Mark Zuckerberg



Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American software developer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president.

2000's

 * I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community.
 * Issues about violating people’s privacy don't seem to be surmountable, I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.
 * "Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board" The Harvard Crimson (November 19, 2003)
 * Zuckersberg's Facemash (a variant of Am I Hot or Not?), which ranked photos of students according to attractiveness, led to the possibility he might have to leave Harvard for a time or permanently. He was not sanctioned by the Administrative Board.


 * It is better to buy than compete. (from a 2008 email)
 * I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. (private message to colleague on April 9, 2012 when Instagram was purchased)
 * From documents revealed during a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit, as cited in "'It's better to buy than compete': The FTC is using Mark Zuckerberg's own words against him", Business Insider (10 December 2020)

Zuckerberg: Just ask Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
 * Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
 * Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)
 * It’s not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, “I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before.” We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people’s profiles. And it’s surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected.
 * To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody’s concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that Facebook can only reinforce preexisting communities.
 * "Exclusive Interview With Mark Zuckerberg" (Nov. 30, 2004)


 * I think that some decisions that we made early on to localize the website and keep it separate for each college on the network kept it really useful, because people could only see people from their local college and friends outside. That made it so people were comfortable sharing information that they probably wouldn't otherwise, which made it useful in the long term for people to look up information about other people on the site.
 * Bambi Francisco interviews Mark Zuckerberg in 2005


 * Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve. We try to pay a lot of attention to this by a combination of very rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback. But if you’re serving 1.2 billion people, it’s very hard.
 * nytimes.com

2010's

 * My goal was never to make Facebook cool.
 * Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg First Public Q&A !, YouTube, 6 November 2014 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Why I wear the same T-shirt every day, The Telegraph, 7 November 2014


 * I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as many decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.
 * Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Why I wear the same T-shirt every day, The Telegraph, 7 November 2014


 * I think the reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about
 * Mark Zuckerberg Says The Social Network Was "Hurtful," Parts Were "Made Up" (November 7, 2014)


 * We were just building stuff 'cause we thought it was cool. I do remember having these specific conversations with my friends where we thought, you know, someone is gonna build this. Someone is gonna build something that makes it so that people can stay connected with their friends and their family, but no way would we be the ones who were contributing to, kinda, leading the whole Internet in this direction.
 * cbsnews.com


 * It takes courage to choose hope over fear. As I look around the world, I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward, against the idea of a connected world and a global community. The path forward is to bring people together, not push them apart. I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others’. I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases even for cutting access to the internet.
 * Source: Zuckerberg's speech during Facebook's F8 developers event on 12 April 2016, developers.facebook.com
 * Quoted: Mark Zuckerberg takes a swipe at Donald Trump telling people to 'choose hope over fear, The Sun, 13 April 2016


 * If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. ... At Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less ... I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you.
 * Quoted: Mark Zuckerberg calls Tim Cook's comments on Facebook 'extremely glib' , The Verge, 2 April 2018


 * I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong. It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.” What we will do is we’ll say, “Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.” But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in.
 * In an interview with as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview (July 18, 2018), .


 * I want make sure that our products are used for good. At the end of the day, other people blaming us or not is actually not the thing that matters to me. It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.
 * In an interview with as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview (July 18, 2018), .


 * Giving people a voice on the one hand, and keeping the community and people safe on the other hand. Our bias tends to be to want to give people a voice and let people express a wide range of opinions. I don’t think that’s a liberal or conservative thing; those are the words in the U.S.
 * In an interview with as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview (July 18, 2018), .


 * I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that. Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue — but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services. If something is spreading and is rated false by, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution in News Feed. And of course if a post crossed line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.
 * As quoted in Mark Zuckerberg clarifies: ‘I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.’ (July 18, 2018) by, .


 * Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation. And that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.
 * Source: 120 Mark Zuckerberg Famous Entrepreneurship & Inspirational Quotes


 * The question I ask myself like almost every day is, 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?' ... Unless I feel like I'm working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I'm not going to feel good about how I'm spending my time.
 * From Marcia Amidon Lusted's biography Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Creator.

Harvard Graduation Speech (2017)
"Mark Zuckerberg's Commencement address at Harvard", Harvard Gazette, May 25, 2017.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 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.
 * 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.

2020's

 * "I think the ability to be immersed and feel present with the people around you or the people who you care about is, from my perspective, clearly the next frontier.[on the metaverse]"
 * "#398 - Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse", on the Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (28 September 2023)


 * "I'm really focused on open source, which is, I'm not sure exactly where it would fit on the continuum, but my theory of this is that what you want to prevent is one organization from getting way more advanced and powerful than everyone else."
 * "Mark Zuckerberg talks Apple vs. Meta Headset Wars, AI Innovations & Raising Cattle", on Morning Brew Daily, found on DeepCast (16 February 2024)

Quotes about Mark Zuckerberg

 * It is clear that Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are no longer simply negligent, but in fact, complacent in the spread of misinformation, despite the irreversible damage to our democracy
 * Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, cited in "Civil rights groups call for ‘pause’ on Facebook ads", AP News (June 17, 2020)


 * On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions! Except it failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse. ... The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate . I don’t care whether Zuckerberg supports Honest Ads or or GDPR. By asking him if he would support legislation, the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal  whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t. Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people’s data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat him as a danger to democracy and demand our senators get a real hearing.
 * Zephyr Teachout, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was an utter sham (11 April 2018), .


 * Shortly after Facebook became a public company, its founder famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. It was, of course, a hacker’s trope and, as such, touchingly innocent. What perhaps never occurred to Zuckerberg is that liberal democracy might be one of the things they break. It’s time for him – and them – to grow up.
 * "The Observer view on how Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy" (editorial), , 17 March 2018.


 * The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of the US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech. Brandeis said those words in 1927, long before the time of abundance, the time of Facebook, when a lie can now be delivered a million times over.
 * Maria Ressa How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)


 * What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%.
 * Vandana Shiva Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (2018)