Zuckerberg comments on Apple add to criticism of recent Meta moves


Zuckerberg’s company also recently announced it was joining the ranks of companies that are rolling back progressive DEI policies, and even forced the removal of tampons that were being offered in men’s restrooms at Meta. — AFP

In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s controversy-courting podcast late last week, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg chose to make some colorful and controversial statements of his own. Apple, Meta’s far larger and more successful big-tech rival, hasn’t “invented anything great in a while,” Zuck said. This kind of statement isn’t too surprising from the CEO – he has a long history of dissing Apple. But, much more surprisingly, he also said it’s time more company cultures shift toward having “masculine energy.”

These words, and other mutterings, quickly stirred up a storm of criticism. The CEO of billion dollar-scale company Epic Games went as far as calling Zuck out, and warning people to “beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.”

Speaking with Rogan, a podcast provocateur beloved by many MAGA supporters, Zuckerberg alleged that Apple was “just kind of sitting” on the iPhone’s success, 20 years after legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs invented it. Zuck pondered that iPhone sales may even be flat, or declining year-on-year because: “Part of it is that each generation doesn’t actually get that much better. So people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before.”

He even alleged that Apple’s 15 to 30% App Store fees, which have provoked anti-competitive legal actions, are masking purported iPhone sales slips by “basically ... squeezing people and having this 30% tax on developers.”

Trash-talking competition is a standard, if not particularly classy, business norm. But in this case Zuckerberg seems like he’s all kinds of wrong.

As Apple news site 9to5Mac pointed out in a post, “Let us also not forget that Meta has never ‘invented anything great.’” Though you may associate Meta with its successful Quest VR headsets (which Zuck previously argued are better than Apple’s expensive super-high-tech US$3,500/RM15,756 Vision Pro goggles), these are directly derived from technology gained from VR startup Oculus.

Facebook acquired the company for US$2bil (RM9bil) in 2014. 9to5Mac notes “Oculus was an acquisition, WhatsApp was an acquisition, Instagram was an acquisition, and intermixed with those acquisitions are features copied and pasted from other platforms.”

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And in October 2024, when Apple reported its most recent quarterly finances, Forbes noted that Apple achieved “US$46.2bil (RM208bil) of iPhone revenue for the first quarter including early numbers from the iPhone 16 released September 20, topping Wall Street estimates of US$45.2bil (RM203.5bil) in smartphone sales.”

Zuckerberg’s leadership lesson here is that if you’re going to smack talk your opposition, you’d better be on solid ground, and have your facts lined up.

Meanwhile, last week it emerged that Meta, that parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was replacing an army of fact checkers with X-style “community notes,” in a move purportedly aimed at boosting free speech and which will, in the words of Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, “empower (the) community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”

Zuckerberg’s company also recently announced it was joining the ranks of companies that are rolling back progressive DEI policies, and even forced the removal of tampons that were being offered in men’s restrooms at Meta. All of this chimes with Zuckerberg’s macho-sounding push for more male-like energy in company leadership, but it’s a stance that is out of alignment with decades-long efforts to achieve gender equality in the business world – which, in the first quarter of 2023, resulted in some 32% of CEOs of all new US companies being women.

In a post on X, Epic’s Tim Sweeney blasted Zuckerberg – and other big-tech CEOs – saying that “After years of pretending to be Democrats, big-tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favour with the new administration.”

Sweeney was referring to recent moves by leaders like Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and companies like Google that seem calculated to pleasing the incoming Trump administration. Noted tech commenter John Gruber blogged about one example of this behaviour, pointing out that Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all chipped in million-dollar-plus donations to President-elect Trump’s inauguration event.

Sweeney went even further, suggesting that Zuckerberg (who Reuters reports was very recently at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida site to meet with the President-elect) and other big-tech CEOs are stirring up a “scummy monopoly campaign” by bending to the whims of Donald Trump and MAGA policies—possibly aiming at encouraging the incoming president to pass favorable policies to boost their already lucrative businesses.

Zuckerberg’s second leadership lesson here is pretty clear: Don’t be so transparently “craven” in rapidly changing your policies – a word the Financial Times used to brand Zuck’s anti-DEI maneuvers.

Also, remember you should be loyal to your own staff. In a New York Times investigation, the paper alleges Zuck knew his policy shifts were controversial, so he formed a special team and led the speedy slate of changes himself. ”Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy before it was announced,” the paper said. – Inc./Tribune News Service

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