Cambridge Analytica has halted Mark Zuckerberg’s presidential ambitions
Good company leaders can steer a firm through challenging times, but it takes an excellent company leader to steer a firm through a complete disaster.
Naively perhaps, I was, up until recently, of the opinion that Mark Zuckerberg is more of the latter than the former. When Travis Kalanick of Uber fame was held up as an example of why achingly pioneering entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily always able to develop into effective bosses of global corporations, Zuckerberg’s success was rolled out as a powerful counterargument.
He appeared to have mastered that weird coming-of-age test in the mysterious kingdom of Silicon Valley, where money grows on trees and the best connected frat kids rule.
As a relatively introverted jeans and T-shirt-wearing computer programmer, he founded Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. He developed his humble product into one of the world’s best-known brands: an emblem of the millennial generation and an enterprise with unmatched social influence.
In a strategically brilliant move, he surrounded himself with some of the smartest people he could find. He chose his public appearances wisely, made sure to be loud on charity and appropriately discreet on politics, while constantly stressing the importance of integrity, honesty and community. In a BBC interview back in 2009 he vowed that Facebook would never sell your data.
Crucially, Zuckerberg has even proved in the past years that he’s capable of navigating rocky waters and turmoil. He’s grappled with the fallout from allegations that Russian sources used his platform to spread false information and fuel political unrest among US voters in 2016. But as various tech commentators have this week pointed out, the scandal erupting around Cambridge Analytica and its links to Facebook is of a different calibre altogether.
If this doesn’t constitute a full-blown corporate disaster, then I don’t know what does. Yet Zuckerberg is nowhere to be seen
Politicians and the public on both sides of the Atlantic are understandably enraged. Facebook is worth $50bn less this week than it was seven days ago, and a social media campaign has gathered impressive momentum calling on the sites two billion users to delete their accounts. Even Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp – which Facebook incidentally swallowed for about $19bn in 2014 – has very publicly joined the call to action.
If this doesn’t constitute a full-blown corporate disaster, then I don’t know what does.
It’s hard to imagine that the 33-year-old and his chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg are not working behind the scenes around the clock to contain the fallout, but neither showed their face at a Q&A session for employees on Tuesday, sparking more than a few raised eyebrows internally.
Externally they haven’t said that much either. Zuckerberg released a terse statement yesterday evening on Facebook admitting to making “mistakes”. But what about all that integrity, honesty and community?
What it means for his future ambitions is unclear.
CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza yesterday authored an article proclaiming that Zuckerberg had gone from “2020 darling to political scourge”, referring to a flurry of rumours and internet memes that some months ago proposed him as a viable Trump challenger in the next presidential election.
For years Zuckerberg has been touted as a visionary leader, with the skill, ambition and deep knowledge to shepherd the modern world through the next industrial revolution unscathed. Now he risks becoming nothing more than the face of a sprawling, data-gathering machine – the potency of which we’re still not sure of – with a budding reputation for favouring profits over ethics. Frankenstein 2.0, for lack of a better