It seems safe to say that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not be voting for Senator Elizabeth Warren in the upcoming Democratic primary. In new leaked audio, obtained by The Verge, Zuckerberg held an internal Facebook employee Q&A back in July where he spoke candidly against critics, laughed at Twitter, sized up TikTok, and explained why Warren is an “existential” threat to his company.
In the meeting, Zuckerberg addressed his concerns about the senator: “You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies . . . I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean . . . it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Warren has already responded to Zuckerberg’s belief that Warren poses an “existential” threat to his company:
What would really “suck” is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy. https://t.co/rI0v55KKAi
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 1, 2019
To mark the 10th anniversary of the release of The Social Network (really!), here are some of the other fascinating moments culled from nearly two hours of audio of Zuckerberg talking to Facebook employees:
On why breaking up big tech is bad:
“Breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues. And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together. It doesn’t make any of the hate speech or issues like that less likely. It makes it more likely because now . . . all the processes that we’re putting in place and investing in, now we’re more fragmented.”
On Twitter:
“It’s why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face, qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment. Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company. [laughter].”
On how Facebook plans to compete with TikTok:
“I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a stand-alone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.”
On his role in the company:
“In 2006, when Yahoo wanted to buy our company, I probably would’ve been fired, and we would have sold the company. We wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t have control. And then throughout, we’ve just been able to focus on the right things over the long-term, whether it was going through our IPO and focusing on building the right mobile products instead of just focusing on monetizing and putting ads in quickly. When our stock price got cut in half. We’ve had the ability to focus on doing what we think are the right things over a multiyear period, instead of just having to be beholden to the quarter-to-quarter demands that a lot of public companies have to struggle with.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the final deadline, June 7.
Sign up for Brands That Matter notifications here.
