mark zuckerberg presentation

The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.

Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps. We believe the metaverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our energy to helping achieve its potential.

As I wrote in our original founder’s letter: “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

This approach has served us well. We’ve built our business to support very large and long term investments to build better services, and that’s what we plan to do here.

The last five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that building products people love isn’t enough.

I’ve gained more appreciation that the internet’s story isn’t straightforward. Every chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, and disruption of established interests. We’ll need to work together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life.

Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance. Most of all, we need to help build ecosystems so that more people have a stake in the future and can benefit not just as consumers but as creators.

This period has also been humbling because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it’s like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and holding back the internet economy.

We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want our services to be accessible to as many people as possible, which means working to make them cost less, not more. Our mobile apps are free. Our ads model is designed to provide businesses the lowest prices. Our commerce tools are available at cost or with modest fees. As a result, billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools.

That’s the approach we want to bring to helping to build the metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting side-loading and streaming from PCs so people have choice, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall creative economy. We’ll need to make sure we don’t lose too much money along the way though.

Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

As we embark on this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.

We’re a company that focuses on connecting people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we’ve always focused on building technology so people can interact with each other.

Today we’re seen as a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social media brand.

Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. In our DNA, we build technology to bring people together. The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started.

Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.

We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these segments. The metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.

Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.

But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.

I used to study Classics, and the word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story. Ours is a story that started in a dorm room and grew beyond anything we imagined; into a family of apps that people use to connect with one another, to find their voice, and to start businesses, communities, and movements that have changed the world.

I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us.

We have built things that have brought people together in new ways. We’ve learned from struggling with difficult social issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to take everything we’ve learned and help build the next chapter.

I’m dedicating our energy to this — more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you’ll join us. The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.

— Mark Zuckerberg

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Mark in the metaverse

Facebook’s ceo on why the social network is becoming ‘a metaverse company’.

By Casey Newton , a contributing editor who has been writing about tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse.

The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees. “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”

The metaverse is having a moment. Coined in Snow Crash , Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Earlier this month, The New York Times explored how companies and products including Epic Games’ Fortnite , Roblox , and even Animal Crossing: New Horizons increasingly had metaverse-like elements. (Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been discussing his desire to contribute to a metaverse for many months now .)

“we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company”

In January 2020, an influential essay by the venture capitalist Matthew Ball set out to identify key characteristics of a metaverse . Among them: it has to span the physical and virtual worlds; contain a fully fledged economy; and offer “unprecedented interoperability” — users have to be able to take their avatars and goods from one place in the metaverse to another, no matter who runs that particular part of it. Critically, no one company will run the metaverse — it will be an “embodied internet,” Zuckerberg said, operated by many different players in a decentralized way.

Watching Zuckerberg’s presentation, I couldn’t decide which was more audacious: his vision itself or his timing. Zuckerberg’s announced intention to build a more maximalist version of Facebook, spanning social presence, office work, and entertainment, comes at a time when the US government is attempting to break his current company up. A package of bills making its way through Congress would potentially force the company to spin out Instagram and WhatsApp, and limit Facebook’s ability to make future acquisitions — or offer services connected to its hardware products.

And even if tech regulation stalls in the United States — historically not a bad bet — a thriving metaverse would raise questions both familiar and strange about how the virtual space is governed, how its contents would be moderated, and what its existence would do to our shared sense of reality. We’re still getting our arms wrapped around the two-dimensional version of social platforms; wrangling the 3D version could be exponentially harder.

At the same time, Zuckerberg said, the metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realized metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device, he says. With the company’s Oculus division, which produces the Quest headset, Facebook is trying to develop one. 

“I don’t think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally.”

After I watched his speech, Zuckerberg and I had a conversation. (The metaverse being unavailable to us at press time, we used Zoom.) We discussed his vision for an embodied internet, the challenges of governing it, and gender imbalance in virtual reality today. And with President Biden’s fierce criticism of Facebook’s failures in removing anti-vaccine content in the headlines, I asked him about that, too. 

“It’s a little bit like fighting crime in a city,” he told me. “No one expects that you’re ever going to fully solve crime in a city.”

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length .   

Mark Zuckerberg, welcome to The Vergecast .

Thanks, Casey. It’s good to be here. We’ve got a lot to go through.

As always, there’s a lot to discuss with you — and the White House is demanding Facebook do more to remove vaccine misinformation, which I know is on a lot of people’s minds right now. I want to get to that, but I want to start with this talk you gave internally at Facebook a few weeks ago, which I recently had a chance to watch. You told your employees that your future vision of Facebook is not the two-dimensional version of it that we’re using today, but something called the metaverse. So what is a metaverse and what parts of it does Facebook plan to build?

This is a big topic. The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies — the whole industry. You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet. And it’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build, but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that, in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers. But you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.

“we’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact.”

I think a lot of people, when they think about the metaverse, they think about just virtual reality — which I think is going to be an important part of that. And that’s clearly a part that we’re very invested in, because it’s the technology that delivers the clearest form of presence. But the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and also mobile devices and game consoles. Speaking of which, a lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that’s about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it, but I don’t think that this is just gaming. I think that this is a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, which I think is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it.

So that can be 3D — it doesn’t have to be. You might be able to jump into an experience, like a 3D concert or something, from your phone, so you can get elements that are 2D or elements that are 3D. I’d love to go through a bunch of the use cases in more detail, but overall, I think that this is going to be a really big part of the next chapter for the technology industry, and it’s something that we’re very excited about. 

It just touches a lot of the biggest themes that we’re working on. Think about things like community and creators as one, or digital commerce as a second, or building out the next set of computing platforms, like virtual and augmented reality, to give people that sense of presence. I think all of these different initiatives that we have at Facebook today will basically ladder up together to contribute to helping to build this metaverse vision.

“I’ve been thinking about some of this stuff since I was in middle school and just starting to code”

And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision in terms of building community and creators. So there’s a lot to jump into here. I’m curious what direction you want to take this in. But this is something that I’m spending a lot of time on, thinking a lot about, we’re working on a ton. And I think it’s just a big part of the next chapter for the work that we’re going to do in the whole industry.

This feels like a fairly far-future vision, even though parts of it are visible now and coming together. I think overall, it feels like a very maximalist version of what the internet could be. You talk to employees about, “from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, being able to jump into the metaverse to do almost anything you can imagine.” And probably some of us are using the internet that way already.

But this description feels more like the metaverse that might be familiar to us from books like Ready Player One or Snow Crash , or maybe like Fortnite today, where some of the most important aspects of our lives, including our work, are being lived and done inside these virtual spaces. Are those good analogs for the kind of world that you’re talking about?

Well, what I’m excited about is helping people deliver and experience a much stronger sense of presence with the people they care about, the people they work with, the places they want to be. And the reality is that today with the mobile internet, we already have something that a lot of people access from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed. I don’t know about you, but a lot of mornings, I reach for my phone by my bedside before I even put on my glasses, just to make sure, get whatever text messages I got during the middle of the night and make sure that nothing has gone wrong that I need to jump into immediately upon waking up. So I don’t think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally.

And today, I think about the computing platforms that we have. We have these phones. They’re relatively small. A lot of the time that we’re spending, we’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact. A lot of the meetings that we have today, you’re looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That’s not how we process things either. We’re used to being in a room with people and having a sense of space where if you’re sitting to my right, then that means I’m also sitting to your left, so we have some shared sense of space in common. When you speak, it’s coming from my right. It’s not just all coming from the same place in front of me.

I don’t know how much you’ve had this experience, but I have a bunch, in work meetings over the last year, where I sometimes find it hard to remember what meeting someone said something in because they all look the same and they all blend together. And I think part of that is because we don’t have this sense of presence in space. What virtual and augmented reality can do, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience, is a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that we’re made to interact. And I think it will be more comfortable. The interactions that we have will be a lot richer, they’ll feel real. In the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, you’ll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or I’ll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and it’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart. So I think that that is really powerful.

I’ve been thinking about some of this stuff since I was in middle school and just starting to code. I remember when I was in math class, I would have my notebook and I’d basically just sit there and write code and ideas for things I wanted to go code when I got home from school that day. And some of them I was able to do back then, but one of the things that I really wanted to build was basically the sense of an embodied internet where you could be in the environment and teleport to different places and be with friends.

I think some combination of the fact that I probably didn’t know enough math to pull it off then, and just the technology was decades away from really being ready to do that in a good way — that wasn’t the direction that I gravitated in originally, in terms of building different social experiences. But this is something that I’ve been excited about. I’ve thought that this would be the holy grail of social interactions from well before when I started Facebook. And it’s really exciting to me that now the next set of platforms are going to be able to do this.

“People aren’t meant to navigate things in terms of a grid of apps”

One of the reasons why we’re investing so much in augmented and virtual reality is mobile phones kind of came around at the same time as Facebook, so we didn’t really get to play a big role in shaping the development of those platforms. So they didn’t really develop in a very natural way, from my perspective. People aren’t meant to navigate things in terms of a grid of apps. I think we interact much more naturally when we think about being present with other people. We orient ourselves and think about the world through people and the interactions we have with people and what we do with them. And I think if we can help build the next set of computing platforms and experiences across that in a way that’s more natural and lets us feel more present with people, I think that’ll be a very positive thing.

I’m not sure that people would necessarily find it more natural to work all day wearing a VR helmet, but maybe it’s something we get used to. But I am really interested in some of the things that you’ve said about the way a metaverse could create jobs that don’t exist today, like whole economies springing up inside of this metaverse. What novel new forms of work do you see happening in this world you want to build?

So, let me get to that in a second. But just to go back to your comment about people not working in [a VR helmet] all day long — there’s clearly an evolution, or multiple, in the technology that are going to need to be possible, that will need to happen before this is the main way that people work. But I think we’re going to be there by the end of this decade. Today, the VR headsets, they’re still kind of a bit clunky, they may be a bit heavier than you would ideally like them to be. There need to be advances in being able to express yourself and having higher resolution, being able to read text better, a number of things like that. But we’re getting there, and each version is better and better. And Quest 2 has been a real hit so far in terms of how people are using it. I’ve been surprised. 

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We planned on it mostly being used for games and thought that a lot of these social interactions or things around work wouldn’t come until later, but a lot of the biggest experiences on Quest 2, that people spend the most time in, are already just hanging out socially. And there are a number of things around work and productivity. There are even experiences that I really hadn’t thought about, things like fitness. These apps like Supernatural and FitXR, which you can kind of think about it like Peloton, but instead of having a bike or a treadmill, the device is your VR headset and you’re basically taking a class in there, where you’re boxing or dancing. And it’s really fun. I think if you haven’t tried it out, it’s something that a lot of people are enjoying.

But going back to your point about work, and how this is going to work, I also don’t think this is going to be all VR. I think it’s going to be AR too. And part of the reason why VR is available, and why you have things like the Quest 2 years before you’re going to have AR glasses is because it’s a little more socially acceptable to wear something like a VR headset in the comfort of your own home. But I think to get AR glasses that we wear around throughout the day, they have to be normal-looking glasses, right? So you’re basically cramming all of these materials to build what we would’ve thought of as a supercomputer 10 years ago into the frame of glasses that are about five millimeters thick — you have computer chips, and networking chips, and holographic wave guides, and things for sensing and mapping out the world, and batteries and speakers, all this stuff, and it just needs to fit into these glasses — so that is a real challenge.

And I actually would go so far as to say that I think that might be one of, if not the biggest technological challenge that our industry will face in the next decade. We tend to really celebrate things that are big, right? But I actually think miniaturizing things and getting a supercomputer to fit into a pair of glasses is actually one of the bigger challenges. But once you have that, so you have those glasses and you have your VR headset, I think that’s going to enable a bunch of really interesting use cases. 

So, one is you will be able to, with basically a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect workstation. So anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks, you can sit down, you can be drinking your coffee and kind of wave your hands and you can have basically as many monitors as you want, all set up, whatever size you want them to be, all preconfigured to the way you had it when you were at your home before. And you can just bring that with you wherever you want.

“We tend to really celebrate things that are big, right?”

If you want to talk to someone, you’re working through a problem, instead of just calling them on the phone, they can teleport in, and then they can see all the context that you have. They can see your five monitors, or whatever it is, and the documents or all the windows of code that you have, or a 3D model that you’re working on. And they can stand next to you and interact, and then in a blink they can teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place.

So I think for focus time and individual productivity, I think being able to have your ideal setup, we call this “infinite office.” We already have a version of this for our VR headsets, and it’s improving very quickly. I think it’s going to be great for multitasking and for getting your environment set up everywhere. There’ve been a lot of studies that show that people are more effective when they can pull up multiple of the things that they’re working on that are related to each other at once. If you’re coding, having multiple windows open rather than single-tasking, that’s a big deal. So I think that that’s going to be one.

The other area that I think is going to be pretty exciting is basically doing meetings. And I already do a bunch of meetings in VR. Even though the avatars aren’t as realistic today as they will be in a few years, in a lot of ways it already feels almost more real, and more like you have a sense of space, than a Zoom call, because you have the shared sense of space. So if someone is sitting to your right, you’re sitting to their left. If you’re sitting in a circle, everyone can kind of remember what order people were in. There’s spatial audio. You look over to the head of the table and there could be a screen there, where people who can’t be in VR or AR can videoconference in and be a part of your meeting from outside. You can project and different people can share as many documents as they want. So it’s no more of this, “Oh, I can only share one document at a time,” because everyone, you presume, only has one screen. And in VR, people can pull up as many screens as they want so you can share as much context as you want during a meeting. You have a whiteboard, people can draw. It’s pretty wild.

And we’re clearly just at the beginning of this. So I think that that’s going to be very exciting and people can customize their office space, and have it feel like what their physical office is and just be a digital continuation of that. So I think that’s pretty neat.

“You can teleport instantaneously”

But then I think what you were also asking about is, aside from doing the kind of knowledge work that we would typically do in offices today, but instead doing it in the metaverse, I do think that there will be entirely new types of work too. So in terms of designing places where people hang out, this is going to be a massive part of the creator economy, I think. You’ll have individual creators designing experiences and places. You’ll have artists doing things, whether it’s a comedy show ... We did this comedy show on our team in Horizon the other day and it was just kind of funny, you feel like you’re there with other people, and there’s something to it that’s a little more engaging than just all looking at a screen independently and watching it yourself. There’s just something to the energy.

What was this show? Did you tell jokes during the show?

I was not the comedian, fortunately for the other participants who were there. But no, the team that’s developing Horizon, which is a big part of our internal efforts in this space, they try to do fun things like this, just to kind of build out and test how the development of the work is going. And I thought that that was pretty funny. But you’d get concerts in there. You have this whole set of creators who are building out different experiences, ranging from an individual creator to teams of dozens of people building AAA games, where you can have your avatar and you can go across these experiences. You can teleport instantaneously. You can bring your outfits and your digital objects with you. So I think that there’s going to be a whole economy around this.

And I guess one broader point that I’d make here is, one lesson that I’ve taken from running Facebook over the last five years is that I used to think about our job as building products that people love to use. But you know, now I think we just need to have a more holistic view of this. It’s not enough to just build something that people like to use. It has to create opportunity and broadly be a positive thing for society in terms of economic opportunity, in terms of being something that, socially, everyone can participate in, that it can be inclusive. So we’re really designing the work that we’re doing in the space with those principles from the ground up. This isn’t just a product that we’re building. It needs to be an ecosystem. So the creators who we work with, the developers, they all need to be able to not only sustain themselves, but hire a lot of folks.

And this is something that I hope eventually millions of people will be working in and creating content for — whether it’s experiences, or spaces, or virtual goods, or virtual clothing, or doing work helping to curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy and frankly, I think that that needs to exist. This needs to be a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats. We can’t just think about this as a product that we’re building.

“overall I’m quite proud of how we’ve shown up and what I think our net impact has been here”

Yeah, so let’s talk about some of those principles that you’re going to use to build this. Because I know some people are going to hear this vision for the metaverse and just reflexively wish that you wouldn’t build it. They’ll say, Facebook wasn’t governed effectively when it was in two dimensions, and trying to build it in three dimensions is pure hubris. And people feel that way for different reasons. But one that has come up a lot over the past couple of weeks is misinformation. President Biden has since walked this back, but on Friday he was talking about misinformation related to COVID vaccines. And he said, “Facebook is killing people.” How do you respond to the idea that Facebook has played a role in making people hesitant about getting vaccinated?

Well, I think that our basic role here — and I appreciate you mentioning the fullness of the context there, because I do think that the president offered more context on that after his original comment. There’s multiple prongs here. One part of it is we need to basically help push out authoritative information. We do that. We’ve helped, I think it’s more than 2 billion people around the world, access authoritative information about COVID over the course of the pandemic by putting it at the top of Facebook and Instagram. We’ve helped millions of people, including here in the US, basically go use our vaccine finder tool to actually go get their vaccine. So I’m quite confident, just looking at the analytics and the net impact, that we’ve been a positive force here.

And in fact, if you look at vaccine acceptance amongst people who use our products, it has increased quite a bit over the last few months. So to the extent that there are pockets of the population for which hesitancy is growing, that hasn’t been the trend of what we’ve seen overall on Facebook. And I also think that broadly, when you’re looking at what’s going on in any given country, it’s useful to look at this from the perspective that Facebook and Instagram and all these tools are widely used in almost every country in the world. So if one country is not reaching its vaccine goal, but other countries that all these same social media tools are in are doing just fine, then I think that that should lead you to conclude that the social media platforms are not the decisive element in terms of what is going on there.

But nonetheless, I do think we have a big role and we have a range of strategies that we employ. We take down content that could lead to imminent harm, and we flag and decrease the distribution of content that our fact checkers flag as misinformation, but that is not going to lead to imminent harm. So we treat those two differently, and I think that’s the right thing to do. So overall, I think we’ve taken a lot of efforts on this. I think our company has made a lot of progress in this space over the last five years since the 2016 election. It’s tough to say that anyone was well-prepared for the pandemic, but I think we’d built a lot of systems that I think could really come in handy on this. And overall I’m quite proud of how we’ve shown up and what I think our net impact has been here. 

But managing the integrity of these communities, whether you’re talking about misinformation on Facebook or other types of harm — we track about 20 different types of harm, everything from terrorism to child exploitation to incitement of violence. There are lots of different types of harm. You need to build specific systems to handle them. We have, I think at this point it’s more than 1,000 people working on building the AI and technical systems. And I think it’s more than 30,000 or 35,000 people helping to review the content. And that kind of apparatus that we built up I think will carry naturally to all the work that we’ll do going forward.

But when you think about the integrity of a system like this, it’s a little bit like fighting crime in a city. No one expects that you’re ever going to fully solve crime in a city. The police department’s goal is not to make it so that if there’s any crime that happens, that you say that the police department is failing. That’s not reasonable. I think, instead, what we generally expect is that the integrity systems, the police departments, if you will, will do a good job of helping to deter and catch the bad thing when it happens and keep it at a minimum, and keep driving the trend in a positive direction and be in front of other issues too. So we’re going to do that here.

And for the metaverse, I think that there are different types of integrity questions. One of the big issues that I think people need to think through is right now there’s a pretty meaningful gender skew, at least in virtual reality, where there’s a lot more men than women. And in some cases that leads to harassment. And I think one of the things that we’ve been able to do better in some of our experiences than some of the other games and things out there is give people easier tools to block people, just be able to have a sense of when there might be harassment going on, to keep it a safe space that can be inclusive for everyone, that everyone wants to be a part of.

“I think that the mix of the problems that we see may vary, and I’m sure there’ll be new ones too”

Because ultimately, you’re not going to have a healthy and vibrant community if it skews so much towards one gender or the other, or a whole part of the population just doesn’t feel safe. So this stuff is going to be critical. It’s not just critical for having a good social impact, it’s critical for building good products. And it’s something that we’re focused on from the beginning here.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading more about the metaverse is that it seems to me that it promises to host much more information, generally, than social networks do today. This isn’t a network where I’m spending 20 or 30 minutes a day scrolling through a feed. Potentially, I’m spending eight-plus hours here working. And, as you noted, it’s not just text or voice communications, you’re also virtually moving through these spaces; it’s an office, it’s a performance space. So do you think that the systems that you have now to work on making spaces safe and healthy extend naturally? Or are we going to have to rethink this, just given the volume of information that is contained here?

Well, there will clearly be new challenges. Even in just the 2D world of the social media apps that we work on, there are going to be new challenges. So this is not a thing that you’re ever done with. But when we started working on a lot of these problems in a much bigger way, through the middle of the 2010s leading up to the 2016 election, and really turbocharged it a lot after that, we just knew that if you’re going to go and try to build these AI systems to be able to proactively identify harmful content — that’s not something that you can stand up in six months. We basically put together a roadmap that was a three- or four-year roadmap to get through all of the work that we needed to get to a good place.

And sometimes when you’re working on long-term projects, it can be a little painful because you realize, “Hey, we want this today.” But it’s going to take a few years to get there. But I do think the reality is that now that we’ve built up a lot of that AI work and we’ve hired a lot of the content moderators, I think it will be easier to add new use cases and be able to adapt the systems that we’ve built to different types of harms. So it’s something that we’re thinking about from the beginning. For example, the gender skew that I just mentioned, the feeling that a number of women have around being harassed in the space, those are somewhat more acute problems, potentially, in gaming and in VR. Obviously that’s a thing that exists in the other platforms as well. But I think that the mix of the problems that we see may vary, and I’m sure there’ll be new ones too. So this is just something that we’ll need to keep focused on.

I want to ask one more question about responsibility. I was talking to Nilay, who runs The Verge , about all this. And he asked me the question, “Who gets to augment reality?” And he talked about a world where we’re all wearing our headsets, and we’re looking at the US Capitol building. And most of us might have an overlay that says, “This is the building where Congress works.” And then some people might see an overlay that says, “On January 6, 2021, our glorious revolution began.” And then maybe some other people see an overlay that says, “Lizard people are inside doing experiments on humans.” And I think the real question in there is: does this metaverse further splinter our sense of shared reality? Does it let us sort ourselves into a bunch of unrelated bubbles? Should we be worried about that?

Well, this, I think, is one of the central questions of our time. And I think there are clear pros and cons of this. I think the positive version of this is that if you go back 20 or 30 years, a lot of people’s individual opportunities and experience was dictated by their physical proximity. Right? 

So [when] I grew up, I played Little League baseball in my town, not because I am made to be a baseball player, but because that was one of the few activities that was available. There was, I think, one other kid in the town who was interested in computers — I was lucky that there was one other kid. And that was my world. If I wanted to call someone who I met when I was at camp or something and wanted to stay in touch with a friend, I would have to pay a lot more because long-distance calls cost more than talking to people nearby.

I think one of the things that is most magical about the present, and that I think is going to get even more so, is that flattening out distance creates a lot more opportunities for people. Not just in the sense that a version of me growing up today wouldn’t be stuck playing Little League, that I’d get to find people who are interested in the same things, so I could explore coding and have a much more vibrant community around that, or surfing, or whatever the thing is that you’re interested in. I think that that’s probably quite compelling and positive. I also think it is really important for economic opportunity. One of the big issues today in society is inequality. And one of the people I think has done the most interesting research on this is this guy, Raj Chetty, I think he’s at Harvard now. And basically some of the research that he’s done shows that the zip code in which you were born and raised is highly correlated with your future mobility and what your income is going to be. And I think that that just goes against the sense that we have in this country that people should have equal opportunity.

But in a world where there can be more remote work, I don’t know what The Verge is doing, but I can tell you at Facebook, since we knew that this pandemic was going to be going on for a while, and we probably weren’t going be in offices, pretty early on, I basically just told our team, “Okay, look, stop just constraining ourselves from hiring people who are physically close to an office that they can’t go into anyway. Remote work is going to be a bigger part of the future. I think within five to 10 years, probably about half the company is going to be remote. Let’s double down on that now and hire people in all these different places, which I think is going to create more opportunity.” But then you have this question, which is, now that we’re going back and you have this hybrid world, there are all these cultural questions of, “Okay, will the people who are working remotely really be able to have exactly the same opportunities as the people who are physically there with each other?”

And I think when you have technologies like holograms from augmented and virtual reality, the answer gets closer to “yes” than it would have been before. When those people were just videoconferencing in on a flat screen or doing phone calls or not seeing each other as often. The better that this technology for presence gets, the more you can live where you want, be a part of the communities that you want to. And I think that that’s more positive in terms of creating more opportunity for people. Now, obviously, you also have the downsides of that that need to get managed. In order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundation of values and some understanding of the world and the problems that we all face together.

And I think part of what we’re all trying to figure out now is, how do you build that in a world where people have so much freedom and opportunity to go explore the things that are interesting to them and get different opportunities, but are less anchored physically? But I think we’re probably just going to go more in that direction. I think we will solve, or at least figure out how to come to an equilibrium on, the cohesion point. But I think overall, we should be celebrating the fact that this is going to, I believe, create more opportunity for people, not just in all places in the US but around the world.

How do you think about how the metaverse will be governed? If it’s a consortium of different companies, who’s going to be responsible for shaping these policies?

Well, I think that there will be a number of different layers to this. I think a good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff. So for our part, for example, we’re building out the Quest headsets for VR, we’re working on AR headsets. But the software that we build, for people to work in or hang out in and build these different worlds, that’s going to go across anything. So other companies build out VR or AR platforms, our software will be everywhere. Just like Facebook or Instagram is today.

So I think part of this is, I think it’ll be good if companies build stuff that can work together and go across lines rather than just being locked into a specific platform. But I do think that, just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.

“In order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundation of values and some understanding of the world and the problems that we all face together”

So we’re already starting to do some of this. There’s an XR consortium that we are in with Microsoft and a bunch of other companies that are working on some of this as well. But I think that that’s going to be one of the big questions. I don’t think every company is going to have exactly the same vision here. I think some are going to have more siloed visions, and I, at least, believe that in order for this to work really well, you want it to be very portable and interconnected.

There’s this great essay that the venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote last year about the metaverse. I imagine you’ve read it, but he talks about “unprecedented interoperability” as one of the defining features of this metaverse. And we live at this time when the biggest tech platforms are barely interoperable; at most, they might let you share some contact data or export some photos. So it sounds like you’re saying that you’re preparing to build systems that are much more interoperable than the ones we have today, at least on Facebook’s end.

Yeah. I think that that aligns with our mission and worldview. We’re generally not trying to serve a smaller number of people but have them pay us a large premium. That’s not our business model. We’re here to serve as many people as possible and to help people connect. And when you’re building social systems primarily, you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible, we want to make them as unified as possible, and part of that is making sure that things can run everywhere, can run across different platforms, can talk to each other. There are a bunch of big questions about how you do that. There will be privacy questions, there’ll be intellectual property questions. 

I thought Matthew Ball’s essays, by the way, were great, and anyone who’s trying to learn about this, I think he wrote a nine-part piece on a bunch of the different aspects of what the metaverse could be, and I highly recommend all of them. But I’d say that, I think sometimes people may be a little idealistic about assuming that this will develop in a certain way. I think the vision that Matthew lays out, for example, of being extremely interoperable, is the vision that I hope comes about. But I think we’ve seen from modern computing that there are different companies that push in different directions. So I think from my perspective, without a doubt, you’re going to have some companies that are trying to build incredibly siloed things, and then some that are trying to build more open and interoperable ones.

And I don’t even think it’s a question of, is one going to win over the other? I mean, has open-source won over closed-source? There were just multiple things at different times, some are expressed more in the technology industry than others, but we’re going to be contributing to trying to build a more open and interoperable one, and that’s kind of our goal here. But even within that, there’s a lot of questions about how that works. Is it interoperable because it’s decentralized, in the way that a bunch of the crypto work is being designed now, so there’s kind of no central dependency? It’s not just interoperable, but there’s no centralized control points? Or is it interoperable because there are some bodies that set standards and enable a bunch of these experiences to work together? And I think you’ll probably see multiple approaches on that too. So I think this is going to be one of the big questions in terms of how this evolves.

I think I have time for two more questions. So one of them is a little bit nerdy, but when you read books and watch movies about the metaverse, the fact that these spaces are owned by giant corporations are often the subject of satire. Do you see any room here for public, government-owned spaces in the metaverse? Something like, I don’t know, libraries, parks, and is this something that governments should start thinking about so that they have a role to play as this stuff gets built?

I certainly think that there should be public spaces. I think that’s important for having healthy communities and a healthy sphere. And I think that those spaces range from things that are government-built or administered, to nonprofits, which I guess are technically private, but are operating in the public interest without a profit goal. So you think about things like Wikipedia, which I think is really like a public good, even though it’s run by a nonprofit, not a government.

“each company should not have its own metaverse”

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is: there are a set of big technology problems today that, it’s almost like 50 years ago the government, I guess I’m talking about the US government here specifically, would have invested a ton in building out these things. But now in this country, that’s not quite how it’s working. Instead, you have a number of Big Tech companies or big companies that are investing in building out this infrastructure. And I don’t know, maybe that’s the right way for it to work. When 5G is rolled out, it’s tough for a startup to really go fund the tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure to go do that. So, you have Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile do it, and that’s pretty good, I guess.

But there are a bunch of big technology problems, [like] defining augmented and virtual reality in this overall metaverse vision. I think that that’s going to be a problem that is going to require tens of billions of dollars of research, but should unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of value or more. I think that there are things like self-driving cars, which seems like it’s turning out to be pretty close to AI-complete; needing to almost solve a lot of different aspects of AI to really fully solve that. So that’s just a massive problem in terms of investment. And some of the aspects around space exploration. Disease research is still one that our government does a lot in.

But I do wonder, especially when we look at China, for example, which does invest a lot directly in these spaces, how that is kind of setting this up to go over time. But look, in the absence of that, yeah, I do think having public spaces is a healthy part of communities. And you’re going to have creators and developers with all different motivations, even on the mobile internet and internet today, you have a lot of people who are interested in doing public-good work. Even if they’re not directly funded by the government to do that. And I think that certainly, you’re going to have a lot of that here as well.

But yeah, I do think that there is this long-term question where, as a society, we should want a very large amount of capital and our most talented technical people working on these futuristic problems, to lead and innovate in these spaces. And I think that there probably is a little bit more of a balance of space, where some of this could come from government, but I think startups and the open-source community and the creator economy is going to fill in a huge amount of this as well.

Last question: If you succeed in building a metaverse, will you at least consider giving it all away to the first person who solves a scavenger hunt?

I appreciate the Ready Player One reference.

I mean, just to nitpick on something here for a second, I don’t think in the future, people are going to call the work that individual companies do a metaverse. Hopefully, if we’re successful collectively in building a system that’s more interoperable, and where you can teleport between things, it should all be the metaverse, each company should not have its own metaverse. Hopefully in the future, asking if a company is building a metaverse will sound as ridiculous as asking a company how their internet is going. So I think just in terms of giving a sense of sort of where this should go, but within that ... now I’ve lost track of what your question was.

It was a joke question. But look, as always, there’s a lot to think about here and I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of the vision .

I mean, this is an exciting area. It’s going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet. And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area. For the last 17 years, we’ve worked a lot on building different apps for people to connect, and the main way that they’ve done that is on phones. And I think if we’re successful, then maybe five years from now, or seven years from now, people will primarily think about us as a metaverse company, rather than a mobile internet company, that’s kind of helping to build these kinds of experiences. And I think it’s just going to span so much.

“people will primarily think about us as a metaverse company, rather than a mobile internet company”

People will hang out, you’ll be able to really feel like you’re present with other people, you’ll be able to do all kinds of different work, there’ll be new jobs, new forms of entertainment. Whether it’s gaming or incredibly complex scavenger hunts like you’re talking about, or more and more enjoyable ways of doing fitness or concerts, or getting together at the comedy show that we talked about. I just think that there’s a ton here, and I think we can do this in a way that creates a lot of economic opportunity where millions of people around the world can be doing creative work that they really enjoy, building experiences or virtual items or art or different things that are more inspiring to them than whatever the jobs are that they may feel like they can do today. So I’m really looking forward to helping to play some role in building out this next chapter for the internet. And I’m sure over the years, we’re going to have many conversations about this, Casey.

For sure. I’m looking forward to writing about all of the unanticipated problems that come about as a result of the metaverse! But the good things, too. Mark, thank you for coming on The Vergecast .

Happy to do it. All right. Talk soon.

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Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.

Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. He was raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry.

Zuckerberg’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children — Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house.

Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."

Mark Zuckerberg’s Education

To keep up with Zuckerberg's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy , an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.

Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse.

Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.

Mark Zuckerberg's College Experience

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University . After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time.

By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users.

He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.

Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg and Founding Facebook

Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin created The Facebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June 2004.

That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students.

Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub.

Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks . Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.

‘Harvard Connection’ and Legal Hurdles

Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up. However, in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle: the creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses.

Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks. After lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.

Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an interview with The New Yorker . "I think I've grown and learned a lot."

Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.

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'The Social Network' Movie

In 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network was released. The critically acclaimed film received eight Academy Award nominations.

Sorkin’s screenplay was based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires , by writer Ben Mezrich. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters.

Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg had been dating his longtime girlfriend since 2003. He also said he was never interested in joining any of the final clubs.

"It's interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg told a reporter at a startup conference in 2010. "So there's all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right."

Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list.

Facebook IPO

In May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering, which raised $16 billion, making it the biggest Internet IPO in history.

After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs in his company's market performance.

In 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.

Fake News and Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Zuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2018, he announced a personal challenge to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. (Previous personal challenges began in New Year's 2009 and have included only eating meat he killed himself and learning to speak Mandarin.)

"We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools," he wrote on his Facebook page. "If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory."

Zuckerberg came under fire again a few months later when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump ’s 2016 campaign, had used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors' confidence in Facebook, its shares dropping by 15 percent after the news became public.

Following a few days' silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers' access to user information, and said he would be happy to testify before Congress.

On Sunday, March 25, Facebook took out full-page ads in seven British and three American newspapers, penned in the form of a personal apology from Zuckerberg. He promised the company would investigate all of its apps, and remind users which ones they can shut off. "I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time," he wrote. "I promise to do better for you."

Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 10 and 11. The first day of hearings, with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant.

The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day's testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was "inevitable."

Personal Wealth

The negative PR around the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica scandal seemingly did little to slow the company's progress: Facebook saw its stock close at a record $203.23 on July 6, 2018. The surge bumped Zuckerberg past Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest person, behind fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Any gains were wiped out when Facebook shares dropped a staggering 19 percent on July 26, following an earnings report that revealed a failure to meet revenue expectations and slowing user growth. Nearly $16 billion of Zuckerberg's personal fortune was erased in one day.

The stock rebounded, and Zuckerberg remains one of the world's wealthiest people. In 2019, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg at No. 8 on its ‘Billionaires’ list—behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates (No. 2) and ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page (No. 10) and Sergey Brin (No. 14). The magazine estimated his net worth to be about $62.3 billion at the time.

In June 2019, Facebook announced it was getting into the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Along with developing the blockchain technology to power its financial infrastructure, Facebook established a Switzerland-based oversight entity called the Libra Association, comprised of tech giants like Spotify and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.

The news again put Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of Congress, which summoned the CEO to testify before the House Financial Service Committee in October. Despite providing assurances that Facebook would withdraw from the Libra Association if the project failed to garner approval from regulators, Zuckerberg faced pointed questioning from skeptical lawmakers who cited the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and other past transgressions.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife

Zuckerberg has been married to Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2012. The longtime couple tied the knot one day after Facebook’s IPO.

About 100 people gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home for the ceremony. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Daughters

Zuckerberg has two daughters, Max, born on November 30, 2015, and August, born on August 28, 2017.

The couple announced they were expecting both of their children on Facebook. When Zuckerberg welcomed Max, he announced he would be taking two months of paternity leave to spend with his family.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Donations and Philanthropic Causes

Since amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his millions to fund a variety of philanthropic causes. The most notable examples came in September 2010, when he donated $100 million to save the failing Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey.

Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the "Giving Pledge", promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates , Warren Buffett and George Lucas . After his donation, Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit.

"With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts," he said.

In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity.

"We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children," the couple wrote in the open letter that was posted on Zuckerberg's Facebook page. "We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation."

In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help “cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University , was named the president of science at CZI.

They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub , a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University , the University of California, San Francisco , and the University of California, Berkeley , Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1984
• Birth date: May 14, 1984
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: White Plains
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest billionaires.
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Phillips Exeter Academy
• Harvard University

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Zuckerberg Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/mark-zuckerberg
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• Last Updated: October 24, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.
• If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I've grown and learned a lot.
• Understanding people is not a waste of time.
• Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
• I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do. I think people really undervalue the option value in flexibility.
• What Facebook is today isn't a set of information, it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that as long as they trust us.
• Everything I do breaks, but I fix it quickly.
• I would personally rather be underestimated. It gives us latitude to go out and make some big bets.
• Apps aren’t the center of the world. People are.
• Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
• Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.
• People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
• [T]he real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
• A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible.

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“I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose,” said Mark Zuckerberg, who was the principal speaker at Harvard’s 366th Commencement on May 25.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard

President Faust, Board of Overseers, faculty, alumni, friends, proud parents, members of the ad board, and graduates of the greatest university in the world,

I’m honored to be with you today because, let’s face it, you accomplished something I never could. If I get through this speech, it’ll be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard. Class of 2017, congratulations!

I’m an unlikely speaker, not just because I dropped out, but because we’re technically in the same generation. We walked this yard less than a decade apart, studied the same ideas and slept through the same Ec10 lectures. We may have taken different paths to get here, especially if you came all the way from the Quad, but today I want to share what I’ve learned about our generation and the world we’re building together.

But first, the last couple of days have brought back a lot of good memories.

How many of you remember exactly what you were doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard? I was playing Civilization and I ran downstairs, got my dad, and for some reason, his reaction was to video me opening the email. That could have been a really sad video. I swear getting into Harvard is still the thing my parents are most proud of me for.

What about your first lecture at Harvard? Mine was Computer Science 121 with the incredible Harry Lewis. I was late so I threw on a t-shirt and didn’t realize until afterwards it was inside out and backwards with my tag sticking out the front. I couldn’t figure out why no one would talk to me — except one guy, KX Jin, he just went with it. We ended up doing our problem sets together, and now he runs a big part of Facebook. And that, Class of 2017, is why you should be nice to people.

But my best memory from Harvard was meeting Priscilla. I had just launched this prank website Facemash, and the ad board wanted to “see me”. Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out. My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going away party. As luck would have it, Priscilla was at that party with her friend. We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: “I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly.”

Actually, any of you graduating can use that line.

I didn’t end up getting kicked out — I did that to myself. Priscilla and I started dating. And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t. But without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life, so you could say it was the most important thing I built in my time here.

We’ve all started lifelong friendships here, and some of us even families. That’s why I’m so grateful to this place. Thanks, Harvard.

Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

One of my favorite stories is when John F Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.

You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.

As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go. I’ve met factory workers who know their old jobs aren’t coming back and are trying to find their place.

To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose.

I remember the night I launched Facebook from my little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to Noch’s with my friend KX. I remember telling him I was excited to connect the Harvard community, but one day someone would connect the whole world.

The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us. We were just college kids. We didn’t know anything about that. There were all these big technology companies with resources. I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us — that all people want to connect. So we just kept moving forward, day by day.

I know a lot of you will have your own stories just like this. A change in the world that seems so clear you’re sure someone else will do it. But they won’t. You will.

But it’s not enough to have purpose yourself. You have to create a sense of purpose for others.

I found that out the hard way. You see, my hope was never to build a company, but to make an impact. And as all these people started joining us, I just assumed that’s what they cared about too, so I never explained what I hoped we’d build.

A couple years in, some big companies wanted to buy us. I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to see if we could connect more people. We were building the first News Feed, and I thought if we could just launch this, it could change how we learn about the world.

Nearly everyone else wanted to sell. Without a sense of higher purpose, this was the startup dream come true. It tore our company apart. After one tense argument, an advisor told me if I didn’t agree to sell, I would regret the decision for the rest of my life. Relationships were so frayed that within a year or so every single person on the management team was gone.

That was my hardest time leading Facebook. I believed in what we were doing, but I felt alone. And worse, it was my fault. I wondered if I was just wrong, an imposter, a 22 year-old kid who had no idea how the world worked.

Now, years later, I understand that *is* how things work with no sense of higher purpose. It’s up to us to create it so we can all keep moving forward together.

Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.

First, let’s take on big meaningful projects.

Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.

Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects.

These projects didn’t just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things.

Now it’s our turn to do great things. I know, you’re probably thinking: I don’t know how to build a dam, or get a million people involved in anything.

But let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.

If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook.

Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started. Oh, you know what else movies get wrong about innovation? No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.

It’s good to be idealistic. But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right. Anyone working on a complex problem will get blamed for not fully understanding the challenge, even though it’s impossible to know everything upfront. Anyone taking initiative will get criticized for moving too fast, because there’s always someone who wants to slow you down.

In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.

So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?

These achievements are within our reach. Let’s do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let’s do big things, not only to create progress, but to create purpose.

So taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose.

Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.

Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn’t the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I’m not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.

But today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. Right now our society is way over-indexed on rewarding success and we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots.

Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.

We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.

Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.

We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable childcare to get to work and healthcare that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.

And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.

That’s why Priscilla and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation. It was never a question of if we were going to do this. The only question was when.

Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.

But it’s not just about money. You can also give time. I promise you, if you take an hour or two a week — that’s all it takes to give someone a hand, to help them reach their potential.

Maybe you think that’s too much time. I used to. When Priscilla graduated from Harvard she became a teacher, and before she’d do education work with me, she told me I needed to teach a class. I complained: “Well, I’m kind of busy. I’m running this company.” But she insisted, so I taught a middle school program on entrepreneurship at the local Boys and Girls Club.

I taught them lessons on product development and marketing, and they taught me what it’s like feeling targeted for your race and having a family member in prison. I shared stories from my time in school, and they shared their hope of one day going to college too. For five years now, I’ve been having dinner with those kids every month. One of them threw me and Priscilla our first baby shower. And next year they’re going to college. Every one of them. First in their families.

We can all make time to give someone a hand. Let’s give everyone the freedom to pursue their purpose — not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because when more people can turn their dreams into something great, we’re all better for it.

Purpose doesn’t only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community. And when our generation says “everyone”, we mean everyone in the world.

Quick show of hands: how many of you are from another country? Now, how many of you are friends with one of these folks? Now we’re talking. We have grown up connected.

In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal.

Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us”. For us, it now encompasses the entire world.

We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations — to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

We get that our greatest opportunities are now global — we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.

This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down. This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it.

This isn’t going to be decided at the UN either. It’s going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now.

We all get meaning from our communities. Whether our communities are houses or sports teams, churches or music groups, they give us that sense we are part of something bigger, that we are not alone; they give us the strength to expand our horizons.

That’s why it’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find purpose somewhere else.

But I know we can rebuild our communities and start new ones because many of you already are.

I met Agnes Igoye, who’s graduating today. Where are you, Agnes? She spent her childhood navigating conflict zones in Uganda, and now she trains thousands of law enforcement officers to keep communities safe.

I met Kayla Oakley and Niha Jain, graduating today, too. Stand up. Kayla and Niha started a non-profit that connects people suffering from illnesses with people in their communities willing to help.

I met David Razu Aznar, graduating from the Kennedy School today. David, stand up. He’s a former city councilor who successfully led the battle to make Mexico City the first Latin American city to pass marriage equality — even before San Francisco.

This is my story too. A student in a dorm room, connecting one community at a time, and keeping at it until one day we connect the whole world.

Change starts local. Even global changes start small — with people like us. In our generation, the struggle of whether we connect more, whether we achieve our biggest opportunities, comes down to this — your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose.

Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it.

Now, you may be thinking: can I really do this?

Remember when I told you about that class I taught at the Boys and Girls Club? One day after class I was talking to them about college, and one of my top students raised his hand and said he wasn’t sure he could go because he’s undocumented. He didn’t know if they’d let him in.

Last year I took him out to breakfast for his birthday. I wanted to get him a present, so I asked him and he started talking about students he saw struggling and said “You know, I’d really just like a book on social justice.”

I was blown away. Here’s a young guy who has every reason to be cynical. He didn’t know if the country he calls home — the only one he’s known — would deny him his dream of going to college. But he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t even thinking of himself. He has a greater sense of purpose, and he’s going to bring people along with him.

It says something about our current situation that I can’t even say his name because I don’t want to put him at risk. But if a high school senior who doesn’t know what the future holds can do his part to move the world forward, then we owe it to the world to do our part too.

Before you walk out those gates one last time, as we sit in front of Memorial Church, I am reminded of a prayer, Mi Shebeirach, that I say whenever I face a challenge, that I sing to my daughter thinking about her future when I tuck her into bed. It goes:

“May the source of strength, who blessed the ones before us, help us *find the courage* to make our lives a blessing.”

I hope you find the courage to make your life a blessing.

Congratulations, Class of ’17! Good luck out there.

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Enter the metaverse: the digital future Mark Zuckerberg is steering us toward

The company, now rebranded Meta, already has a foothold in the digital world. How far will it go to see it succeed?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday outlined his vision for the future of the social media giant, formalising the company’s focus on the metaverse.

In a presentation at the company’s annual Connect conference, Zuckerberg announced the company is rebranding as Meta and detailed how his company aims to build a new version of the internet.

“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet, we’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are,” he said.

Here’s what you need to know:

What is the metaverse?

The metaverse is where the physical and digital worlds come together. It is a space where digital representations of people – avatars – interact at work and play, meeting in their office, going to concerts and even trying on clothes.

At the centre of this universe will be virtual reality, a digital world that you can already enter via Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets. It will also include augmented reality, a sort of step back from VR where elements of the digital world are layered on top of reality – think Pokémon Go or Facebook’s recent smart glasses tie-up with Ray-Ban.

Facebook already has a professional version of the metaverse under way: Horizon Workrooms, an app that lets Oculus-sporting workers enter virtual offices and hold meetings.

Indeed, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, holds his Monday team meetings in the office metaverse, replete with virtual table and whiteboard. Speaking last month , Clegg said the metaverse would be a series of interlinked worlds, where a user moves seamlessly from Facebook’s world to Apple’s or Google’s, or a computer game publisher’s. This month Facebook said it was creating 10,000 new jobs in the European Union as part of growth plans that include building a metaverse.

Any recommended reading?

The term metaverse – a combination of the prefix meta (meaning “beyond”) and universe – was coined in Snow Crash, a novel by American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. The spiel on the Amazon website says it was written “in the years 1988 through 1991 as the author listened to a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music”.

The novel’s protagonist, Hiro, is a hacker and a pizza delivery driver for the mafia and the first explanation of this virtual world in the novel states: “So Hiro’s not here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing into his goggle and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.” And if Facebook gets its way, so will you.

Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Facebook’s Oculus business and a key figure in its VR efforts, said in a blogpost: “It all started with Snow Crash.”

What are the legal concerns about the metaverse?

The overwhelming concerns, particularly in the context of the Frances Haugen revelations and the widespread targeting of social media by state-backed hackers, are privacy and security.

For instance, an advertiser targeting you in a virtual world might not just be reacting to old-world data like your age and gender: what about your body language, your physiological responses, knowing who you are interacting with and how?

Facebook has already announced a $50m (£36m) investment programme to ensure the metaverse is built responsibly”, with the money distributed among organisations and academic institutions such as Seoul National University and Women in Immersive Tech.

How much is Facebook spending on the metaverse?

Billions of dollars a year already. The company said this week that investment in its Facebook Reality Labs division – where the company works on VR and AR – would reduce operating profit by $10bn (£7.25bn) in 2021.

It is a significant sum, but Facebook generates huge amounts of money from its core business of harvesting users’ data and then charging advertisers to access those people with targeted ads (focusing on things such as gender, location, income, relationship). Across Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and, of course, its eponymous platform, Facebook generated a net income – a US measure of profit – of $29bn last year from its 2.8 billion daily users. It can afford $10bn.

Will Facebook succeed?

Right now, it is hard to imagine Facebook being able to launch any product breezily. The Haugen revelations and testimonies have enhanced its status as a target of politicians, regulators and campaign groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

Facebook has been portrayed emphatically, through its own research, as a company that struggles – willingly or not – to contain the damaging impact of its products on its own users. Indeed, last month Facebook paused development of one product – Instagram Kids – due to the furore caused by the Haugen leaks.

Clegg has said the metaverse will take 10 years to build. Will it have assuaged the concerns of the public, watchdogs and governments about the company and its leadership by then?

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Mark Zuckerberg stars in surreal metaverse presentation before announcing company rebrand

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Say goodbye to "Facebook," as least when it comes to the social media platform's company name. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is heading into the metaverse.

In a presentation on Thursday, Zuckerberg outlined his vision for a future built around the "metaverse" and announced that Facebook will be changing its company name to "Meta" to reflect its new focus on virtual spaces. Zuckerberg said that while social media apps will "always be an important focus" for the company, the name Facebook is too "tightly linked to one product." The rebrand comes as Facebook has been facing a major public relations crisis after a whistleblower came forward to allege the company puts profits over users' safety.

"From now on, we're going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first," Zuckerberg said. "That means that over time, you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

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Throughout the slightly-trippy presentation, the CEO pitched multiple concepts for this metaverse-driven future, in which "you'll be able to step beyond the physical world" by putting on a pair of glasses. After showing himself moving into a virtual "home space" and then sitting at a virtual table with a group of friends, Zuckerberg promised that "you're going to really feel like you're there with other people" and that virtual avatars will eventually become "as common as profile pictures today."

While acknowledging all of this is still a "long way off," Zuckerberg also said that in the metaverse, users will be able to "make things happen by thinking about them," "teleport places with people," and "send a text message just by thinking about moving your fingers." One example showed two people playing chess in real life while one of them appears as a hologram. Check out some of the footage below, and watch the full presentation here .

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Brendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe.

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4 Key Takeaways From Mark Zuckerberg's Comments During Meta's Q1 Earnings Call

Artificial Intelligence Was The Dominant Theme

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After Meta Platforms ( META ) provided weak revenue guidance and announced plans to increase spending—news that sent the company's shares sharply lower despite better-than-expected quarterly results—Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg joined company executives on an earnings call that focused on artificial intelligence (AI) .

Zuckerberg talked about Meta's AI investments and its AI-powered recommendation engine, as well as providing a brief update about the recently launched MetaAI and touching on the company's support for an "open" AI ecosystem.

Zuckerberg said that Meta sees "compelling investment opportunities" to improve its core business in the near term as well as generative AI (GenAI) and the company's virtual reality lab in the longer term.

The company expects to "invest significantly more in infrastructure over the coming years" while "maintaining a focus on operating discipline." The CEO said the company believes its "strong financial position will allow us to support these investments while also returning capital to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends."

Zuckerberg noted that the company has historically seen volatility in its stock when it is "investing in scaling and new products but aren't yet monetizing it." He said that the company experienced a similar cycle in the early days of Reels, which now makes up around 50% of the time users spend on Instagram.

He underlined that he sees increased expenditure to invest in AI as necessary to "stay at the leading edge of this."

The company said in its first-quarter earnings press release that it had raised its capital expenditures guidance for 2024 to between $35 billion and $40 billion, up from between $30 billion and $37 billion, due to "infrastructure investments to support our artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap."

Meta shares had tumbled in after-hours trading Wednesday immediately following the earnings release. The declines accelerated during the earnings call, and the stock was down 15.4% at $417.60 at around 7:30 p.m. ET.

The CEO offered investors an update on how Meta uses its AI tech in its ranking and recommendation engines for its platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

"About 30% of the posts on Facebook feeds are delivered by our AI recommendation system. That's up to 2x over the last couple of years, and for the first time ever more than 50% of the content that people see on Instagram is now AI recommended," Zuckerberg reported.

He explained that the AI recommendation system improves engagement and in turn increases the opportunity that the platform has to deliver ads and "deliver more value" to advertisers.

Meta Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Susan Lee noted that advertisers benefit from the company's AI tech through the recommendation engine as well as the GenAI features offered in its Ad Manager. She added that the company is in the early stages of testing AI agents that businesses could use on Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with customers.

Initial MetaAI Feedback Is 'Very Positive' A Week After Launch

Zuckerberg provided investors with a brief update about its new AI assistant, saying that initial feedback is "very positive."

Meta launched MetaAI, powered by its latest AI model, Llama 3, a week ahead of earnings. The new AI assistant, which is integrated into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, could help Meta better compete with Microsoft-backed ( MSFT ) OpenAI's  ChatGPT  and Alphabet's ( GOOGL ) Google  Gemini chatbot .

"The initial rollout of MetaAI is going well" as "tens of millions of people have already tried it," Zuckerberg said, adding that a lot of the feedback the company has received about the AI assistant is to expand its regional availability.

He added that the company "believe[s] that MetaAI with Llama 3 is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use."

Meta Supports 'Open' Ecosystem For AI and Virtual Reality

Zuckerberg touched on the company's push for openness in AI and virtual reality systems.

When talking about how the company is improving its AI model training, Zuckerberg noted that "some improvements will come from the open source community," and added that "improving cost efficiency is one of the main areas that [he] expect[s] that open sourcing will help."

Meta has been vocal in its support for an "open ecosystem" to promote safety and transparency. While promoting the open-source approach doesn't translate to direct gains for Meta, it could help the company gain influence and better compete with leading makers of closed AI models, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Amazon-backed ( AMZN ) Anthropic, and Google parent company Alphabet.

He also said that "a similar open ecosystem approach will help [Meta] expand the virtual and mixed reality headset market over time as well."

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The Meta-morphosis of Mark Zuckerberg

The robotic nerd depicted in “The Social Network” has turned into the kinder, more accessible face of Silicon Valley. What’s going on?

By Vanessa Friedman

In the run-up to Meta’s first-quarter earnings report this week, a video image of Mark Zuckerberg suddenly started going viral.

Not because of the artificial intelligence assistant he was touting or because of the expected ad revenue growth, but because of the silver chain he was wearing around his neck.

“Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement about something Meta is doing with A.I., but I could not listen to or retain a second of it because when I look at the Reel of him talking, all I see is necklace,” Amy Odell wrote in her Substack, Back Row.

Later, a doctored version of the same picture with Mr. Zuckerberg sporting some scruffy facial hair got people even more excited. The 4,000-plus mostly drooling comments under an Instagram post from the celebrity news account The Shade Room included one from Gwyneth Paltrow, who compared Mr. Zuckerberg to her ex-husband, Chris Martin.

All of a sudden, it seems, people care a lot about how Mark Zuckerberg, 39, looks. At a time when the halcyon promise of technology has been cast in a darker, more suspicious light, the guy whose relentless allegiance to a gray T-shirt became synonymous with the nerd pledge to “move fast and break things” has somehow become the kinder, gentler face of technology.

“The history of Silicon Valley has always been about a carefully constructed image and narrative used to reinforce its myths,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. But, he went on, “The playbook is changing.”

And Mr. Zuckerberg has emerged as the most visible sign yet that in the phenomenology of Silicon Valley, we are entering a post-Jobsian age.

Once upon a time, back in the days when Steve Jobs was the prophet of a better future through computing, the virtues of his approach to life seemed self-evident, including the adoption of an immutable daily uniform as the ideal form of dress. It freed the mind from the paltry concerns of such everyday choices as what color shirt goes with what socks. (So annoying!) Thus it was, too, with Mr. Zuckerberg, who went so far as to announce in a 2014 Facebook forum that he wore the same T-shirt every day because “I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible, other than how to best serve this community.”

(Admittedly, it was a luxury version of a gray T-shirt from Brunello Cucinelli, but it was still a T-shirt.)

But after multiple trips by chief executives to Washington, D.C. , to testify about the controversies about anxiety and depression caused by social media pressures; after the convictions of Elizabeth Holmes (she of the Jobs-like black turtleneck) and Sam Bankman-Fried ; after the cesspool of conspiracy theories and anger that has emerged on X; after all that, the story — and its heroes’ journeys and its heroes’ costumes — suddenly doesn’t look so convincing. Behold the new, looser Mr. Zuckerberg.

He has become, said Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant and stylist who works with executives in New York and California, “a more democratized figure.”

Arguably the seeds were planted back in 2021, when Facebook turned into Meta, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s first avatar — dressed, as he generally was IRL, in a T-shirt and jeans — turned out to have a closet of alternative outfits, including a skeleton unitard and an astronaut’s suit. The transformation picked up steam as Mr. Zuckerberg discovered the joys of mixed martial arts and started posting photographs of himself shirtless , sweaty and with various bumps and bruises. It then reached a tipping point with the introduction of the platform Threads.

Not long after Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled his “open and friendly public space for conversation,” he also unveiled his own new, friendlier look — one that focused less on an automated uniform and more on experimentation (everything being relative), as recorded via his own Instagram posts. Suddenly, it seemed as though he was having fun with fashion.

He cheerfully shared photographs of himself looking “Yellowstone”-ready in a chunky shearling coat by Overland. (It seems to be the Maverick Rancher coat, which is the sort of subconscious tell “Saturday Night Live” might embrace.) Next came snaps of himself and his wife, Priscilla Chan, at Anant Ambani’s three-day pre-wedding celebration in Gujarat, in various forms of Indian-inspired finery: a gold silk Sunderbans Tigress shirt from Rahul Mishra, a black Alexander McQueen suit embroidered with silver dragonflies and a pastel floral kurta.

And then Mr. Zuckerberg added a pic titled “ jersey swap ” in which he and Jensen Huang of Nvidia traded outerwear, with Mr. Zuckerberg donning one of Mr. Huang’s trademark leather jackets and Mr. Huang his shearling. By the time of his last jaunt to the capital, he had let his tightly controlled Julius Caesar haircut grow into looser curls.

He has even started sharing shopping tips. When Jen Wieczner of New York magazine wrote an article identifying a sweater Mr. Zuckerberg wore as from the stealth wealth brand Loro Piana, he popped into the comments under the magazine’s Instagram post to note that the garment was actually a crew neck from Buck Mason — a Los Angeles brand that focuses on American classics — not one from an Italian luxury house owned by LVMH.

Then, when one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s followers complimented a ribbed knit cardigan he wore in a date night pick on his feed, he jumped in with a tag: “It’s @johnelliottco — I’m loving their stuff recently.”

Other brands he favors now include Todd Snyder and Vuori.

“They are kind of trendy names,” said Derek Guy, who blogs about men’s wear at Die, Workwear! “Everything has a different silhouette, like the sweatshirt with overly long sleeves or the T-shirt with dropped shoulder seams.”

Mr. Guy and Mr. Ganesan, of Menlo Ventures, said they were convinced that Mr. Zuckerberg had enlisted professional help (which is to say, a stylist) to help him develop his look. But a spokeswoman for Meta said that was not the case — at least for his day-to-day life. “Mark mostly buys clothes he finds on Instagram,” she said. “Though he does get input from time to time for formal events and occasions.”

Either way, Mr. Zuckerberg’s pivot from the luxury labels made famous by the morally bankrupt billionaires of “Succession” to more contemporary brands means that “he now has a stable of clothing that makes him an accessible figure for the world and his audience,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.

His new wardrobe also distinguishes him from rivals like Jeff Bezos — who has transformed himself into a real life version of Iron Man, with his bulging muscles, leather jackets and yachts — and Elon Musk, who seems to be channeling a sort of “Top Gun”-meets- “Goldfinger” vibe.

By contrast, Mr. Ganesan said, Mr. Zuckerberg now looks like “the buddy you want to call if you’re doing backyard construction.” Think of him as the tech dude next door. All of which matters because, Mr. Ganesan went on, “mainstream America can relate to that, and he is offering a mainstream product.”

And that, he said, is just “very good for business.”

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article, using information from Blanks by Thirteen Studios, misidentified the manufacturer of a white T-shirt that Mark Zuckerberg wore in Las Vegas. The shirt was made by John Elliott, not Blanks by Thirteen.

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Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014. More about Vanessa Friedman

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Mark Zuckerberg

Aug 05, 2014

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Mark Zuckerberg. By: Spencer DeGraw. Introduction. Early Life. Born May 14, 1984 Attended Harvard in 2002 Won prizes in Science ( math, astronomy, and physics ) Captain of Fencing team Tutored by David Newman. What he did as a Leader.

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Presentation Transcript

Mark Zuckerberg By: Spencer DeGraw

Introduction

Early Life • Born May 14, 1984 • Attended Harvard in 2002 • Won prizes in Science ( math, astronomy, and physics ) • Captain of Fencing team • Tutored by David Newman

What he did as a Leader • Created Facebook, the Biggest Internet IPO in History • Became the youngest CEO at age 28 • “Person of the Year” in 2010 • Signed the Giving Pledge, giving 50% of his wealth to a charity during a part of his lifetime

Why is he a good Leader • Helped people interact and have fun, even when far away • Helped people with charities

Bibliography Dickey, Megan R. Mark Zuckerberg. 2013. Bussiness Insider. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. <http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-on-kids-coding-2013-2>. Hanson, Jarice. "Zuckerberg, Mark." World Book Student. World Book, 2013. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.  "Mark Zuckerberg Biography." Biography.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2013. Ripley, Ryan. Mark Zuckerberg. 2013. We Are Libertarians. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.http://wearelibertarians.com/mark-zuckerberg-can-stop-the-nsa-will-he/. Wikipedia contributors. "Mark Zuckerberg." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 8 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

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Performance of the AI Zuckerberg  

The audience of the video clearly recognized this because the presentation of this video took another direction. Zuckerberg was in some posture, which could have been plausibly the sitting or standing position, which made him visually distinct from the real Zuckerberg. However, despite efforts to make the AI sound more human in the blinking part, there were striking differences in its mannerisms in general. Nevertheless, the voice mimicry was very accurate when it came to Zuckerberg’s unique voice pattern in terms of pitch and intonation. Still, the AI’s response lacked some necessary level of understanding. 

To exemplify, in the challenge that required to describe Meta on the thread and 1 hashtag in 20 seconds using merely an emoji, AI Zuckerberg clearly and succinctly answered that meta globe emoji is shaping up the social ties of the future in the metaverse. Join us at it thumbs-up emoji. However, this type of reply highlighted the common,

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Technology and personality: Film the thin red line.

The video and the way it is becoming popular appeal to the prospect of artificial media sharing people’s personal experiences. While AI technologies have come to the extent where authentic-sounding conversations and personalized interactions can substitute human ones, a distinct difference is still obvious, especially in terms of tons of imponderability remaining in human relationships, such as genuine emotions, spontaneous attitudes, and so on.

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Mark Zuckerberg appeared to take a shot at Apple's Vision Pro

• Mark Zuckerberg seemed to take a jab at Apple's Vision Pro during Meta's first-quarter earnings call.
• The CEO said he saw a mainstream market for AI glasses without a display.
• Meta's smart glasses, developed with Ray-Ban, feature AI, a camera, and built-in speakers.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to take a hit at Apple's Vision Pro in Meta's first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg said he didn't think augmented-reality glasses would make it in the mainstream market until it had "full holographic displays." The comment appears to show his skepticism of the potential success of a product such as Apple's Vision Pro .

"I still think that that's going to be awesome and is the long-term mature state for the product," the CEO said. "But now, it seems pretty clear that there's also a meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display."

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Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment to clarify Zuckerberg's comments.

Meta launched its latest version of Ray-Ban smart glasses in September. The device has a starting price of $299 and includes a camera, built-in speakers, access to Meta AI, and the ability to make calls.

"Glasses are the ideal device for an AI assistant because you can let them see what you see and hear what you hear," the CEO said. "So their full context on what's going on around you."

The CEO said he thought the glasses had "the ability to be a pretty meaningful and growing platform" sooner than he expected.

While Meta's Quest virtual-reality headset competes with Apple's Vision Pro, Zuckerberg has said before that he doesn't imagine a future of people walking around with VR headsets .

"That's certainly not the future that I'm hoping we get to," Zuckerberg told the podcast host Andrew Huberman in an interview in October.

It wouldn't be the first time the CEO has thrown shade at the Apple Vision Pro and tried to one-up Meta's competitor. In February, Zuckerberg posted a video of himself reviewing Apple's competing device and said the Quest didn't only have better value but was "the better product, period."

In the video, Zuckerberg also listed several features of Meta's Quest that he said were better than the Vision Pro's, such as a brighter screen and wider field of vision.

Zuckerberg isn't the only executive at Meta to drag the Apple Vision Pro. The tech giant's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth , previously said the product was "very uncomfortable."

Watch: What can Apple's new VR headset do?

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