Mark Zuckerberg: Move fast and get rich

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Welcome to Good, Bad, Billionaire.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing, I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And today's billionaire, Zing is founder of Facebook, wanted to connect the world.

The boy wonder himself, the billionaire boy wonder.

Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, which owns a bunch of other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

So Mark Zuckerberg, whom you may know from the movie The Social Network.

Great movie.

Great movie.

He was the world's youngest self-made billionaire when he was only 23.

And he became the youngest ever centi billionaire at the age of 36.

That means he's got a hundred billion dollars.

He's currently the fourth richest person in the world, his net worth at time recording around 170 billion.

I'm sure it'll be even bigger by the time you listen to this.

Meta recently reported that over 3.1 billion people in the world use their platforms.

That's Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp every single day.

That is 40% of all the people on the planet.

You want to talk about world conquering?

This is it.

And yet he's known for his unflashy style.

For years, he wore hoodies and t-shirts and drove kind of boring cars like a Honda or an Acura.

But he does spend money.

You know, in 2023, he was revealed to be building this massive $270 million compound in Hawaii with a 5,000 square foot underground bunker.

Wondering what that's for.

He does now own a $1.3 million sports car, other properties worth around $300 million, and he got a $12,000 surfboard.

What's it made of?

Gold?

Carbon fiber?

I don't know.

So let's get an idea of what Mark Zuckerberg is like, because we actually have a clip of you, Simon, talking to him.

Yeah, I think his first broadcast interview in the UK.

Let's hear a little bit.

I just wonder why it's so important to you personally to stay in charge with this iron grip on a company at this stage of its development when it has this incredible role and responsibility in the way that, you know, moderating humanity.

Well, I mean, I think that being the founder of a company,

you know, I've been able to help build something that, first of all, a lot of people around the world really like using.

They wouldn't like it any less if you sold some shares or changed the voting structure.

They'd still like it.

Sure.

Well, and to be clear, I have sold a lot of shares, and

I've committed to giving 99% of

my wealth away over the course of my lifetime through the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, the

family philanthropy that I've set up, and we've already given a lot of money away through that.

So

that's underway.

I mean, look, there are things that we're able to do because I control the company and can take a longer-term outlook than other

kind of shorter-term shareholder-driven companies wouldn't be able to do.

I think that if I didn't control the company, we would have sold the company earlier on in its history to Yahoo.

And, you know, who knows what would have happened then?

Very interesting that, because

there's one of the tests we have about you know if this company didn't exist or this billionaire didn't exist would life be different and i think that something about the way facebook has grown and works today is definitely found in the person of mark zuckerberg so i think it would have been different had he not been in charge what was he like as a person he is clipped unemotional analytical.

There's a slight coldness about him.

I can't imagine going for a beer with him really, or I can't imagine him crying, although apparently he does at some stage.

There's a clarity of vision and also this desire to stay in control.

You sense he has a real purpose in mind.

Now, whether it's a good or bad one, we'll get to, but that was my reflections on him.

It's interesting.

You can see videos of him doing jiu-jitsu.

He's gotten really big into jiu-jitsu recently.

I actually looked up some clips of his fighting, and it's sort of exactly as you describe.

You can't really see any emotion on his face while he's getting pummeled into the ground or pummeling his opponent into the ground.

Yeah, he's a curious-looking person as well.

If you had to design someone who looks a bit like an android,

they wouldn't be far away.

Yeah, very pale, big ears.

Yeah.

Well, let's go back into the history and origins of Mark Zuckerberg.

So he's born in 1984.

He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, one of the less snooty towns in New York State.

Solidly middle-class upbringing.

His dad ran a dental practice from their house.

His mum was a psychiatrist.

His mother paused her career to bring up Mark and his three sisters, and she apparently called him the prince.

So even from a young age, you could see he was kind of singled out as the special one.

But all four of the Zuckerberg kids were quite high achievers.

They all loved Star Wars.

Apparently, Mark's Bar Mitzvah was Star Wars-themed, which is a nice nod to our other billionaire, George Lucas.

Yeah, but he had a tech-savvy dad, Ed Zuckerberg, always looking for the latest dental tech.

And he bought an Atari in 1978 and then paid $10,000 for an IBM personal computer in the early 1980s.

That's actually quite a lot of money to spend on a computer names.

Yeah, because it wasn't the no-brainer.

Now, that was a big outlay on something.

And this is really interesting.

So Ed Zuckerberg actually installed an internet-based intercom system in his house to let his dental staff and family communicate.

And he called it Zucknet.

Zucknet.

Yeah.

What a precursor.

Well, when Mark was 10, he learned to code and write computer programs on the Atari.

And his dad took him to university-level computer classes at the local college.

And they told him to leave his kid at home.

He said, but he's the student.

And true to form, young Mark Zuckerberg loved world-building computer games.

He said, I wasn't into playing games.

I just liked making them.

And interestingly, one of the first games he built was based on Risk, which is a board game about conquering the world.

Yeah, about world domination.

I used to play that a lot as a kid.

It takes hours and hours and hours.

Mark also spent hours and hours and hours on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, which launched in 97 when he was just 13.

And immediately he managed to hack it.

He said, I could kick my friends off because of bugs in the system.

And later on, a Facebook executive called Dave Moritz said he believes AIM changed how that generation communicates.

We're not as competent at intimate communication because we grew up on it.

We didn't learn the nuance of intimate communication in person.

I think that is so profound.

You're connected to lots of other people, but maybe those connections aren't as rich or as deep.

I don't know.

Yeah, or you know, as Dave Morin puts it, maybe they're not as intimate.

Yeah, maybe.

But back to Mark, he calculated that his school he went to wouldn't get him enough points to get into a top university, so he got his parents to send him to an exclusive private boarding school.

And on the wall of his room at school, his only poster was a Harvard banner.

So clearly, Mark was pretty obsessed with getting into Harvard.

But still, you know, his favorite place to spend time in was the computer center at this academy.

Yeah, he led all-night coding sessions with programming races trying to hack the school systems.

For a senior project, him and his friend created this music player called Synapse, which played tracks based on what you played before.

Which, you know, when you think about it, sounds quite a lot like the Spotify algorithm.

Yeah, if you, for people who like this, also like this.

Exactly.

And, you know, his teachers were impressed.

It's actually a really advanced thing to build when you're a student.

He joined Harvard in 2002 as a psychology major, although mostly he took computer science classes.

And also an entrepreneurial streak as well.

He started promoting Synapse.

He even had promotional t-shirts made.

And after it was picked up by a tech news site, Microsoft, AOL, and others offered him and his friend money for the program.

But he turned it down to stay at Harvard.

Yeah, I mean, one company, it was even said to have offered him $950,000, so almost a million.

Half of that could have been his and his, his, you know, split between him and his friend, but he said no.

Okay, you're in your second year of university.

You're 20 years old.

And someone comes along, offer you half a million dollars.

And you go, nah.

Later on, he gets offered even more and turns that down.

You see, that's why I'm sitting here talking to you.

I'd have been out.

That's why we're working for someone else and he's working for himself.

So his next project, which will sound familiar, was actually begun after a bad date.

It was a joke that kind of got out of hand.

It was called Face Mash.

It was similar to another website, Am I Hot or Not, where users rated people's uploaded pictures on a scale of one to ten for attractiveness.

A bit like we rate our billionaires.

Exactly.

But instead of rating billionaires, FaceMash pitted pictures of female classmates who, by the way, had not consented to their images being used against each other, and users had to choose the most attractive of the two.

Yeah, and actually, there's echoes of Tinder here.

Swipe, yeah, left or right, you know.

And also interesting because this element of social comparison, you know, people always talk about social media making you feel bad.

That element of comparison is embedded in Facebook's origins.

And judging.

Well, Zuckerberg spent three days coding it.

It quickly went viral.

But due to complaints, it was shut down.

And Mark actually almost got kicked out.

He's put on disciplinary probation for a year.

And, you know, we talked about the social network.

Some of the lines that the actor playing Zuckerberg says in that opening scene where he's creating Face Smash, those are actually lines lifted directly from Zuckerberg's live journal entry from that date.

And while the film sort of puts FaceMash as the genesis of Facebook, Zuckerberg claims the two projects were actually started around the same time, but separately.

And, you know, while the film also makes that bad date into the motivation for, you know, Zuckerberg creating this network where everyone can connect after he was rejected by this girl, Mark Zuckerberg actually met someone else, a girl called Priscilla Chan, at a party that his frat threw, thinking that he was getting kicked out of Harvard because of FaceMash.

And Mark and Priscilla have have been together ever since.

They got married in 2012, him and Priscilla.

They've had three children and unlike many of our billionaires, they've stayed together.

But he wasn't the only person doing social media sites.

A small but significant one was called Six Degrees.

That launched in 1997, closed down in 2001, had millions of users, but some think it just came along too early.

And then you have sites like Classmates in the US, Friends Reunited in the UK, both of which kind of centered on these old school networks, Friends You Reunited, which was massive.

I remember it being huge.

It was like the thing that people were talking about the whole time.

I had a friend.

Fixing up marriages.

Well, people used to get in touch with their old flames from high school, from school, and from university.

It caused a lot of rows.

Oh, wow.

I think nowadays...

The idea of looking up your ex on social media, I mean, people do it.

Of course, every day is.

It's just weird if you don't do it.

Friends Reunited, by the way, had 15 million users.

And at one point, it was bought by ITV for £120 million.

Bad deal because by 2016 it was shut down.

I know that was a terrible transaction for them.

There was also Friendster, which was launched in 2003.

That had more of a dating slant on it.

And biggest of all, MySpace, which was quickly becoming the hub for music and culture fans.

MySpace was a very big deal.

I was also on MySpace, had my top friends listening to Lily Allen.

Those were the days.

But beyond those nationwide sites, Zuckerberg's fellow students were also setting up sites.

At his own high school, a guy called Christopher Tillery had digitized the school's directory with photos and addresses for his senior year project.

Zuckerberg had hacked it and changed the code so that no one could access the page about him.

Mark Zuckerberg, privacy nerd.

At Harvard, Aaron Greenspan's house system site included a directory we called Universal Facebook.

And Zuckerberg had actually messaged Greenspan about his site.

And when Greenspan looked up his logs, he found that Zuckerberg had actually visited and left these kind of digital breadcrumbs, which showed what he was looking at.

And actually, a Facebook is it was already a thing.

A Facebook is the name US universities give, the sheets of paper they distribute to freshmen which profile the students and staff and kind of get to know you kind of thing.

Clearly, a lot of potential Facebooks were kind of milling around being generated at the time.

But then there was a project called Harvard Connection.

In 2003, he'd been approached by fellow students Divier Narendra and the famous Olympic Rowingtons Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who'd asked him to build a site they'd had the idea for, Harvard Connection.

And in January, Zuckerberg said, yeah, I'm still working on your site.

But then he launched his own very similar site and stopped replying to their emails.

Yeah, and as it turned out, Zuckerberg's site would dwarf all of these other social networks.

At that time, it was called the Facebook.

So other universities had digital versions of what you just described, the Facebook.

And Harvard had promised to get one, but not gotten around to building it.

So Zuckerberg worked for three months to launch thefacebook.com in February 2004.

The initial site of the Facebook was only accessible to Harvard students, but within two weeks, it already had 4,300 user accounts.

That's in two weeks.

The key thing was that you were sharing information with this sense of safety because you could only sign up if you had a university email that was recognized by Facebook.com.

Yeah, so you felt that you are comfortable with sharing your information.

Yeah, so FaceMash, he'd taken it without permission.

But with Facebook, people were willingly giving it over.

And so unlike MySpace or later Twitter, people were using their real names because they had that comfort.

And the data they were sharing was very clearly about them with their identity in the real world.

And one of its co-founders, yes, there were Facebook co-founders.

We just don't hear very much about them.

Chris Hughes said that other social networks at the time hadn't, quote, figured out how to make people feel comfortable sharing information in a trusted, trusted, controlled environment.

And Facebook managed to do just that.

And it's that that becomes that personal data is absolutely critical to how Zuckerberg makes all his money.

Even early on, I think he understood the value of personal data in a way that the users perhaps did not understand.

I'm probably part of the generation that remembers a time before the internet and then logging on when you're a teenager.

And when you were growing up and the internet first came around, your parents would tell you, never ever give out your real name don't ever tell anyone where you live but Facebook changed all that it was crazy and there is that famous expression because obviously Facebook is free to use whatsapp's free to use Instagram is free to use if what you're using is free then you're the product

and you know there were some instant messages from around this time that were uncovered by business insider which show Zuckerberg actually boasting that he would see all the data people had submitted and calling users dumb F words for trusting him with their information.

Blimey.

Yeah.

Anyway, he enlisted four fellow students who would become Facebook's co-founders.

They included his roommate Chris Hughes, who was a history major.

He sort of took on the public-facing tasks and promoting the site.

And Eduardo Severin, who was a friend from his fraternity who provided the money for servers and initially at least did the business side of the company.

He had the second largest stake after Zuckerberg.

He was the chief financial officer, the CFO.

But Zuckerberg was indisputably the leader.

And on an early about page of Facebook, you can see him describing himself as, quote, founder, master, and commander, enemy of the state, which I feel like he will probably

regret seeing.

Well, especially when it gets hauled in front of Senate committees at left, right, and center, for sure.

Anyway, they were ready to expand the site beyond Harvard to allow students at other universities to sign up.

It's a real business.

Zuckerberg even reportedly borrowed $100,000 from his parents to help with the running costs.

So it's a business.

It's a real thing.

It's happening.

In 2004, Zuckerberg moved the team 3,000 miles west to California because Silicon Valley is there.

Yeah, that's where it's all at.

So he rented a house in Palo Alto near Silicon Valley, from which all the founders, apart from Severin, who was interning in New York, they would run the site there along with some interns of their own.

And you can actually visit this house now.

It's actually become a bit of a tourist mecca after it was depicted in the social network.

Yeah, it was what you would imagine a party house house to be, where the party was coding and being a geek, basically.

And initially, the rental for that house was just for the summer break, but Zuckerberg was inspired by Bill Gates's use of Harvard's lenient leave policy and extended his stay.

And in fact, like Bill Gates, whom we've also covered on another episode, he never came back to Harvard.

He never finished the degree.

He is a university dropout.

Wow.

See, my parents wouldn't have allowed that, so that's why I'm not a billionaire.

Yeah, one reason.

Yes.

Well, and another reason he extended his stay is he soon met up with Sean Parker, invited him to move in.

Now, Sean Parker was the co-founder of Napster, which was the file sharing site that completely revolutionized the music industry.

Yeah.

In fact, some people might argue it ruined the music industry because it meant you could illegally, in some cases, download music files.

Yeah.

He was five years older than Zuckerberg.

He'd been a serial founder of a bunch of different businesses, but at that point he was unemployed.

And he began advising Zuckerberg on the business side of running Facebook.

You know, things like moving the registration of the site to Delaware, which is a state more widely known for tax benefits and privacy.

And it wasn't long until Savarin was booted out in favor of Sean Parker.

Yeah, and Parker wasn't with the company for much more than a year, but his experience was crucial.

He used his connections to set up investment from venture capitalists with very impressive track records.

Most importantly, the German-American PayPal founder and hedge fund owner, Peter Thiel.

He's a legendary investor now.

He's more than that.

He's kind of a prophet, a Svengali of a certain way of thinking.

I actually interviewed him once as well.

And I have to say, I interviewed him in Davos, where all these people go and share ideas about how the world should be.

And at that time, I thought he was the smartest person I'd ever interviewed.

When you asked him a question, you could see him looking up, really cogitating, thinking it through, and you got a really nuanced, complex answer.

But Thiel was really influential on Zuckerberg, right?

Because he basically didn't just stump up money for Facebook.

he also kind of, I don't know, like shaped the ethos of how Facebook started operating.

Yeah, because he's a sort of libertarian.

He believes that there should be extreme freedom.

Billionaires are there to innovate and should be the people running the world.

And, you know, in Teal's world, the idea of a government is awful.

You know, he actually said the government is so fundamentally evil.

Technology is an incredible alternative to politics.

Wow.

Also, according to Shira Franco, who is the author of An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook Battle for Domination, Teal really backed the idea of the founder genius.

So one where Zuckerberg is the genius and needs to be calling all the shots.

In other words, one where he's got control of the company.

Which goes back to that clip we played earlier of me talking to him when I said, why do you have to have this iron grip on the company?

I think the answer lies in here.

Thiel was instrumental in that.

He basically influenced Zuckerberg to set up this business structure where Zuckerberg got a controlling share so he can do what he wants.

Some commenters have said that Zuckerberg is Facebook's dictator.

Yeah.

and then you do this by issuing different types of shares, which have different amounts of voting rights in the Oval Company.

In most companies, you buy one share, one share, one vote.

And if I've got 10% of the shares, I have 10% of the vote.

When you have different classes of shares, like A shares and B shares, Zuckerberg could have 10, 20% of the company, but 57% of the voting rights.

So he still has control.

And that's actually quite common in technology companies now.

That set a bit of a standard for it.

So if you were a shareholder, you'd be like, why are they introducing these shares it's going to dilute the power that i have unless you're attracting the peter teal kind of shareholders who believe in the founders make the right calls they're the people who should be in charge if you believe in that then you'll back that kind of structure interesting okay i mean zuckerberg clearly seemed to like it because apparently at the end of staff meetings he used to end by shouting domination i can't quite imagine this guy in a hoodie shouting domination but okay whatever floats your vote but they also had this ethos which was move fast and break things.

And actually, Zuckerberg explained that motto in a letter to investors in 2012.

And it's worth actually hearing this out because I think this is very influential in the way that entrepreneurs think these days.

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster.

As most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes and they are losing opportunities by moving too slowly.

We have a saying, move fast and break things.

The idea is that you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.

Depends on what you end up breaking.

So Teo had invested in Friendster, which made him kind of wary of Facebook because he initially thought of social media sites as fads that come and go.

But Zuckerberg explained to him that 80% of the Facebook's users signed on every day, whereas most sites at the time would be pleased to see 15% of people log on.

So people were addicted to Facebook.

Yeah, so Teal put in $500,000, half a million, for 7% of the company, which meant the Facebook at that point was valued at $5 million.

Yeah.

Zuckerberg could pay off his parents' loan, the money paid for actual staff and servers, and the site at this point had 50 universities signed up.

But by December 2004, they would have 1 million users.

So although the deal didn't put any actual money in his pocket, the valuation at $5 million means Zuckerberg's stake was worth over a million dollars.

So he's a millionaire.

But once there was money involved, here come the lawyers.

Let's take a journey back to 2003.

Canadian teen sensation Avrilavine was topping the charts and turning the music industry upside down.

But what if I told you that the Avril Levine we know and love might not be the same Avril?

What?

Did Avril die?

Was she replaced by a doppelganger?

I'm Joanne McCanally and I'm doing a deep dive into a notorious internet conspiracy.

Who replaced Avril Levine?

Listen on BBC Sands.

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So, remember the Winklevoss twins?

I do.

In 2004, the founders of the site Harvard Connections, who'd asked Zuckerberg to code it, took him to court saying that he'd stolen their business plan, he'd sourced their code and he'd stole their site so he could set up his own one.

One of the Rowing twins, Tyler Winklevoss, said it's sort of a land grab.

You feel robbed.

The kids down the hall are using it and you're thinking, that's supposed to be us.

I must say, they were very unflatteringly portrayed in the film, weren't they?

Oh, yeah, 100%.

Rich, jumped-up posh kids who felt entitled to the Facebook.

So Facebook also sued Eduardo Saverin and then was counter-sued by Saverin.

Yes, because Zuckerberg had diluted Saverin's stake after he hadn't raised enough funds, he'd placed unauthorized ads on the site, so basically they brought in additional funding, which diluted him out, and so his proportion of the company had shrunk.

Both cases, however, were eventually settled out of court.

And, you know, these stories are central to the social network biopic.

It's worth noting, however, that that film by David Fincher is actually based on a book by a journalist who was approached by Saverin.

So it's very much Savarin's point of view.

Well, funnily enough, Savrin now says he doesn't resent Zuckerberg.

You know why?

He's worth $26 billion himself.

Most of that came from his stake in Meta.

Yeah, that's a cock battle I'd love to be in.

So in 2005, the Facebook was moving pretty fast.

Teal's money was part of the seed round.

The next injection of money would be what they call the A round.

Okay, what does A stand for?

Well, there's seed funding and then

There's a very sophisticated ecosystem in Silicon Valley, which has different rounds of investors and investors specialize in really early, then I want to get in at the A stage, then there'll be a B series, then it'll be a C series, and these are all stages in the development of company.

Seed is pre-income, A is like, you know, pre-profit.

C is when you're scaling up.

So these are different stages.

And by the time you're getting C around C, people are taking you incredibly seriously.

Right.

Okay.

So the Facebook's at an A round of investment.

Yeah.

And Zuckerberg accepted an investment offer from a friend's dad, the Washington Post publisher, Donald Graham.

But then he got a $12.7 million offer from a Silicon Valley firm.

And apparently this was a big dilemma.

What's he going to do?

And apparently he was found crying in the toilet.

Something I find hard to imagine.

Graham, you know, was quite the good guy about it.

He said, take the better offer.

And they actually remained friends.

And Zuckerberg later asked him to be on the board of Facebook.

So it worked out for him.

And a crucial moment, one of the first things the Facebook spent that investment money on was buying the domain name.

Facebook.com.

So Zuckerberg obviously had always wanted it because let's face it, Facebook.com is much nicer and rolls off the tongue better than thefacebook.com.

Are you saying that it would be any different if it was called the Facebook rather than Facebook?

I don't know if it would have materially differed for their outcomes, but you know, it just rolls off the tongue in a much nicer way.

So they used the money to buy Facebook.com and soon Facebook had more than five million users after allowing high school students to join.

More venture capital investments flowed in, but there was then a massive offer to buy the site.

Despite not generating an income yet, in June 2006, Yahoo came along and offered $1 billion.

You know, we talked about how he turned down almost a million dollars.

This is quite the upgrade.

Well, this is turning down at this point.

His stake is worth 30%.

He's turning down $300 million, age 20-something.

Like I say, I'm out at this stage.

Okay, to be fair, he was quite torn.

So he asked his mentors, including Teal, for advice.

And Teal said, what would you do with that money?

Basically, Zuckerberg realized his answer would be create another Facebook.

So why not carry on?

I wouldn't have turned it down.

No.

300 million bucks?

Anyway.

You're sorted for life.

You are.

But Facebook is evolving.

It keeps adding features.

In 2006, it launched the news feed.

That had taken a year to code.

And this was a kind of feed that showed you what everyone you were following was up to.

It kind of put it all into this newsfeed for you to look at.

And though it seems strange now, there was an immediate backlash.

Within 48 hours, 7% of users joined an anti-newsfeed group.

They said it was invasive.

Users were angry that relationship status and holiday photos were being shared on what it felt like was a public message board.

I mean we've moved on so far from being angry about stuff like that.

It's really quite something to look at it.

what it was like back then.

But you know, this caused a panic among investors.

Facebook actually had to hire their first security guard to protect the office from protesters.

And Zuckerberg wrote an apology of sorts titled Calm Down, Breathe, We Hear You.

One line said, We agree, stalking isn't cool, but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is.

Despite the protests, data showed that he was right on the money.

People spent more time on the site.

Newsfeed made Facebook unique.

It offered a customized landing page for each user.

So my Facebook landing page is different to yours because you've got different friends, so we have different feeds.

And it's that customization that would be copied across the internet.

So in the same way, now you look at your Instagram feed and it looks different to everyone else's feed.

That's exactly what Facebook pioneered.

Yeah, and Matt Kohler, who was then the vice president of Facebook's product management, said it was a microcosm of Mark and the company.

The intent was good.

There were some misfires along the way.

We acknowledged the misfires, we fixed it, and we moved on.

Broke something and moved on.

Their next challenge was to expand their market.

Twitter, by the way, had launched in July 2006.

So, Facebook realized it had to look beyond students if they wanted to compete in the big wide world.

Just a few weeks after Newsfeed launched, Facebook became open to everyone.

It was called open registration.

At the time, it seemed like it might trigger an even bigger backlash.

You remember it was initially founded on this idea that you were signing up and giving this public information away, but only within a trusted group of people.

But Facebook learnt their lesson.

They briefed the press beforehand.

And this time, no protests, no need for a security guard.

And it worked.

Yeah, in 2005, they had five and a half million users.

By the end of 2006, they had 12 million plus.

That's a lot of people.

But also, worth knowing that at this point in time, it'd been running for four years, but not making any money.

They had some adverts on their site, but they needed to boost revenue.

They needed to monetize this thing.

Investors wanted them to start making money.

And enter at this point, Bill Gates, another one of our billionaires.

He's no longer chief executive of Microsoft, but he's still the executive chair.

He took an interest in Zuckerberg, not least because he was being touted as the next Bill Gates.

Microsoft were very interested in online advertising.

They understood that whoever controls the platforms for online ads would control the future of the internet market.

Yeah, and at this time, Google were dominating the advertising market, the online ad market, and Microsoft had been competing with them to buy up new sites.

In 2006, Google had bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, beating out Microsoft.

Microsoft initially tried to buy Facebook, but Zuckerberg, once again, wasn't interested in selling the company.

But in 2007, they accepted a $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook.

So doing the maths, if it's 240 million for 1.6%, that price valued Facebook at a whopping $15 billion back in 2006.

You know what's cooler than a billion?

$15 billion.

A lot of people were shocked by that valuation.

Facebook had 50 million users compared to MySpace's 300 million, and MySpace was valued at less than that, at 12 billion.

So there seemed to be a mismatch.

What's going on right here is there is a land grab.

This is a scramble for online eyeballs.

And this is them divvying up the future of advertising, basically.

Right.

And in that kind of firestorm, people end up paying quite a lot of money for silly amounts of money.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, because investors get FOMO as well as Facebook users.

So tech journalist Kyra Swisher at the time famously wrote about how ridiculous this price was.

She said that Facebook was a lemonade stand and Microsoft was desperate.

And that was pretty common.

I've interviewed Kyra Swisher many times.

And, you know, she's considered one of the sharpest people on technology anywhere in the world and a lot of people thought that.

I would say the majority of people were watching these valuations just going, this is insane.

But crucially there were some investors who weren't thinking that because some people actually followed Microsoft with big investments at actually similar rates.

And remember he's got a 30% share so at this point 30% of 15 billion dollars he's comfortably a billionaire.

And the following year he's included on dun dun dun the Forbes list as the world's youngest billionaire.

Forbes were cautious of the $15 billion valuation.

They went with a lower figure of $5 billion.

So they estimated his net worth at a cool, but now looks tiny, $1.5 billion.

So let's take it to beyond a billion because Zuckerberg has many, many billions to come.

So one key to his success was surrounding himself with the right people.

There's Sean Parker, there's Peter Thiel, there's Bill Gates.

He's very good at drawing on other people's skills and experience.

And that might make you think he's a kind of passive person, an eager student.

But an early Facebook employee said, whether it's Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark, but Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most, fundraising.

In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.

So he's not being exploited here.

He's doing the exploiting.

And if you see him when he gets dragged in front of Senate and all that kind of stuff, he always talks about, we we have a set of tools to do this.

We have a set of tools.

It's a bit of a kind of mantra for him.

That's the way you think, tools to do his bidding, basically.

Yeah, people as tools, tools that help him get ahead.

And I suppose, in a way,

there might be something in the billionaire mindset here that, you know, they know that they can't do everything themselves.

They need to use other people to get things done for them.

People always say, oh, delegate, delegate.

That's a sign of a good manager.

The dark side of delegating is that you're basically delegating flunkies to do the stuff that you don't want.

Now, Now, I don't know how Cheryl Sandberg would like being called a tool in this.

Or a flunky, to be fair.

Or you're a flunky together, because she was one of the next big people in the Facebook story.

She kind of supercharged Facebook, right?

Yeah.

And she was a rock star executive herself.

She was the vice president of sales and operations at Google.

And remember that the people at Facebook, I remember talking to one of the people saying, we looked at Google and we thought they're the holy grail.

They've managed to monetize advertising.

We need to do the same.

And Cheryl was absolutely key in that.

And they were looking for a chief operating officer to help boost that advertising revenue.

So, and to Cheryl Sandberg, she'd grown that team at Google from four to four thousand.

And she'd built this program called AdWords, which was incredibly groundbreaking, lucrative, and allowed Google to make money off ads.

It's the Rosetta Stone of Google's making money, the AdWords program.

She was 38.

Zuckerberg was 23.

She's a very charismatic woman, Cheryl Sandberg.

And there's an iciness to her, but she's pretty cool.

And I can imagine a 23-year-old being quite goggle-eyed at a 38-year-old Sheryl Sandberg.

I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but anyway, I think they probably had a different relationship than he did with Sean Park or whatever.

They spent a lot of time together.

When Cheryl Sandberg was up for the job, the two met at her house for dinner once or twice a week for six weeks.

Her husband described it as it was like dating.

They were like dating and sizing each other up to see if they could go into a partnership.

I'm not sure that's an entirely comfortable phrase from the husband there.

A Facebook executive said, people can be intimidated by Mark, but Cheryl cut right through that.

And she was the adult in the room.

She took on the business side, left Zuckerberg to run the product side, although Mark Zuckerberg would always have the final say.

And it's worth noting that Sandberg understood the business completely.

She knew Google could offer advertisers search terms, but Facebook could offer advertisers access to specific demographics from using all that data they collected on their users over time.

All those things that you were liking, all the things that you were tagging your friends in, all the places you were checking into.

All that builds a very accurate profile of who you are.

What am I interested in?

What are my likes and my dislikes?

Which bands do I like?

Who you're dating?

Who you're going out with.

I mean, when you think about it, the amount of stuff and information we gave Facebook willingly.

Because that was a big thing about Facebook, whether you were single or in a relationship or not.

It's complicated.

What does that mean?

That's a maybe.

This is why, in a way, Facebook was brilliant to have a relationship status that just said it's complicated.

Yeah.

So Cheryl Sandberg explained: while Google had monetized intent, Facebook could monetize demand.

Advertisers could sell Facebook users things they wanted even before they thought they knew they wanted them.

So three years in under Sandberg Facebook grew from 130 to 2,500 employees.

And the platform went from 70 million worldwide users to nearly 700 million overtaking MySpace as the biggest social media platform in the process.

Then in 2012, Facebook has its IPO.

This is the bit where you sell shares to the general public.

You get a view on what the whole company is worth, and the company was valued at $104 billion.

That's the largest internet IPO ever, still to this day.

And I remember very clearly at that time, people were looking at that and saying, $100 billion, you've got to be out of your mind.

There's no way is this company worth that.

Well, Zuckerberg still at the time had 22% share of the company.

So at that point, he was worth over $22 billion.

But important note, although he had 22% share of the company, because those two different classes of shares with different voting rights, he actually had 57% of the voting rights.

So he's still very much in control.

And you know, all those other competitors that were coming up at the time, Facebook saw them off by simply buying them.

In April 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram.

Instagram had 12 employees, okay?

12 employees.

So they spent a billion dollars, but it turned out to be one of the greatest deals of all time.

Zuckerberg understood that while Facebook had been designed for PCs, Instagram was a perfect fit for mobile users.

So he bought that competition.

And I dare say, if people knew what Facebook was going to become or Meta as we now know it, that deal would never happen.

It would be allowed to happen again.

Because it would be

if today Instagram was an independent company and Facebook was an independent company, Facebook trying to buy Instagram, there's no way that would be allowed by competition authorities.

They would just think it's too antitrust.

They would say that you're taking up too much of the online pie.

Well, Facebook was allowed to do it and then in 2014 facebook bought whatsapp for nearly 19 billion dollars yeah and zuckerberg said at the time he wouldn't meddle often with the messaging app so as not to mess with a good thing it's worth knowing that whatsapp is massive in places like the uk and india it's actually not so huge in the us but you know in the uk it is massive i would say that in the business world as well five percent of people use msn just simple texts and 95 of people use whatsapp so whatsapp is the normal channel for sending a text these days.

Yeah, and Zuckerberg actually says that now WhatsApp is at the core of the business.

He said, if you're envisaging what the private social platform of the future starting from scratch, I think it will basically look like WhatsApp.

So, he's thinking about WhatsApp not just as a messaging service, but as a social media platform.

And meanwhile, the growth of Facebook itself has continued.

In 2012, they reached the 1 billion user milestone.

Fast forward to today, it's over 3 billion.

So, let's take a look at the impact Facebook has had on the world because that is a lot of the world's population that are signed up to Facebook.

Yeah, in 2010 and 2011 Facebook was cited as a key tool for democracy when protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt that turned into the Arab Spring.

Many news outlets referred to it in fact as the Facebook revolution.

Some have downplayed its importance but you know the general consensus is that it did allow people to disseminate information.

It helped people on the ground cover events as they happened.

Yeah, one study found that nine in ten Egyptians and Tunisians said they use Facebook to organize protests or spread awareness about them.

But from that height of being the

champion of democracy, Facebook has had quite the fall since Facebook's role in democracy has actually been questioned quite a lot.

Because there were some reports in 2018 in the New York Times and The Guardian, up to 87 million Facebook profiles had been harvested and sold to a company called Cambridge Analytica.

And this is an interesting one because if I told you that a corporation which which wanted to sell stuff had harvested 87 million users' information and pushed ads to them, you would think, what's wrong with that?

That's how commerce works, right?

I think it's different with elections, though.

And it's around this time that Facebook starts introducing publishers onto the platform.

So, you know, newspapers, magazines, online websites start getting into Facebook.

And you are able as a user to see where articles rank.

You know, you can pass around links.

And it's worth noting that around the time of the election, there was an awful lot of fake news going around.

There were publications that, honestly speaking, did not exist, did not have an office, did not have an so-called editor-in-chief or editorial standards.

And those articles were going viral and people were reacting to them and reading them as if they came from real legit publishers.

Zuckerberg initially refused to acknowledge that misinformation on the site affected voters, calling it a pretty crazy idea, saying that voters make decisions based on their lived experience.

He also lived to regret that comment because a year later he said, this is too important an issue to be dismissive.

So all of this was floating around in the ether and it eventually meant that in 2018 Zuckerberg was hauled up before Congress.

Yeah and everyone expected him to be grilled when he faced US Congress for five hours in 2018 for social media privacy and the use and abuse of data.

In fact his staff were so worried he would sweat.

profusely like he'd done in previous hearings they actually persuaded congressional aides to turn up the aircon but he came away pretty much unscathed This is largely because of the fact lawmakers actually didn't really understand what Facebook did.

I watched those sessions and it was clear they haven't got a clue what was going on.

One of them asked, why am I suddenly seeing chocolate ads all over Facebook?

And another one asked, is Facebook spying on the emails I send via WhatsApp?

I think now the role of social media in elections is considered, you know, no one thinks they don't matter.

No one thinks that.

But the thing is, is that you talk about fake news.

If I go out there into the studio in the BBC and say something which is false, there'll be a complaint to Wafcom.

I'll probably get sacked.

That's not a game plan.

Let's not carry that thought experiment too far.

But the point is, is that as a publisher or as a broadcaster, there are rules about what can be published.

Facebook has always said that it is not a publisher, it is a platform, and therefore doesn't have the responsibility that the stuff that appears on its service is checked for veracity, basically.

And that's a battle that's still going on.

Yeah, so if a badly spelled, badly sourced, completely inaccurate news report from a publisher that

nobody has heard of goes viral on Facebook, Facebook's kind of general attitude is that wasn't us.

We've got nothing to do with it.

That's people sharing it on their platforms.

And that's absolutely fine.

That's what Facebook says.

And this is the whole thing about social media social harms.

One of the many appearances Mark Zuckerberg has made in front of politicians in the US.

There was that famous hearing where there were people behind him in the room who

suffered various types of social harms, you know, people of either eating disorders or suicides or whatever it was.

And they were all behind him and they all had pictures of the person in their family who had suffered that social harm.

And he was forced to turn around and off mic, he said, I apologize to them.

So, I mean, this is a live issue, right?

During that congressional hearing where, you know, parents were holding up pictures of the children who had died following sexual exploitation or harassment via social media, he actually told senators his company had 40,000 people working in trust and safety.

That's the division that is ostensibly meant to be protecting users from harms like this.

Yeah, and he announced they're putting in protections to give teens more age-appropriate experiences.

But it didn't stop a senator saying in that hearing, telling Mark Zuckerberg that he had blood on his hands.

You have a product that is killing people to applause from the people in the room.

Let's not feel too sorry for Mark Zuckerberg because at this point he is now richer than ever.

Yeah, in 2021, in fact, Facebook changed its name to Meta to better encompass all the companies that own the WhatsApp, the Instagram, and Facebook, a bit like Google did, changing its holding company name to Alphabet.

It also coincided with the announce of the Metaverse, their virtual reality company.

The Metaverse is something of an obsession for Mark Zuckerberg.

This is the boy who loved world building games.

Fair to say, the jury is still out on it.

There was a lot of hoo-ha when it first came in.

Yeah, I think it's very much we're going to have to wait and see.

In 2022, Shara Sandberg stepped down as COO, and in 2024 she actually left the board of Meta under her revenue grew from $272 million in 2008 to nearly 118 billion in 2021.

That's incredible.

Zuckerberg himself is now titled as the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta.

And although tech companies don't usually pay dividends, in February 2024, Meta announced they would pay their first ever quarterly dividend to investors after they beat revenue expectations in 2023.

Yeah, and remember, Zuckerberg has got 350 million meta shares.

That's a 13% stake now.

He gets 700 million a year in dividends.

So before he even gets out of bed, 700 million a year.

Also, this paying a dividend is quite a big moment in a company's development because particularly for tech companies, it means that you've got to a kind of thing where you're never going to have that explosive growth ever again.

You would never pay a dividend if you thought you could double in size.

You would reinvest all the money in expanding the business.

So it's a sign that it's a maturity.

It's like a utility now.

It's sort of a a really mature company, which is generating cash, so much cash that it can afford to pay it out without having to invest it all in the future growth.

Right.

The kids grown up and moved out of the parents' houses now paying for the parents' rent.

Exactly.

And that dividend announcement saw Meta's market value surge $204 billion in one day.

That is the largest surge in value in history.

And Meta is currently valued at $1.2 trillion.

Oh my God.

I think that's one of the few times we've actually used the word trillion.

I know.

It's one of the most valuable companies in the world.

In fact, only a handful of companies, Apple, Google, Nvidia now, are worth more than that.

You know, it's in the Trillionaires Club.

And obviously, all that meant that Zuckerberg's wealth has expanded.

So he's now valued by Forbes as being over $170 billion.

So it's tough at the top, and there's not many people up on that level.

But in 2023, one of the few men richer than him, Elon Musk, challenged Zuckerberg to a cage fight.

I don't think this was a good call because at this point Zuckerberg just won several medals at his first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament.

He replied with send me location.

Musk never did.

I don't think that I'd be surprised if that ever happens that fight.

And I know how I'm betting on.

I mean, yeah,

it would be a good bet to battle on Zuckerberg.

Well, let's judge him himself.

Is he good, bad, or just another binary?

Let's go through our categories.

First out of 10, wealth.

Oh, he's a 9 out of 10.

he's definitely nine yeah i mean nine point nine almost

so because i mean there's only elon musk jeff bezos and bernard arnaud who are richer than him so on wealth yeah nine possibly ten yeah i think nine okay there's always more to earn there's always

there's always more to earn so nine out of ten for wealth rags to riches he was born comfortably middle class his parents invested in facebook went to a swanky private school went to harvard yeah pretty comfortably well off yeah wouldn't have struggled And probably that's why he was able to turn away so much money, right?

That's interesting, isn't it?

We wonder if you came from a really poor background, whether you would have been able to turn down half a million dollars at the age of 20.

Yeah, exactly.

You'd be like, oh, no, I could buy my parents' house.

I could make sure they retire comfortably.

I'm going to give him a three.

Two, two or three.

I'm going to give him a two.

When you're called the prince by your mum from age dot, get out of here.

Yeah.

Okay, two.

Two from both of us.

Villainy.

Now, on this one, it's difficult to separate the person from the product.

I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is inherently a bad person.

In fact, I'm pretty sure he isn't.

But I think we're judging Facebook here as well, aren't we?

Yeah, definitely.

And you know what?

I think if you control a company with that amount of determination, you kind of want your product and you to be one and the same.

So in a way, he's asked for it.

Yeah, that's true.

He's always wanted to have the most power of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

Let's look in the positive column first.

On the the positive side, Facebook let you stay in touch with your friends and your family no matter where you are.

And Instagram does this as well.

You can keep in touch with people all over the world and be more connected.

There's a lot of bad sides to that though.

I don't personally use Facebook at all, but I do use Instagram and it's kind of nice.

And what Instagram started out was like sending postcards really of your holidays or look at a little selfie of me standing next to someone famous or in front of a famous building.

It's very different now though.

Oh, it's really different.

You can build an entire career off Instagram alone.

But, you know, I keep coming back to this whole idea of what Facebook and Meta have done for journalism and publishing.

You know, the algorithm that it's created essentially kind of pushes people down a wormhole.

So it's like you want to drive up engagement.

You want people to use your platform more.

You'll just send them stuff you know will either enrage them or tickle their fancy or, you know, it just encourages people to spend so much time online.

I don't know if that's necessarily good for people.

Yeah.

And if you think about it, sort of Instagram, Facebook, and Google, to be fair, have completely revolutionized the advertising industry.

They suck up so much of what used to be spent on TV, in magazines, in adverts and newspapers.

I mean, they've sort of destroyed whole bits of the publishing world, haven't they?

I suppose some people have drawn a line between social media, like Facebook, WhatsApp, or whatever, and the rise of populism,

the direct threat to democracy, because the algorithm can influence how people think.

Maybe that's too strong, but it's certainly a factor.

I mean, it's hard to imagine misinformation and disinformation having the amount of power that it has over people without Facebook's involvement.

There's a virality to

this communication, which is unprecedented.

And also because, you know, Facebook knows so much about people.

If you were a bad actor with bad intentions, you could easily tailor make your content towards people you know would be affected by it.

Yeah.

Okay, so questionable, difficult issues there on villainy.

And you know what?

We have judged him based on Facebook, but as a person, he also screwed over quite a lot of people in his 20s.

Oh, that's true.

I mean, he basically pushed out his old friends, Eduardo Savarin.

Yeah, and he also, according to Winklevoss twin, screwed them over.

Yeah, he's definitely made some moves in order to seize more control and ultimately make more money.

So I'm going to give him quite a high rank on this one.

He's not Victor Boot, the merchant of death.

He's not El Chapu, hasn't personally killed 2,000 people.

But I'm going to give him a seven for villainy.

Oh, I'm going to give him an eight.

I'm going to be harsher.

Okay.

It's the fact that he's personally, at the beginning of Facebook's story, not a very nice guy.

You can tell from the way he used to deal with his old partners.

And also the product he created is also not a very nice product.

So eight out of ten for me.

Okay, seven and eight.

Philanthropy is going to score pretty well on this one.

Yeah, so in 2015, him and his wife pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook stock over their lifetime.

Since then, their foundation has granted $4.8 billion in grants.

So, you know, that's quite a lot of money, but it's not nearly everything he owns.

Yeah, it was funny, actually, in 2018, there was a lot of criticism.

He handed out $3 million to help the housing crisis in Silicon Valley, and people said that was a bit rich because the crisis was in part caused by the success of companies like Facebook.

He doesn't really have a kind of, I'm going to save the world kind of, I'm going to give away all my money.

He's going to start now.

He said, I mean, he basically set up a kind of

rival to the giving pledge, didn't he?

Basically, so they have said they're going to give away 99% of the money.

They're not getting there very quickly.

No, I mean, I know they're young, but you know, guys, you better get going.

I'm going to seven question mark on this one.

Yeah, I'm going to give them a seven.

Okay.

Power.

Oh, he's going to score really highly on this, just for building Facebook and owning Instagram alone.

Yeah.

He owns the most powerful social media platforms in the world and he is in charge of them.

This is not run by committee, this company.

And it's funny when you think about it, if Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suddenly went down for whatever reason, people would be like, oh, wait, how do I talk to people?

Do I need to text them?

Do I call them?

You know,

it takes up so much airtime in people's heads and so makes up so much of the way that people communicate with each other now.

And, you know, he is somebody who has got the ear of presidents, heads of state.

And you could say that the product that he has created can influence elections.

We've seen evidence of that.

It can cause insurrections.

It can lead to overthrowing of dictators, maybe in Tunisia and Egypt and what have you.

So

I think he's up there with Murdoch, actually.

I'm going to give him possibly a 10.

Yeah, I'm going to give him a 10.

Wow.

Even though everyone says, oh, Facebook, who even logs onto that anymore?

It's just full of like your 60-year-old aunts and uncles that are arguing with each other over newspaper articles.

It's still a really powerful thing.

Yeah, tens all around.

And legacy.

Well, the world will never be the same again, will it, right?

No.

Even Sean Parker, who was once involved with Facebook itself, said, God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.

Yeah.

When we've looked at other billionaires, we've seen, if they hadn't existed, would this stuff have happened anyway?

And I think social media probably would have happened, but there's something about the ethos that comes through Zuckerberg and his old friend Peter Thiel, which meant that this company, I think, grew in a different way than it might otherwise have done.

Yeah, you can imagine if Myspace had won out in the battle between MySpace and Facebook, social media would look very different.

I think it would.

I think it would.

So in terms of legacy, I'm going to give him a 10 for legacy.

I just don't think the world's ever going to be the same again.

No, I'm going to give him a 10 as well.

Wow.

I wasn't expecting to be able to do that.

Yeah, you know what?

I've talked myself into it.

It's very...

Hard when you look at him and you know, it's quite, you know, sort of a bit gormless looking.

Yeah.

But it's funny, isn't it?

The people who look the most unassuming can end up having the biggest effects on the world.

And he hasn't even turned 40 years old yet.

Gee whiz.

So 10 for a legacy.

So good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Well, I outsource this question.

I feel very strongly that it's

he's bad.

You know, because I grew up in that generation that can remember a time before Facebook, before social media.

I remember being one of the first people to sign up to Facebook because I was at a UK university that was let into the first early early stages where you could join this US invention and everything changed.

It was incredible.

Everything changed.

My university experience was so different to people who graduated two years ahead of me because of Facebook.

I am a bit older than you and I remember.

Just a little bit.

I remember a time I was I was at university pre-mobile phone.

That's how old I am.

All of that stuff.

I missed out on all of that.

But I don't feel any worse off for that.

And I find myself when I am doom scrolling in the middle of the night, I think this is no way to live my life.

I know, exactly.

And that's what Facebook essentially did.

And also Instagram, which, you know, they now own.

It just gives you a window into seeing everyone else's lives.

And it's impossible not to compare.

You need to go back to FaceMash and it's literally comparing people.

So good, bad, good.

So I called Rory Ketland-Jones,

the BBC's former technology editor, and he said, I think he's probably a baddie.

And I think he probably is.

I think him and the products that he've made

have not made the world a better place.

So I'm sorry, Mark.

I'm blowing my next interview with him.

But on the bright side, you're not even 40 yet.

There's still plenty of time to turn the ship around.

I don't know, but

the thing that he's unleashed can never be put back in the bottle.

That's true.

Yeah.

Right.

So I'm sorry, Mark Zuckerberg.

I know you'll get over it with your $170 billion, but you were a bad billionaire.

I mean, I feel a bit bad about this because we do actually use two of these platforms to advertise our own podcast.

Hopefully we won't be taken down.

yes

um we're going to take a little break for a while so while we're away please get thinking of any billionaires you want us to cover and send their names to us on pick your social network of choice yes exactly uh thanks for listening so far to good bad billionaire we'll be back soon uh and check out the episodes you've missed on bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts

Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire.

This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward.

James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

Hey, let's talk about your expense report.

I didn't submit an expense report.

You will.

Custom saddles and dog training services are not within policy.

What are you talking about?

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It's the breakthrough I needed to focus more on our future.

These are my future expenses?

Yes, and self-defense classes are out of policy.

I'll need self-defense classes?

You will.

For what?

It's a big dog.

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