The Maturation Of Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks to Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda (unseen) in front of a monitor displaying a facebook page of Prime Minister's Office of Japan in Tokyo on March 29, 2012. (YURIKO NAKAO/AFP/Getty Images)

New York Magazine:

If all goes as planned, Facebook will finally pull the trigger later this month on its long-salivated-over IPO. The deal could value the company in the neighborhood of $100 billion, making founder and CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg's own unusually large stake worth $25 billion. It is a huge sum, even in context. Zuckerberg's impending fortune is more money than Wal-Mart's 10,000-plus stores made last year. It's more than Wall Street paid in bonuses to New Yorkers last year. And it has been amassed in only eight years by a 27-year-old who not long ago passed out business cards reading "I'm CEO, bitch."

Read the whole story at New York Magazine

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Comments

[HuffPundit]

08:50 PM on 05/07/2012

Sexbook IPO...

[CAdawn]

02:13 PM on 05/07/2012

I take pride in knowing I'm the only one in the US who has not and will not join Facebook.

[Libercation]

02:07 PM on 05/07/2012

People already complain about FACEBOOK as a vice. The shine has diminished, and the ground is set for someone to take its place in popularity. Just another AOL.

[MFS001]

02:49 PM on 05/07/2012

Comparing FB to AOL or MySpace, as many have done, is to completely miss the extent to which FB has changed society. We are talking nearly 1 billion users. AOL, at its height, was merely a freckle on the behind of what FB has become.

[Libercation]

03:39 PM on 05/07/2012

The internet changed society. Facebook is just one take. The interface is unattractive, the CEO is predatory, and it is recognized by educators, marriage counselors, business owners, and developmental psychologists as a dangerous and colossal waste of time.

[adamkuras]

02:00 PM on 05/07/2012

Huh when i read that, i read adam zuckerberg might drive wall street nuts. Ever get word insertions while reading articles like that? Seems to happen to me all the time. I get thought pictures in my head too showing people's reactions like someone taking a picture of me. Anyone have that issue?

[Cage me]

01:37 PM on 05/07/2012

Good for you mister z... laugh all the way to the bank because everyone else would do the same.. no different then lebron james jay z beyonce oprah steven spielberg ted turner
jay leno blah blah blah... people live for entertainment and facebook is part of thatyou and as long as people are dumb enough to pay for work they have no 1 to blame

[Whatever1234]

01:23 PM on 05/07/2012

Zuckerberg is great, yahoo offered him 1 billion when he had nothing, he told them to get lost.

[StarFish12]

01:31 PM on 05/07/2012

He's the 1%. Get it??

[Winski]

01:16 PM on 05/07/2012

Auf wiedersehen!

[Deparis]

12:54 PM on 05/07/2012

What kind of goods does Mr. Zuckerberg manufacture and sell for his company and his personal net worth to be in the tens or hundreds of billions of our green backs again? And you still do not believe that this world has gone completely mad?

[MFS001]

02:37 PM on 05/07/2012

What "goods" did radio stations produce; how about television networks? Facebook's "goods" is a highly effective new advertising medium.

[Valerio della Porta]

12:43 PM on 05/07/2012

From the article "The Zuckerberg-Sandberg duo has been so successful—annual revenues have increased from $150 million to nearly $4 billion since she came aboard—that it has now become a new model for tech company-building. Instead of replacing the quirky founder with a professional CEO, companies now try to “go get a Sheryl.”"

Actually it is not new, Bill Gates did exactly this when he hired Steve Ballmer in the early days.

[parabq]

12:38 PM on 05/07/2012

A prime example of Wall Street greed !! Wall Street wants in (at least initially) so bad it overlooks the imaturity of management. At some point a new fad will emerge and FB will follow the path of MySpace. As long as growth is easy Zuckerberg can putz along. Once he gets real competition he will fold like a bad window shade. It wont be pretty.

[AgathaX]

12:31 PM on 05/07/2012

It's a good article. It's makes a good case for why Facebook will succeed where Myspace and others failed. I came late to the game, signing up for a Fb account only about a year ago. It is now a part of my daily routine. I have fewer than 30 Fb friends and intend to keep it on that scale. It's great to have casual contact with distant family. That my teenaged son and I are both avid users of the same product indicates that they are definitely doing something right.

One of the reasons I initially resisted is that I didn't care for the messenger part of Fb trying to take over email-style communication. It annoyed me that my son wouldn't check an email account, essentially forcing people who wanted to communicate with him into a particular service. As my email box filled up with junk mail, and my Fb messenger box did not, I am turning loose of my qualms about that service.

[castlemike]

12:20 PM on 05/07/2012

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=205638

But that's not the question -- the question is whether at 99 times earnings there's inherent value in what amounts to a fad company selling advertising to people who hang around posting pictures of themselves doing beer bongs.

In a word: No.

Never mind that the world is increasingly going mobile and the mobile world is inherently intolerant of advertising. It's not just the form factor of mobile devices, although that certainly enters into it -- when you get a tiny little sliver of the bottom or top of a screen, you can't sell much (and thus the marketing is not worth much on the price side.)

It's also the fact that data plans are usage sensitive, and therefore the user is paying for the delivery of the advertising that he is then forced to consume.

This is a bankrupt business model that will eventually collapse inward on itself. It might not happen immediately, but the more "multimedia" one makes advertising the more bandwidth consumptive it is, and this will soon wind up running into the people's perception (and reality) that they're paying for the delivery of the ad that is disrupting their experience.

There's no way around this convergence problem, and thus the company ultimately will go nowhere.

[Robert SF]

12:13 PM on 05/07/2012

Remember back in the 70s there was this craze over a toy called Clackers? Then suddenly the fad was over. That's how it will be with Facebook.

[wardropper]

12:00 PM on 05/07/2012

"Maturation"...?

That isn't going to happen for another thirty years in his case.
How can you mature when you have reached "divine" status...?
You start doing silly things - Icarus comes to mind...

[bizzaro birdman]

11:58 AM on 05/07/2012

Does he just try really hard to come off like a feminine hygiene product bag or does it come naturally to him?