The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn’t to watch Steph Curry. Thousands of fans gathered at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco to watch one of Silicon Valley’s biggest ballers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sit down for a conversation with the hosts of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert.
Shortly after hopping onstage, Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over.
Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. Onstage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read “learning through suffering” in Greek letters.
The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he’d made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang’s original comment — that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today — was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders.
While Zuckerberg’s opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg’s new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.
“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
The vague comments seemed to be about critics blaming Facebook for its part in Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016. Among other things, a firm called Cambridge Analytica took Facebook users’ data and attempted to use it to influence voters to choose Trump. Foreign actors also used the platform in an attempt to influence the election and sow political division, culminating in years of bad press for the company and in Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. (It’s unclear how effective these campaigns actually were.) In the months following the 2016 election, Zuckerberg lamented how almost no one had good things to say about Facebook.
Now, however, Zuckerberg says he’s found the right balance on political issues. He didn’t say much more than that, but his recent actions are instructive.
In August, the Meta CEO sent a letter to House Republicans effectively apologizing for censoring misinformation around COVID-19 in 2020, and bending to demands from the Biden administration. Zuckerberg said he regrets not being more outspoken about the pressure from government officials at the time. In the future, Zuckerberg said he would “push back if something like this happens again.”
Meanwhile on Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram have removed all special restrictions for Trump’s social media accounts. These restrictions were originally placed on his accounts after the January 6 insurrection in 2021, but will not impact Trump’s accounts going into the 2024 election.
In July, while not going as far as to endorse a specific candidate for U.S. president, the Meta CEO also called Trump a “badass” for lifting his fist in the air after someone attempted to assassinate him.
On Tuesday night, Zuckerberg said he’s more excited about projects outside of social media these days, describing Meta as a “human connection” company at its core. The Meta CEO noted how no one gets out of bed in the morning and goes “f— yea, social media!” Instead, he wants to make more “awesome” products, seemingly referring to Meta’s AR glasses, VR goggles, and open source AI efforts.
Zuckerberg was pressed at one point about whether he regrets naming the company Meta, which signaled the company’s pivot toward the metaverse. The CEO simply replied, “Meta is a good name.”
Regardless of where Zuckerberg’s focus is, Meta’s social media platforms are still where billions of people convene every day. That means content moderation issues will arise, and the CEO will ultimately have to make consequential decisions.