“I would, I would not, but if you want”: the epic story of Mark Zuckerberg’s (alleged) resignation from Meta
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The denial of Andy Stone, spokesman for Meta, leaves some time: “It’s false”, he answered to an article posted on Twitter from a mysterious (but very popular) financial news account.
The piece, published by The Leak, revealed that the king is naked. And that is that Mark Zuckerberg would have been ready to leave the leadership of the pachyderm holding company founded as Facebook now 18 years ago in Harvard dormitories. Can you leave a group that was founded, built in your own image and likeness? Of course yes: the events of Bill Gates and, with other outcomes and on a smaller scale, the adventurous story of Adam Neumann of WeWork (just to mention a couple of cases at the antipodes) prove it.
The article cites a source inside the group, explaining that the decision would have been made by Zuckerberg himself. After all, pressures have not been lacking, especially in recent months and in particular after the release of the most recent quarterly: profits more than halved (4.4 billion dollars compared to 9.2 in the same period of the previous year) and revenues down with relative collapse of the capitalization, with 65 billion lost within a few hours from the dissemination of financial data. The real problem, in addition to the stagnant advertising market, the bad global macroeconomic situation and the obstacles placed by players such as Apple in the collection of user data, however, is intimately intertwined with Zuck’s vision for the near future. Yup, exact: that of the metaverse.
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The Reality Labs unit working on this, and which has obviously been given the right research time at a loss, is draining more resources than expected: it has lost $9.4 billion in 2022 with negligible revenue for the group (285 million), linked for example to lower than expected sales of the Quest 2 viewer. The point is that the metaverse has become, in the eyes of shareholders and investors, a sort of referendum on Zuckerberg: if you believe to the first you also continue to trust the second, and vice versa. This is why the stakes are very high and after all the indiscretion of The Leak did not appear particularly surprising. Given the size of Meta, a giant with a turnover of 118 billion dollars a year, 2023 would still seem like an acceptable year for a not too painful exit strategy. On the contrary, the more we continue on the bet of the metaverse, at least according to the figures that the founder intends to use, the more the situation gets screwed up. By tying Zuckerberg to the most important passage in the story of his creature.
After all, there is no need to go too far back in time: Brad Gerstner’s open letter, the 51-year-old founder and CEO of the powerful Altimeter Capital fund, which has hundreds of millions of dollars of Meta shares in its portfolio, was clear: “Meta needs to rebuild trust with investors, employees and the technology community to attract, inspire and retain the best people in the world. In short, Meta needs get in shape and get back to focus” on the fronts he knows best and on which he earns shovelfuls of money. In short: less metaverse (with the proposal to keep the dedicated budget below 5 billion a year), less expenses and more concreteness.
A large portion of those who put money into society would therefore be against such massive investments in the metaverse (which Zuckerberg would even like to double) and, considering how and how much they would change the face of the group without creating a dollar of profits, it is now opposed in an almost philosophical key, in principle, to those plans all crushed in the long if not very long term.
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If on the savings front some answers came with the recent personnel cuts plan (11,000 people worldwide13% of the international workforce), on the more purely strategic front, the news circulated and then denied would seem to invest Zuckerberg at the root: it is difficult to take it all back what has been done and said in the last year without, absurdly, producing a further loss of confidence in investors. The only way, at this point, would therefore be to retire to a philanthropic life and pass the hand. So far, all the historic founders of the realities acquired by Meta over time have left Menlo Park: Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram, where Zuck put the faithful Adam Mosseri, then Jan Koum and shortly after Brian Acton of WhatsApp and finally the chief operating officer and right-hand man of Zuckerberg for 14 years, Sheryl Sandbergjust last June.
There old guard is now represented only by the metadreamer Zuck, who is at stake in the coming weeks for a good chunk of his future.
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