Clegg’s US jaunt made him rich but was a failure
Predictably any hopes he had of changing Meta for the better have proven forelorn as it continues to outrage and its sales decline
THe has been paid a fortune to simply take Zuckerberg’s place in the stocks
hings have gone from bad to worse in the Metaverse. As Mark Zuckerberg retreats further into his alternative reality, sidekick Nick Clegg seems determined to avoid having to don his VR specs and join the company’s robotic founder in cyberspace.
It was only in February that Clegg was promoted to the top table at Facebook’s newlynamed parent company alongside Zuckerberg and his right-hand woman Sheryl Sandberg. But you don’t have to explore new galaxies for a few months for it to feel like a lifetime.
Fast forward to the summer and with Sandberg stepping back, Clegg is so keen to distance himself from Meta’s mission control that he is heading back to London, joining an exodus of executives swapping the tech giant’s Menlo Park base for its 620,000 sq ft megalithic tech monument at King’s Cross.
News of Clegg’s return home comes a day after it emerged that Adam Mosseri, the boss of Meta’s Instagram app, is also planning to relocate to London. Chief marketing officer Alex Schultz moved to the UK this year too.
Under the guise of a remote working push, Clegg will still divide his time between Meta’s spiritual California home and its European headquarters. There is also a suggestion that he has moved back to London for personal reasons, including being closer to his elderly parents.
Neither of those versions of events seem entirely convincing. With Sandberg’s departure, Britain’s former deputy prime minister became the company’s highest-profile executive just as it entered the toughest phase in its history and sales went into reverse. Yet, Clegg has chosen to mark this pivotal moment by jumping on the first flight home. It doesn’t take the brain of a computer programming nerd to work out that something is not right. In an increasingly political world, it looks like Sir Nick has read the runes and is stepping away at the first opportunity, and frankly who can blame him?
Clegg has emphatically failed to make Meta a better company, if indeed he ever truly believed he could. There was always more than a sneaking suspicion that he was cynically motivated to enter the Silicon valley bubble by a desire to improve his bank balance.
If so, he has certainly achieved that. The Cleggs own a £7m five-bedroom home in Atherton, a town known as “the most expensive postcode in America”, the Meta exec earns a salary of £2.8m and was awarded shares in the company worth almost £10m after his promotion to the all-powerful post of president of global affairs. But any hopes he may have had of changing Facebook have proven hopelessly and predictably forlorn. Clegg was meant to be the acceptable face of Facebook as Zuckerberg and Sandberg grew tired of trying to defend the indefensible. In reality he has been paid a fortune to simply take Zuckerberg’s place in the stocks as it has continued to outrage public opinion with its reckless culture.
His big idea to try to shake things up – an Oversight Board – is no more than Potemkin governance. If anything, Meta has become less accountable as Zuckerberg disengages from the world and retreats into the Metaverse.
The idea that the likes of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had either the appetite or the power to change the culture was always deeply flawed because ultimately it is driven by money, which is driven overwhelmingly by its formidable advertising-based model.
Meanwhile, Clegg’s refusal to acknowledge some of the more serious concerns about Meta smacks of someone who has either well and truly “drunk the Kool-aid” in American parlance, or worse is being wilfully disingenuous.
His claim that Facebook’s content was largely “babies, barbecues and bar mitzvahs” summed up the total disconnect at the heart of the company that has convinced regulators in America, Europe and Britain that a regulatory crackdown is the only way to rein in one of the world’s most powerful organisations.
On one level, California’s loss is London’s gain, proof that the capital is still a magnet for tech talent and that fears of Britain losing its European tech crown were always silly. Regardless of the political backdrop, most ambitious professionals will choose to live and work where English is the first language, not Paris or Berlin.
Yet, it is hard to see the upside for Meta. High profile departures risk reducing the company’s leadership to a monocultural group of Zuckerberg acolytes. Insiders claim the former boy wonder is increasingly unwilling to be challenged and ever-more irate that the outside world is not buying into his vision.
That is worrying. The platform is now in a phase where growth has deserted them for the first time. This sudden decline risks making its culture even more toxic particularly given the apparent paucity of answers as to how it plots a path back.
The biggest threat comes from China’s Tiktok, to which it seems to have no answer. Perhaps it never will. History suggests that social networks exert a sort of half-life in which the current generation uses them but the next one doesn’t.
In the past, Facebook has responded by buying up its most exciting rivals such as Instagram and Whatsapp. Tiktok offers no such avenue given its ties to the Chinese state. Innovation seems largely restricted to virtual reality and Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse, which looks every bit like a solution looking for a problem. Don’t be surprised if Clegg’s partial homecoming ultimately proves to be a hop and skip towards the exit.