Meta, the conglomerate of digital platforms chaired by Mark Zuckerberg, is not having a good year. In the second quarter of 2022, its income fell for the first time since it went public in 2012. In addition, internally, the company is going through internal changes that respond more to a need to comply with the whims of its CEO, than to abide by principles. professionals, according to experts.
On the other hand, the metaverse, that technological world announced with great fanfare, seems to have remained a simple virtual reality prototype. Zuckerberg assured at its launch that it would be a kind of utopia where users could experience equally realistic sensations. Go to meetings, concerts, buy products in virtual stores, etc. But today, the metaverse is branded as “silly” with “the graphical quality of some 90s games.”
This is where experts like Bill George, a leadership specialist and former CEO of the medical technology company Medtronic, say that Zuckerberg’s “wealth went to his head.” “I think that Facebook will not do well while he is there,” he told CNBC Make It.
“It’s probably one of the reasons so many people are leaving the company. He has really lost his way.”
Risks that accelerate the possible fall of Meta
Bill George is also a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and has 20 years of experience studying leadership failures in the workplace. He asserts that those leaders who lose sight of their values, beliefs, and purposes are destined to fail. Currently, he “sees striking similarities with Zuckerberg and Meta.”
In this sense, there are several risks that overshadow the future of Meta and accelerate its fall. The metaverse itself due to multimillion-dollar losses — Meta’s Reality Labs lost 10.2 billion dollars last year — and the change to video, the format that users consume the most today, points out investment.
For that last reason TikTok is hot on his heels. So much so that Instagram and Facebook today copy it to attract users. In the second quarter of this year, the platform had 1.643 million monthly active users, according to BusinessOfApps. The social network created in China is growing so fast that even the Democratic Party forgot the espionage investigations of the Beijing regime against US users and created its own account to attract votes.
More trouble for Zuckerberg
George claims that the CEO of Meta disarmed his team of professionals to keep “young people who are more like Mark’s followers.” He in turn, he laments that he “is going off the rails in real time.”
Certainly, the company is still making millions despite the losses. While its “daily active users” per month reach the amount of 2.88 billion if Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are added. But that does not exempt her from the risks. His CEO made clear his political preferences towards the Democratic Party and for that he earned thousands of criticisms.
Having financed opinion articles on information portals to criticize antitrust bills, harming conservative media traffic or infiltrating Democratic activists in electoral offices in 2020, Zuckerberg is accused of all of this by different independent investigations. So from being a young technology enthusiast, he became the CEO who is guided by self-interest and partners to obey a larger political plan.
At the beginning of July of this year, the conglomerate said that it was going to reduce the hiring of engineers by at least 30%. That is, the scenario is not as ideal as Zuckerberg would like. Added to this is that in a couple of months there will be the mid-term elections in the US, in which it could become clear how much the businessman interferes in managing public opinion.
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Lack of leadership from Mark Zuckerberg opens the door for the fall of Meta