need to text them? Do I call them? You know, it's it takes up so much airtime in people's heads and so makes up so much of the way that people communicate with each other now. And, you know, he is somebody who has got the ear of presidents, heads of state. And you could say that the product that he has created can influence elections. We've seen evidence of that. It can cause insurrections. It can lead to overthrowing of dictators, maybe in Tunisia and Egypt and what have you. So I think he's up there with Murdoch, actually. I'm going to give him possibly a 10. Yeah, I'm going to give him a 10.

56:31Wow. Even though everyone says, oh, Facebook, who even logs onto that anymore? It's just full of like your 60-year-old aunts and uncles arguing with each other over newspaper articles. It's still a really powerful thing. Yeah, 10s all around. And legacy. Well, the world will never be the same again, will it, right? No. Even Sean Parker, who was once involved with Facebook itself, said, God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. Yeah. When we've looked at other billionaires, we're saying, if they hadn't existed, would this stuff have happened anyway? And I think social media probably would have happened.

57:04But there's something about the ethos that, you know, comes through Zuckerberg and his old friend Peter Thiel, which meant that this company, I think, grew in a different way than it might otherwise have done. Yeah, you can imagine if MySpace had won out in the battle between MySpace and Facebook, social media would look very different. I think it would. I think it would. So in terms of legacy, I'm going to give him a 10 for legacy. I just don't think the world's ever going to be the same again. No, I'm going to give him a 10 as well. I wasn't expecting to give out 10. Yeah, you know what? I've dropped myself into it.

57:34It's very hard when you look at him and, you know, it's quite, you know, sort of a bit gormless looking. But it's funny, isn't it? The people who look the most unassuming can end up having the biggest effects on the world. And he hasn't even turned 40 years old yet. Gee whiz. So 10 for legacy. So good, bad or just another billionaire? Well, I outsource this question. I feel very strongly that he's bad. Because I grew up in that generation that can remember a time before Facebook, before social media. I remember being one of the first people to sign up to Facebook because I was at a UK university that was let into the first early stages where you could join this US invention.

58:16And everything changed. It was incredible. Everything changed. My university experience was so different to people who graduated two years ahead of me because of Facebook. I am a bit older than you. Just a little bit. I remember a time I was at university pre-mobile phone. That's how old I am. All of that stuff. I missed out on all of that. But I don't feel any worse off for that. And I find myself when I am doom scrolling in the middle of the night, I think this is no way to live my life. I know. Exactly. And that's what Facebook essentially did. And also Instagram, which, you know, they now own.

58:50It just gives you a window into seeing everyone else's lives. And it's impossible not to compare. You go back to Face Smash and it's literally comparing people. So good, bad or just another video? I called Rory Ketland-Jones, the BBC's former technology editor. And he said, I think he's probably a baddie. And I think he probably is. I think him and the products that he's made have not made the world a better place. So I'm sorry, Mark. I'm blowing my next interview with him. But on the bright side, you're not even 40 yet. There's still plenty of time to turn the ship around. I don't know, but the thing that he's unleashed can never be put back in the bottle.

59:28That's true. Yeah. So I'm sorry, Mark Zuckerberg. I know you'll get over it with your$170 billion, but you were a bad billionaire. I mean, I feel a bit bad about this because we do actually use two of these platforms to advertise our own podcast. Hopefully we'll be taken down. We're going to take a little break for a while. So while we're away, please get thinking of any billionaires you want us to cover and send their names to us on. Pick your social network of choice. Yes, exactly. Thanks for listening so far to Good Bad Billionaire. We'll be back soon. And check out the episodes you've missed on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00:05Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire. This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward. James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

1:00:17America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.