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How Mark Zuckerberg Became Too Big to Fail
Facebook has had a turbulent two years. But almost no one in tech thinks Mr. Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, should step down from the company he built.
A few weeks ago, after Facebook revealed that tens of millions of its users’ accounts had been exposed in a security breach, I began asking people in and around the tech industry a simple question: Should Mark Zuckerberg still be running Facebook?
I’ll spare you the suspense. Just about everyone thought Mr. Zuckerberg was still the right man for the job, if not the only man for the job. This included people who currently work at Facebook, people who used to work at Facebook, financial analysts, venture capitalists, tech-skeptic activists, ardent critics of the company and its giddiest supporters.
The consensus went like this: Even if Mr. Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s founder, chief executive, chairman and most powerful shareholder — bore most of the responsibility for the company’s cataclysmic recent history, he alone possessed the stature to fix it.
More than one of his supporters told me it was bad faith to even broach the subject — that Mr. Zuckerberg’s indispensability was so plain that the only reason I might have to ask whether he should still run the company was the clicks I would get on this article. But even critics were not that excited about the idea of Mr. Zuckerberg’s removal. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an organization that fights monopoly power, argued that Facebook’s problems grew out of its business model and the legal and regulatory vacuum in which it has operated — not the man who runs it.
“To be blunt, if we took Mark Zuckerberg out and we replaced him with Mahatma Gandhi, I don’t think the corporation would change in any significant way,” Mr. Lynn said.
That few can imagine a Facebook without Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, underscores how unaccountable our largest tech companies have become. Mr. Zuckerberg, thanks to his own drive and brilliance, has become one of the most powerful unelected people in the world. Like an errant oil company or sugar-pumping food company, Facebook makes decisions that create huge consequences for society — and he has profited handsomely from the chaos.
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