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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this time the top posters on HN should stop criticizing one of the top performing founder CEOs of the last 20 years who built an insane business, made many calls that were called stupid at the time (WhatsApp), and many that were actually stupid decisions.

Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?

If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes

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I think many people just really dislike Zuckerberg as a human being and Meta as a company. Social media has seriously damaged society in many ways.

It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.

It's an entertainment tool. Like a television or playstation. Only a fool would think social media is anything more.

Sure, but society is full of fools. Plenty of people say social media is the primary way they get news. Social media platforms are super spreaders of lies and propaganda.

I don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal.

The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?

> Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?

> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.

It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.

Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.

He’s not “being paid that much”

He’s earned almost all his money through owning part of a company that millions of shareholders think is worth trillions, and does in fact generate a lot of profits.

A committee didn’t decide Zuckerberg is paid $30bn.

And id say his work is pretty exceptional. If it wasn’t then his company wouldn’t be growing. And he’d probably be pressured into resigning as CEO

Yes, I do know all of that semantics, thanks for stating the obvious.

Being rewarded for creating a privacy destroying advertising empire, exceptional work. Imagine a world where the incentives were a bit different, we might have seen other kind of work rewarded instead of social media and ads.

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