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Comment by cmahler7 | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg has the charisma of a damp rag, he'll embarrass himself if he actually runs for president. Clinton had experience and all the data in the world thanks to Eric Schmidt and still lost to a novice because she lacked any charisma at all.

The fact he thinks corny stuff like this actually makes him more relatable to the average american really says it all about how out of touch he is.

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I think he's not there yet, but he has decades to change his persona. If he starts to distance himself from facebook and spend more time on charity over the next decade, he could easily become a Gates level international philanthropist by the time he's 50. If he wants to parlay that into a prestige position like President (a move many thought infeasible until the last year or so) I could see a practical path toward a run. It's anybody's guess as to what it actually takes to win the presidency these anymore.

Totally agree with you on his image. At this point, I think it would take, at the very least, tens of millions of dollars and use of a platform through which his message could reach an audience of hundreds of millions to overcome, and no one seems to have an answer as to how Mark Zuckerberg is going to be able to swing that.

>he'll embarrass himself if he actually runs for president..

I think you are underestimating the power of facebook (& fake news). He has money (64 billion USD) & he controls media (44 percent of all adults get their news from Facebook). he has already won, keep watching.

Could you explain further?

I was very impressed with his ability to learn Chinese and speak it semi-formally in a room filled with Chinese. I think that showed a certain charisma.

I'm not personally a fan of him and I agree that this stuff is representative of being out of touch, yet this behavior does win elections.

I think he would actually be a decent centrist (Obama-style) candidate. He's mildly progressive (not full out Bernie) has no serious negative legacy (this imperfect pledge to run a mile a day stuff is a non-starter) like HRC.

The reason trump was successful is because he didn't apologize for being rich. On the other end you have hillary clinton pouring beer terribly and spending hours planning which meal to get a chipotle to appeal to the most voters. People aren't dumb and they see right through that type of stuff.

As for charisma nearly every interview I've seen of him has been painfully awkward and it's pretty hard to learn something like that.

On paper he's a great candidate, but on paper nobody thought Trump would make it past the Iowa primaries and now he's in the white house.

Trump was successful not because he was unapologetic for being rich, but rather because he said things that a large plurality of voters wanted to hear and was able to win states that gave him a big victory in electoral college votes. The only people who didn't think he had a chance are those who cannot hear or understand those voters, and what's disturbing about that is that inability to understand those voters is supposed to somehow delegitimize his victory.

What delegitimizes him is that he is a notorious lier.

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