The reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg

Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg was seen as the ultimate memeable CEO, the guy who needed a booster seat didn't know how to drink water, might actually have been a robot, but in the last year he's made a comeback for the ages he's singularly focused on. . from the Harvard dorm and the man can run MMA fights a blossoming friendship with Jensen Wang talks about a hot summer of Zuck chains F coats and thanks to a stellar performance in the stock

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et a Wall Street favorite now fighting Elon Musk for the title of Third Richest Person in the World, that guy is Mark Zuckerberg, right?

And you know, he may be dressing very well, but he's still a cold-blooded killer, but now his Moment of Truth meta-actions are prepared for what could be the worst day. stock has seen in years, can it deliver on the biggest platform change in technology in decades? Generative AI now, why doesn't it deserve the death benefit it has? I'll give it to you this week at Tech, check out Zuck's

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and his moment show me Harvard didn't have Facebook so that's the void we were trying to fill and now we're 100,000 people so who knows where we go next.

That's what Zuck said on CNBC in 2004, where Next was an empire, his family of apps that includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger today reaching nearly 4 billion users. He founded his company at age 19 and two decades later he is still in control and more successful than ever. That's a feat that is rare today and increasingly rare. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the few tech founding CEOs who continue to work as great tech founders. You've seen everyone from Jeff Bezos come to the cash withdrawal from him. Larry and Sergey are much less involved in Google. Steve Jobs passed away and that's why you. look at the landscape and say who is still the answer, only zck and current Nvidia CEO AI King Jensen hang up, not a bad scenario to share and something Zach himself seems to be proud of, he and I, At this moment, we are the two oldest.

Tech founders of one of the big tech companies, he's actually been at this for over, I think, over 30 years, so, we, almost 30 years, so, he's been doing it a little bit longer than me, but we have a lot. There are many stories and experiences that we share and I appreciate your wisdom on all of these things that shared wisdom helped both companies leave the rest of technology in the dust this year after Nvidia meta be the best performing Mega Cap stock of the year . The last 12 months by far, even as the rest of the tech and social media stocks in particular lag, so how did you get it right if you got in shape and called 2023 the year of efficiency?

It was an incredible decision, an incredible change in terms of management. I don't see companies at this scale with that agility and what we heard last night was a significant change and I think it's really important to understand that Mark said this is not the case and he cut staff and went against the traditionally softer culture of Silicon Valley. They have a hiring freeze in the company. I think this is not only great for the meta, but it really is leadership for all of Silicon Valley and all of technology. Zak was ruthless at the time, multiple rounds of layoffs ultimately cutting thousands of workers at once. laying off 22% of his workforce, but it ran quarterly.

Revenue growth soared and Wall Street applauded. It is the fastest change in corporate history under Zuckerberg. You're talking about a number of employees now that is around 67,000. It was 87,000 on the top right, you know, someone is saying. To me, how long does it take you to know that you get your, you buy a new house, you put it together, it takes you like N9 months to feel comfortable, whatever it is, this guy reorganized an entire company in 3 months, it's amazing what did Zuckerberg? and we continue to see the impact of that and the icing on the cake issued its first dividend, a clear signal to investors that it was evolving into a more mature company.

It's a change for the ages, I mean The Comeback Kid Zuckerberg, I mean comeback. A year and a half ago and now you are making a dividend that listened to Wall Street, they are making gestures of capital discipline and friendship with shareholders. They seem to have obviously taken seriously the criticism that they were being propagated and spending too much on someone else. key to the meta's recent success: zuck's early and almost accidental adoption of generative AI before many of its rivals even knew to start paying attention, we were basically limited in the infrastructure we had to catch up with what that Tik Tok was doing as fast as we were.

I would have wanted to um, so I basically looked at that and said, hey, we need to make sure we're never in this situation again, so let's order enough GPUs to do what we need to do in reals and sorting and controlling and feeding, but let's double that. , which meant that in 2023, when everyone started realizing the generation's potential and skyrocketed the prices of those Nvidia GPUs, Zuck already had a stash, which could be why his latest AI model, Llama 3, is seen as one of the best. open source models that exist and the fact that it is open and not closed like GPT chat and Gemini, which is another important differentiation from competitors, and Zuck bets that it will pay off in the long term, there are a lot of ads when it we have launched or we have wanted it. to release features and then Apple says no you're not releasing, the question is what is it like, are we ready for a world like that with AI where you're going to have a handful of companies running these closed features? models that will have control of the APIs and therefore be able to tell you what you can build.

Well, for example, I can say that it is worth building a model ourselves to make sure that we are not in that position, all this has led Meta to jump headlong into the AI ​​race and catch up quickly. Its meta AI chatbot hit the

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et nearly a year after major competitors Microsoft and Google, but Zuck was quick to take advantage of meta scale and distribution to put that technology in the hands of billions of users. Compare Google, which has talked about adding AI to its core search product for a year but has not yet taken it out of beta testing, or Apple, which has an install base. of more than 2 billion and has yet to articulate a clear strategy for generating artificial intelligence.

Zuckerberg is used to changing his product quickly. I mean, if you think about the age of social media, social media companies need to change and adapt, because people get bored very quickly and that's why Facebook has gone from news to stories to real and now it's incorporating AI; it's simply built into the company's DNA, even if it's not ready for prime time. Meta AI has its share of problems that the New York Times called funny. use but can't be trusted, says he has trouble with fact numbers and web searching, but it's still a bold move by Zuck that could keep him on top or see it all fall apart once again for Mark Zuckerberg has always walked a fine line between Tech Visionary and villain and a big part of his success has been

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on both a personal and corporate level.

Facebook successfully overcame a failed initial public offering in 2012 and the shift to mobile devices, but Some of the most existential threats were related to data privacy. This data scandal shows that his business model is broken, this was a huge breach of trust. People come to Facebook every day and depend on us to protect their data. I'm very sorry that we let so many people down and the amplification of political content, the large number of negative headlines about Facebook. the inability to curb the spread of radicalizing content and also its inability to respond to employee concerns, the procession of high-profile appearances at the Capitol added pressure in which lawmakers pulled no punches, was their data included in the data sold? to malicious third parties your personal data yes, it was, are you willing to change your business model in order to protect individual privacy?

Congressman, we have made and continue to make changes to reduce the amount of are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy Congressman I'm not sure what that means a few years after Zuck put a lot of effort into the metaverse that they are dragging it on the Internet because of how ugly the graphics of this game are. Fortune calls him an international laughing stock. The board labels the appearance as so stupid and Forbes asks if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how bad his metaverse is. A move that Wall Street didn't take very well either.

I made a mistake here. I made a mistake. I trusted this management team that was poorly advised, but but. then came his year of efficiency saving his shares and his credibility on Wall Street, plus there was another technological villain on the scene taking some pressure off Elon Musk, his drama featured the purchase of Twitter with all the layoffs, rebranding, technical failures that They allowed Zuck in with his imitation threads, great news, today we are launching threads, an open and friendly public space for conversations and then there was the billionaire cage fight that Musk challenged Zuck, who coincidentally had 18 months of training from Brazilian jiujitsu for a cage fight and although it never ended up happening Zak emerged looking like the adult in the room, another boost to his public image.

Zuck showed that he could take a hit. I don't think it's any surprise or coincidence that he took up MMA, as he has been able to take hits. in the business world and to answer them, I think those two are quite linked and what Zuckerberg is trying to show himself and show the world is that he can know effectively, take one on the chin but continue to compete and have no interest . to retreat, but it's windy at the top and Zuck may not want to get too comfortable. His most recent quarterly report, a reminder that Wall Street and public opinion are fickle, gave a bleaker outlook for his sales this year and much more spending on artificial intelligence than Wall.

The Street was prepared for there to be periods of increased investment. I read that probably for several quarters of this investment phase, they obviously just updated full-year capex guidance, but I don't expect you to read between the lines here much of a rise or perhaps a breakout in terms of the shares. IA plummeted in the wake of those results that wiped out nearly $200 billion in market value a meta collapse stocks hit levels not seen since late January as revenue guidance falls short of expectations is this the beginning of the end? For the Mega Cap Rally, Zer spent most of that earnings call focusing on money-losing companies like Ai and the metaverse, but for his part, Zak has a track record of turning high costs into real revenue and urged Investors to remember that historically they invest to build these new ones.

The scaled experiences in our apps have been a very good long-term investment for us and for the investors who have stayed with us. Savvy investors see that the product is scaling and that there is a clear monetizable opportunity even before revenue is realized, but the likes of social media and trends are moving quickly. Tik tok's rapid rise underscores that the potential ban on Tik tok is another challenge or opportunity for Zuck to navigate. There is also the advertising market, on which 98% of Meta's current income depends. It is an industry that is subject to rapid declines. It is an industry that is subject to rapid declines. faces more competition than ever and there's a presidential election this year, target numbers have been boosted by huge ad spend from Chinese retailers like timu and Shen, so Mark Zuckerberg is riding the wave of his latest reinvention, a reminder that in the fast-paced world of technology, staying on top is as difficult as getting there