[kajumix]

Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.

[tombert]

Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective.

I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.

It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.

[kajumix]

Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.