Resolutions for Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg

I’ve been thinking about the resolutions tech leaders might make in 2019. This year, the Boy Wonders who run the biggest companies in the industry showed that they sometimes struggle to keep healthy, share their wealth — or slow down when necessary. A digital detox is the obvious prescription for Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX moved markets this year when he tweeted that he’d secured funding to take the electric carmaker private at $420 a share. The stock jumped — and then fell as the deal failed to materialise. The tweet ended up costing Musk $20m (R282m) and the Tesla chairmanship.

Musk’s admission that 420 — slang for dagga — had been a joke fell on deaf ears. (Shares fell further after he was filmed smoking a joint legally, in California, while recording a podcast in September.)

Earlier this year, Musk admitted to sleeping on the floor of the Tesla factory for days at a time during production of the Model 3 sedan. According to the New York Times, Tesla board members are concerned that he might be using Ambien, a sedative, to sleep, and are worried it has contributed to his somewhat surreal late-night tweets.

Musk still seems to be struggling to rein in his online behaviour. Recent tweets include his attempt to hire a “knight to yell insults at people in a French accent”, to work on the site of the Boring Company — his giant tunnel-building side project — in LA, and one that states simply: “? trouble”, which at least showed self-awareness. So for the new year, I suggest Musk resolves to turn over a healthy new leaf — and become truly boring.

Jeff Bezos had a much better year. Amazon briefly became a trillion-dollar company and Bezos launched his own philanthropic project, pledging to give $2bn to preschool programmes and to help the homeless. He had cities falling over each other to subsidise new Amazon offices — cunningly marketed as a “second headquarters”.

For his New Year’s resolution, I suggest the world’s richest man pledges to hire local workers. He could see the site in Queens, New York, as an opportunity to innovate and show how a tech-dominated economy can work for people without an advanced education — the first step in creating a model that could be replicated at Amazon scale.

I hesitate to make a resolution for Mark Zuckerberg, tech’s master of New Year’s resolutions. Over the years he has resolved to run a mile a day, only eat meat he slaughters himself and learn Mandarin. In 2018, his resolution was to “fix Facebook”, a tacit acknowledgement that this was not the time for personal passions. I do not believe, however, that even Zuckerberg had faith that this immense task would be completed within 12 months.

He has made changes, but he has failed to address a central problem with how the platform works: its speed. Fact-checkers cannot possibly verify memes and stories that go viral in minutes. Fake accounts pop up in the millions because it’s still in Facebook’s interest to make it quick to join. The rapid fire of posts keeps users addicted.

So, for Zuckerberg’s resolution, I suggest mindfulness. He needs to imbue Facebook with a slower, more thoughtful pace. All resolutions involve sacrifice — and this would mean that investors sacrifice growth, at least in the short term. But as Zuckerberg holds the majority of votes, he should use his privilege for good — and meditate on a slower future in the new year.

Financial Times