Sitting in a glass-walled conference room nicknamed The Aquarium, Mark Zuckerberg runs a cost/benefit analysis on the topic that has brought him headlines this year: mixed martial arts. Today, he’s focusing on head shots versus body shots. “Getting hit in the face doesn’t hurt that much,” he deadpans. “It just does brain damage.”
The obviously-never-going-to-happen cage match with Elon Musk (“I assumed he wouldn’t do it”) put Zuckerberg back into the zeitgeist in the stupidest way, but it also served a business purpose: For much of his career, he has undermined his monumental achievements by wading through a swamp of missteps and democracy-crippling scandals. So the Musk beef was rare: an opportunity to play hero to the Tesla CEO’s petulant villain, to demonstrate that Facebook’s former “toddler CEO” has evolved into Meta’s statesman.
“The thing that determines your destiny isn’t a competitor,” he says. “It’s how you execute.”
Such reflection is well-timed. Zuckerberg will turn 40 next May, with a fortune estimated at $106 billion, a philanthropy arm designed for maximum impact and a commitment to transform one of the most important companies in the world, over which he has near total control. In many ways, he’s having his Bill Gates moment. Like Zuckerberg, Gates dropped out of Harvard to build a historically significant tech company. Like Zuckerberg, he was the nerdy boy-wonder face of his field. Like Zuckerberg, he produced fans, enemies and antitrust concerns on his brusque, relentless way to the top.
The obviously-never-going-to-happen cage match with Elon Musk (“I assumed he wouldn’t do it”) put Zuckerberg back into the zeitgeist in the stupidest way, but it also served a business purpose: For much of his career, he has undermined his monumental achievements by wading through a swamp of missteps and democracy-crippling scandals. So the Musk beef was rare: an opportunity to play hero to the Tesla CEO’s petulant villain, to demonstrate that Facebook’s former “toddler CEO” has evolved into Meta’s statesman.
“The thing that determines your destiny isn’t a competitor,” he says. “It’s how you execute.”
Such reflection is well-timed. Zuckerberg will turn 40 next May, with a fortune estimated at $106 billion, a philanthropy arm designed for maximum impact and a commitment to transform one of the most important companies in the world, over which he has near total control. In many ways, he’s having his Bill Gates moment. Like Zuckerberg, Gates dropped out of Harvard to build a historically significant tech company. Like Zuckerberg, he was the nerdy boy-wonder face of his field. Like Zuckerberg, he produced fans, enemies and antitrust concerns on his brusque, relentless way to the top.
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TechTranscript
00:00 (soft music)
00:02 - Thanks Mark for taking time to talk to Forbes.
00:09 - Happy to.
00:10 - What is the biggest technological innovation
00:13 of your lifetime?
00:15 - I think if I had to pick to date,
00:17 it would probably be mobile,
00:19 having every, giving everyone the ability to connect.
00:21 But I think going forwards,
00:24 I mean the two that I'm the most excited about
00:27 are AI is obviously just having a huge moment right now.
00:31 There've been awesome breakthroughs in the last year
00:33 on this and I just think that this is gonna transform
00:36 all of the different products that we have
00:38 and everything across the industry.
00:40 So, my own view is that there isn't gonna be
00:43 one kind of big central super intelligence.
00:46 I think that there are gonna be a lot of different AIs
00:48 that people interact with for different things
00:50 and that we interact with throughout our day.
00:53 And I'm really excited to try to help make that happen.
00:57 The other one that I think is gonna be very exciting
01:00 over time is the metaverse, right?
01:03 The ability for people to basically feel physically present
01:08 with another person,
01:10 no matter where you actually are in the world, right?
01:12 So in the near term, we get that with VR,
01:14 where you can jump in and you can be embodied as an avatar
01:17 and just feel like you're right there with another person.
01:19 There's something that's sort of magical about that,
01:21 that you don't get in any other kind of screen
01:23 or technology that we use,
01:24 that nothing really replaces the feeling
01:27 of being there with another person.
01:28 But over the long term, I think we're gonna get that
01:31 through a pair of normal looking glasses
01:33 where we could be having this conversation in the future
01:35 and one of us could just be a hologram sitting here
01:37 and having a normal kind of full interaction,
01:39 feeling like we're physically there with each other.
01:41 And I think that that's gonna be really,
01:44 really just a huge deal.
01:45 But, I mean, it met at the main thing that I'm focused on
01:48 is we talk about building the future of human connection.
01:52 And I think those two areas really blend together
01:57 to be that, right?
01:58 For giving people the ability to feel present
02:01 with another person no matter where they are.
02:03 And then also over the long term,
02:05 giving people the ability to interact not just with people,
02:07 but also AIs and businesses that they care about
02:11 in different ways is just all part of the future
02:13 of making the world more connected.
02:15 So I think it's super exciting.
02:16 - I mean, this idea of having, putting on glasses
02:19 and then like you could be a hologram or I could be a hologram
02:21 is that a decade or more away?
02:24 Like any idea? - No, I hope not.
02:25 - Oh, less, really? - Yeah, less.
02:27 Well, first of all, you are gonna be able to do it
02:30 and you can do it with Quest Pro today.
02:32 And when Quest 3 comes out,
02:34 you'll be able to do it with mixed reality, right?
02:35 So the first headsets that we made were virtual reality,
02:38 which basically meant that you kind of were fully immersed
02:41 in a world around you.
02:42 Now you put on the headset and by default,
02:45 you're kind of in your living room
02:47 or you see the physical world around you
02:49 and you see digital objects overlaid on that.
02:51 And I think that that's, so we're starting to get that.
02:54 And I think over the coming years,
02:56 we'll get to the zone where it's,
02:59 the digital world isn't just something that we access
03:02 through phones or screens, it'll be more and more
03:06 just kind of blended into the world around us.
03:08 A lot of the art or the games or media or screens,
03:13 or it's actually an interesting thought experiment
03:15 just to think about how much of the stuff around you
03:17 could be a hologram, right?
03:18 I mean, your chair can't be
03:19 'cause you need to physically sit on it.
03:21 Food can't be because you need to physically eat it.
03:23 But like most of the other things around us
03:25 actually probably could be holograms over time.
03:29 And that's gonna open up
03:31 a lot of interesting opportunities too.
03:33 So you're getting that with these kinds of headsets
03:36 like Quest already that millions of people have access to.
03:39 And then my hope is that over the next several years,
03:42 we'll also get increasingly powerful glasses.
03:44 But that's a very hard tech problem
03:47 because you're basically fitting
03:49 like the equivalent of a supercomputer
03:51 into a pair of normal looking glasses.
03:53 So making things small is hard.
03:58 - I think that's why I was thinking it would take a decade.
04:00 'Cause like thinking about the difference in size
04:02 between what the Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Stories
04:06 is that are pretty different.
04:07 - Yeah, and it's not necessarily
04:09 that you're gonna be able to do the same thing with both
04:10 just like a computer might have more power on your desk
04:14 than your phone, but you could still do
04:17 a lot of awesome stuff with your phone.
04:19 My guess is that glasses will walk around
04:22 throughout the day with them.
04:24 They won't be quite as powerful
04:25 as what you'll be able to do with a full headset.
04:28 So maybe if you're like sitting down to work on something
04:31 or if you're like a surgeon
04:32 and you're gonna do a remote surgery,
04:34 then you probably want like a more powerful VR headset,
04:36 not just a small pair of glasses,
04:38 but for like mobile use cases, walking around
04:41 in places where you're gonna be interacting
04:42 with a lot of other people live
04:44 where you wanna be, you wanna see the people around you,
04:47 not just have a headset on.
04:48 I think that it's gonna be super useful.
04:51 So yeah, no, I think it's gonna be this decade.
04:52 - What would you say is the hardest part of running Meta?
04:55 - Well, I think the hardest,
05:00 this may just be for me because of the way
05:04 that I'm oriented, but you know, it's a big company
05:10 and I think getting the people right
05:13 and the culture right is the thing
05:15 that both matters the most
05:17 and is sort of the hardest to dial,
05:21 you know, especially as a company scales.
05:23 And one of the things that I've found over time is,
05:26 you know, we've gone through these different periods
05:29 as a company where sometimes people think we're awesome.
05:32 Sometimes people think we're terrible.
05:34 You know, sometimes people think we're just like
05:36 everything we do is gonna be a winner.
05:37 And sometimes people think like,
05:39 we're like the gang that can't shoot straight.
05:41 And like, you know, we, you know,
05:42 just nothing that we do is gonna work.
05:44 But regardless of what people are saying externally,
05:47 I've found that if you can keep sort of a good amount
05:51 of internal cohesion, you can get anything done.
05:56 Right, whereas even when, you know,
05:58 sometimes people are very excited about the company,
06:01 if people internally aren't actually aligned
06:02 and what we need to go do,
06:03 then it's very hard to get things done.
06:05 So for me, I mean, it's maybe somewhat of a trite thing
06:10 to say, but I think like, I mean,
06:12 this is all about getting people, right?
06:16 Like getting the right people involved
06:19 and building great teams of awesome people
06:21 to be able to build new things
06:25 that are super impressive for a lot of people.
06:27 So that to me is probably what I spend
06:29 the most time focused on.
06:31 And it's probably the most important part
06:33 of running a company.
06:34 - That sounds, I think that sounds fair to me.
06:37 Who is your biggest rival
06:39 and how are you competing against them?
06:41 - Well, we have a lot of competitors
06:48 in pretty much everything we do,
06:50 from social media to devices, to advertising,
06:53 to like all the different areas.
06:55 But I don't know, I guess one philosophy
06:58 that I've always had is I actually think your biggest,
07:04 the thing that determines your destiny
07:05 is not a competitor, it's how you execute.
07:09 And I think most companies probably focus too much
07:15 on competitors and maybe even focus too much on ideas.
07:21 And I think at the end of the day,
07:23 a lot of what makes great companies great
07:26 is the ability to just like relentlessly execute
07:29 and efficiently execute and do that rigorously
07:31 and just get better and better at it all the time.
07:33 And that's one of the things that we've really focused on.
07:35 So I don't know, maybe it's like,
07:37 it's sort of like a very, I don't know,
07:40 like martial arts view of the world or something
07:42 that you, it's like when you go into a competition,
07:45 it's not, you're not fighting another person,
07:47 you're fighting yourself, right?
07:48 And you're just trying to be a better version of yourself
07:51 and make the company better
07:52 and able to better execute every day.
07:55 But I always tell our company that
07:57 whenever I've gotten asked that question,
07:59 like a lot of times over time,
08:02 and it's always just, no,
08:03 like we don't control our competitors,
08:05 but we do control what we do and we can get better at it.
08:07 And that's how we build better things for the world.
08:10 - And you're okay, obviously,
08:11 mimicking features at other competitors
08:15 and trying to roll them out here, right?
08:17 I mean, you've certainly seen that.
08:18 - You want to learn from what people in the world
08:21 are enjoying and finding useful, right?
08:24 And yeah, I think you want to be humble about it, right?
08:26 It's, you know, not every great idea
08:28 is going to come from us.
08:29 You know, I like to think that, you know,
08:31 we invent a lot of things,
08:33 but no, I think that the idea that like,
08:36 we would create everything that people want to use
08:39 is ridiculous, right?
08:40 So yeah, of course we want to be looking around
08:42 and seeing what people find useful
08:44 and trying to do our own take on those things
08:48 and make them even better.
08:49 And I think that that kind of natural competition
08:52 is how these ideas get honed
08:55 and things get better in the world.
08:56 - If you're in a match with Elon
08:59 and he uses the heel hook move,
09:01 how do you defend against it?
09:02 - Well, I don't think that fight's going to happen,
09:04 but look, I mean, I love the stuff.
09:09 You know, I like competing.
09:10 I like doing it with friends.
09:11 It's like an important part of my daily workout,
09:14 but I like competing too.
09:16 I started doing jujitsu competitions earlier this year.
09:20 I want to do an MMA competition
09:22 or do kind of a formal fight sometime in the next year.
09:25 So I'm looking forward to that.
09:27 I'm probably going to do it with somebody
09:28 who takes the sport really seriously
09:30 and does it competitively or is a professional.
09:32 So I'm training hard and looking forward to it.
09:36 But no, to your question about the heel hook,
09:38 that's a relatively high level jujitsu move.
09:42 So I think the person would have to be pretty serious
09:45 and experienced in order to be even attempting that.
09:47 (silence)
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