We Know Everything Worth Knowing About Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook has become one of the world's most powerful companies, but its CEO doesn't have the wisdom to deal with its problems.
An engineer can’t fix this.
Photographer: Christophe Morin/BloombergThe most important piece of business journalism published last week — notwithstanding the extraordinary coverage given to the 10th anniversary of Lehman Brothers Holdings’s bankruptcy — was a 14,000-word article in the New Yorker titled “The Ghost in the Machine.”1 The headline is plucked from a 1967 book by Arthur Koestler, the central theme of which is that man has “some built-in error or deficiency which predisposes him towards self-destruction.”
In this case, it’s one man in particular: Mark Zuckerberg, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook Inc. Over the summer, he gave a series of interviews to the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, wearing, as Osnos writes, “the tight smile of obligation.” No doubt Zuckerberg made himself and other Facebook executives available to Osnos because he thought it would be good public relations to show that he has his arms around the company’s myriad problems.