Facebook CEO Accused of Securities Fraud

Precision noted that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned 26 last week, and gets to celebrate by being accused of securities fraud. This goes back to the old Facebook legend that Zuckerberg stole code from other Harvard students.

Comments

Re:Remember, folks

[somersault]

He may or may not be guilty of anything

I've never actually done any research into the guy, but from all the stories up here I can pretty much tell he's a douche.

Re:Remember, folks

[Pojut]

I gotta say, I'm not all that surprised...think about it, you're just an average college student, and not a few years later you're a billionaire. That's gonna fuck with your ego, no matter who you are.

Hating facebook

[goombah99]

How we humans love to tear down success. It's in our social nature. So it's perhaps ironic that Facebook, the top predator in the land of social acceleration, is having a bad week and we are all enjoying the schadenfreude.

That observed, one can realize there are good reasons to hate face book, and overblown ones. Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms, faster than the older generations are comfortable with. This could be good in some cases, but there's also can be excellent reasons why traditions became traditions. For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me. Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing. Also people are mean.

My hope is that as the bad reasons get debunked we don't lose sight of the good reasons for hating facebook.

Re:Hating facebook

[mikael_j]

Well, to be honest Facebook really wasn't the first "community" website, or the first site to have the features that it has, it just happened to manage to become the biggest.

Personally I don't mind congratulating and rewarding whoever first came up with an idea (although almost everything "new" is built on what came before it in one way or another, I doubt there was some caveman who woke up one morning, had some leftovers from yesterday's hunt and then figured out the theory of relativity) but why should we all smile and pretend we admire Zuckerberg just because his site happened to become the biggest? By the same logic no one should be criticizing Microsoft because they, after all, managed to become the biggest. Or IBM for that matter, or any other industrial, political or military giants. Hell, we should all have been congratulating the soviets on a job well done when their nuclear arsenal surpassed the US one (and if some brownnosing people had their way we'd also be rewriting the history books to ignore any US achievements in building nuclear weapons that came prior to the soviet equivalents).

A lot of what is considered "business savvy" these days is really just a matter of some decent knowledge of a subject (but not "OMG NEW EINSTEIN!!1" knowledge, just solid knowledge) combined with luck and timing (and you can get lucky when it comes to the timing, your idea might have been tried by some other guy a year ago when the market wasn't ready for it but now the market is ready for it and since you were unaware of the other guy's failure you take another stab at it, or maybe you simply took longer to complete your product/service and the other guy was actually better than you but ignored by customers/users because the market wasn't ready yet, just because you're "first to market" isn't a guaranteed path to profit).

Re:Hating facebook

[spun]

Humans do not hate success. Humans love a winner. We love deserved success, success that comes from hard work, determination, and smarts. We hate undeserved success, that comes from taking advantage of others. We are social animals, born with an innate sense of fairness. We don't hate success, we hate injustice and unfairness.

Re:Hating facebook

[goombah99]

Isn't there a huge difference between the companies you list (IBM and MS) and Facebook? IBM and Microsoft got big through hard work and smart business behavior and it took them a quite a long time and a lot of persistence. In the case of MS the products may have been crap but they were crap people wanted. for example, to carnoivres steaks are great but they take skill to prepare so there is actually a lot more revenue in hot dogs which we all know are crap but what we love. MS made crappy software but it did in a way that let oem equipment makers mass market the PC at cheap prices. You got what you paid for, but it was designed carefully to be what you were willing to buy.

Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first. But because it happened so fast-- basically just at the moment it was technically possible it happened-- we suspect that maybe even they did not realize it. It's like Yahoo, ebay or craigslist. Someone was going to do it. One lucky bacteria got there first.

Re:Hating facebook

[loudmax]

Personally, what I find worthy of hate isn't the lack of privacy, it's their locked-in system. Users create a web of friends in Facebook, and that web only exists inside FB's servers. Within Facebook you can't link to friends on LinkedIn or Myspace or Buzz or whatever. Protocols need to be used that allow users to link identity across social networks.

As far as privacy goes, it's really a question of how you use their service. For now, you really need to assume that anything you post on FB will be shared with the entire internet. Just as Microsoft eventually figured out how to make Windows reasonably secure, Facebook will probably figure out how to make their privacy settings reasonably simple. Assuming they get it right, what's left to hate? Same as MS: monopoly lock-in.

Re:Hating facebook

[Eponymous Coward]

To be fair though, back in the days when it required an .edu address to join, Facebook was much more private than it is now. Now, they constantly change their terms of service and make public what was once private. I think that's what has a lot of people upset.

Re:Hating facebook

[Wyatt Earp]

Humans love success.

They also love to see someone fail when they foul up.

Take Tiger Woods for example, if it'd not come out that he was a lying, cheating whoremonger, everyone would have continued to love him. If his car accident had been for medical reasons or if his wife had chased him around with a golf club because of something she did, all the Tiger Wood fans would have respected and supported him. But it turned out that someone who has been a major player in golf for 15 years was a jackass and his problems are his fault, people will continue to watch him fail and many will hope for continued failure.

Robert Downey Jr is the opposite side to that coin, he was successful and then had a drug problem that screwed his life up. No one felt good about that, but now that he is cleaned up and recovering folks like going to his films. "I'm glad he got his act together" is common when people talk about Robert Downey Jr. Now if people were like what you think they are, they'd be avoiding his movies and saying "Goddamned drug addict, why is he in movies still?"

Re:Remember, folks

[lorenlal]

Especially when you make that money by screwing other people over in the first place (allegedly).

BTW - I'm not a huge fan of the fact that the summary refers to the allegations as "legend." That strongly implies that it never happened... And there's decent indication that it may have.

Re:Remember, folks

[dAzED1]

yeah, the worst-case scenario could happen, and he could be reduced to just a couple hundred mill. Wouldn't that be a shame :/ I can't imagine trying to live off that much as a 26yo; ramen every day, yuck!

Do you *really* think that he hasn't diversified at least a little by now?

The whole story

[schmidt349]

The title of this article is totally misleading. The Winklevosses agreed to a settlement involving a payment of cash and a quantity of Facebook stock assuming a certain valuation. That valuation was based on the Microsoft purchase of a small chunk of the company that, if you bought all the stock at the same price, would make it work $15 billion.

Obviously that valuation was unrealistic, but the Winklevosses agreed to it *because their lawyers told them to.* Their law firm didn't complete their due diligence or else they may have wanted to renegotiate the deal. But that's not even remotely Facebook's fault.

The reason for this accusation is that the Winklevosses have to pay their lawyers a contingency fee based on the higher valuation of the stock. This will result in a net loss to them. They're pissed off at this turn of events, so they're casting aspersions on Facebook's CEO and demanding a securities investigation. But don't forget that they're a pair of moneyed aristocrats from a family of moneyed aristocrats (read: spoiled brats). So don't think of them as wronged parties because they're not.

Facebook was no more the Winklevosses' idea than Windows Aero or Mac OS Aqua or Enlightenment or KDE were the ideas of Xerox PARC.

Re:He's getting what he's due.

[Spatial]

What if? The result of offending a god is always the same: nothing happens.

Re:Remember, folks

[postbigbang]

It's not like his investment is liquid.

But perhaps if he gets smacked around, the investors get cold feet, maybe Microsoft or Oracle or who knows buys it and makes him kind of rich. As in way-rich. The financing that he has means his share is still pretty good..... that is, until whatever comes after Facebook arrives. Facebook arrived after MySpace, which came after various GeoCities, and so on.

Facebook has immense number of users that might be happy to find a subsequent provider that does something more, like hosts as many photos as they can upload (people are obsessive about pics) or does something else, like rents them movies or something. Facebook has no monopoly, just massive success. It could evaporate in a single quarter. Apple knows this very well.

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Re:there once was a time

[Hurricane78]

Not with the plans I have in mind... ...it will literally become impossible to create a “separate” site like this.
They will be part of a common (full-privacy-enabled) net, whether they want it or not. Even whether they buy a law against it or not.